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Twitter’s $42k-per-month API prices out nearly everyone
- jmercouris 4y agoNothing new. It has been prohibitively expensive and cumbersome to get Twitter data for years, even for research as an Institution.
- altdataseller 4y agoFalse. You could search thru and consume almost 5-10% of all tweets for free with the free API provided you had enough user tokens. Of course if you paid the full firehose, it would be much more expensive
- jmercouris 4y agoI don't know what you mean about it being false. If you circumvent the API license by making tons of tokens and connecting from different IPs it is possible- much in the same way that a bank has free money if you rob it.
- fortuna86 4y agoTwitter also used to suspend API keys seemingly at random, making research data on Twitter nearly impossible.
- vlunkr 4y agoAny idea how much this compares to previous prices?
- secos 4y agoThe last time I talked to Twitter sales (about 2 years ago) they were asking for 6k/mo.
- hn2017 4y agoThat is false. https://twitter.com/stokel/status/1634310536723668995?s=20 https://twitter.com/stokel/status/1634310536723668995?s=20
- secos 4y agoThank you for reminding me why I dislike this place so much. I've literally got the email right here: "As I mentioned on the phone, we structure them as a monthly subscription based on an annual agreement. Variables that affect pricing are the APIs you use to get data and the amount of data you consume each month. Our smallest packages fall between $5,000-$8,000 per month." The price they quoted me, over the phone, was 6k. Doesn't mean we took it (we didn't) but that was what they were asking for. I know others that were paying 5k/mo. And I know others who still had free accounts from way back in the day. Everyone is being swept up now.
- graupel 4y agoThis sounds like pricing used to be for the Twitter Firehose - so expensive (and so, so much data to wrangle)
- jeffbee 4y agoIt's only a few hundred MB per second.
- mbStavola 4y agoVerified was also going to be $20/mo, I'm sure businesses and researchers are just going to wait it out until the price drops.
- bydo 4y agoSo we just need Stephen King to chime in again? Edit for context: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
- codetrotter 4y agoIdk. Context?
- beeskneecaps 4y agohttps://twitter.com/stephenking/status/1587042605627490304 https://twitter.com/stephenking/status/1587042605627490304 and subsequently https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
- theFletch 4y agoThere's a blue check by his name now, so...
- mbStavola 4y agoSo... nothing? If you click on his checkmark it tells you that he's a legacy verified account and does NOT pay for Twitter Blue.
- theFletch 4y agoSorry, I guess I thought Musk had already removed legacy checks. The whole thing seems a little silly. King obviously doesn't need Twitter, but I'm sure he receives more value out of Twitter than $8/mo even so (or whatever they're charging now).
- KomoD 4y agohttps://archive.ph/mxifu https://archive.ph/mxifu
- mrtksn 4y agoI'm not the greatest Musk fan but IMHO his approach to charge those who benefits from Twitter is spot on and I'm actually rooting for him to be able to find a viable business model which does not rely on selling my attention to highest bidder. If you are going to influence people, pay for the reach and If you are going to mine data, pay for the data. I guess the exact pricing can be adjusted according to the market needs but I agree with the paid access approach.
- 8note 4y agoThe reach and data aren't twitter the business' to exchange though, it's the Twitter community of users
- 1270018080 4y agoThey could make even more money if they charged $84k per month! Genius business model.
- timcavel 4y ago[dead]
- minimaxir 4y agoGiven that Twitter data has been becoming less valuable due to recent events, I don't think Twitter has as much leverage to raise the price, even for businesses specializing in such data.
- jacobedawson 4y ago...Blackburn, however, says researchers will continue to find a way to scrutinize what’s happening on Twitter. “We’ve been mostly cut off from Facebook for years and we’ve continued to make progress,” he says. “It’s not like science is going to be held hostage by a guy that played himself into burning $44 billion on a website that makes no money, just so he could force all its users to read his shitposts.”
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago[flagged]
- mehlmao 4y agoWhat was censored under Dorsey that isn't censored under Musk?
- sneak 4y agoThe Twitter Files come to mind.
- KyeRussell 4y agoThey didn’t MEAN anything.
- JohnFen 4y ago> maybe they're doing it because their political ideology I can't speak for anyone but myself, but my attitude about this has nothing to do with politics.
- officeplant 4y ago>their political ideology demands purity I wasn't aware Musk had one.
- sonotathrowaway 4y ago
- mike_d 4y agoAll of these moves make sense when you zoom out and realize Musk has no interest in Twitter as a business. It is a megaphone to amplify his own voice and the voices that support his viewpoints. Having third party API consumers able to pull in content and reorder it other than how he wants it presented is counter to that goal. The genius of Fox News was "why spend money on buying political attack ads when you can just buy the network and run them all day long." Twitter is just becoming that too.
- babyshake 4y agoI would love to see this "buying social media company to force everyone to pay attention to you"incorporated into the last season of Succession, although I am sure it was my mostly written before all of this Musk Twitter drama.
- croes 4y agoBut these third parties brought traffic and helped Twitter being relevant.
- Finnucane 4y agoExcept that Fox is profitable, and it isn’t clear how much musk is willing or able to pay out of his own pocket for the privilege. I don’t think he planned for that.
- heywherelogingo 4y agoWhat an absurd statement - everything he's done is to make twitter profitable and viable as a business - reduced headcount, reduced systems, reduced perks, .... He was already high profile in numerous spheres so no amplification was required. It's obvious that you don't share his viewpoints, and so you're simply slinging mud. It's the opinion of many that Musk didn't even want twitter, as a megaphone or otherwise, that he screwed up, obligating himself, and now has to make a successful business of it.
- dang 4y agoCan you please make your substantive points without name-calling ("what an absurd statement") or swipes ("It's obvious that you don't share his viewpoints, and so you're simply slinging mud")? The site guidelines specifically ask commenters to avoid those things, and your post would be just fine without them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- babyshake 4y agoAt the very least, they should be allowing Blue subscribers enough API access to do basic Zapier style workflows running a few times a day. There are a lot of folks out there who want to do the same simple personal uses of the Twitter API they have been doing for 10+ years.
- IceWreck 4y agoAnyone who wants to do research will just end up using Twitter's data from non official sources. Last I checked web scraping and using undocumented but public APIs used in web/apps is still legal.0 Ex: Nitter operates without official APIs.
- zX41ZdbW 4y agoAt least 1% of tweets are archived on Internet Archive. https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/46145 https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/46145
- gamblor956 4y agoI'm surprised that nobody has noticed that the price was set at 42k because it's another one of Musk's 420 (aka weed) jokes, and not because of any specific data showing that is the optimal price point for this offering.
- everybodyknows 4y agoDo we know why Musk would be fond of 420 jokes?
- thrwawy74 4y agoHe will run on the vague impression people had of him being a cool guy who smokes weed for the next 2 decades. I hope he goes to Mars so we don't have to hear about him, or at least we'll have an 8 minute delay?
- washadjeffmad 4y agoIt's a luxury service. There is no optimal price outside of "high enough to prevent entities for whom money is an object from applying".
- orbit7 4y agoThat's a novel way to get free publicity lol
- wesleywt 4y agoMusk is paying 40 billion for this publicity.
- hn2017 4y agoA disservice to researchers out there. Musk is willing to let misinformation and extremism run rampant
- noonething 4y agoso scraping then?
- NelsonMinar 4y agoI wonder what guarantee Twitter is offering that they won't just cancel or change the terms of the API program again with only a few days' notice.
- secos 4y ago"Trust us, bro"
- amelius 4y agoSounds like they want to become the next Bloomberg Terminal.
- mikestew 4y ago420 with just a few extra zeros added on, eh? The hilarity just never stops, does it?
- anaganisk 4y agoIn India, 420 is generally used to refer to a person who is a cheat/dishonest. Still fits guess. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_420_of_the_Indian_Penal_Code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_420_of_the_Indian_Pe...
- shantanujoshi 4y agoAll this daily anti musk rhetoric veiled in pro science narratives and not one comment on every other entity milking academic budgets. There’s plenty of examples.
- 19h 4y ago420...00 as in weed.. Musk doesn't actually want people to have API access.
- rektide 4y agoThis is the burning of the public space. Alas the zombie entity will persist, people will stay here, but this is absolutely the death of this as a public social space, and the start of a dark new pay-to-play world for Twitter where only the very-few have real capabilities. This is the death of the spirit of the project. May it hopefully wreck & burn fast. The pretense of Twitter's usefulness will take too long to flail fade & fail, and it's not so instantly notable to consumers, but this is the most epic & rapid grade #enshittification a once valuable & once core internet service that the planet has ever witnessed. This is a complete fall from grace & capability. Nothing remains, nothing of value is left to the world. Tim O'Reilly famously said, "create more value than you capture." Twitter is no longer a place that creates value. It is now a Scrooge McDuck potemkin village, profiteering off an image that it no longer deserves. Burn, fucker, burn, burn the fuck down, you vile traitorous, disrespectful pieces of shit that have ruined everything about the idea. Perish. New Twitter stands against humanity.
- JoeMayoBot 4y agoHe's probably getting some benefit out of this approach: 1. Some fun (the 420 comments) and shocking people. 2. Market research to see how people react to various prices (A/B testing while trying and backing out of bad decisions) 3. Free press - good or bad, it's in the news and he must be getting some benefit out of the attention. Not a fan of this approach and hoping everything lands in a fair place.