$1/month for every 10k followers over your first 10k. Small price to pay for "fame". 1,000,000 followers is $99/month. You don't think Trump and the Kardashians would pay that for the voice it gives them to promote whatever they promote?
So for this model to get TWTR near its current revenue, Twitter would need to have 104 million accounts with more than 10k followers. Twitter only has about 320 million MAUs.
If you think that the % of MAUs with 10k+ followers is closer 0.1%, then the avg. monthly charge would need to be $7,800/month.
It also correlates to the amount of resources used - the more resource intensive a user is the more he pays.
It's also completely backwards to how social networks tend to work - you incentivize engagement not penalize it.
If it works it will be a genius move, if it fails it will take the company with it.
Any person that uses Twitter knows that many of their followers are bots/Spam.
http://fortune.com/2017/01/13/wells-fargo-fake-accounts-scan...
It might be more feasible to charge people for following other people.
Or just offer a straightforward ad-free experience (maybe with some extra features) for a set monthly fee. Which is what I've wanted all along, but has the disadvantage of fracturing the userbase you can sell ads to and making Twitter a less valuable platform for advertisers, so they'd need a decent conversion rate to offset that.
I now absolutely hate this thing where the internet is made of free stuff and people won't pay for it. I know a load of people who practically live on Facebook but the idea of paying for it horrifies them. Do not understand that.
You don't get how business works, Trump does not needs Twitter, Twitter needs him and Kardashians. Twitter has already lost Kardashian followers to Instagram. As others have pointed out this fails to generate any revenue, let alone recoup cost of implementing this single "feature".