Twitter says it's looking at subscription options as ad revenue drops sharply | Hacker News Reader

Twitter says it's looking at subscription options as ad revenue drops sharply

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45 pointscalcifer61 comments

I couldn't shake the image of Twitter being an enthusiast, cool kids, wordsmiths only type platform from my head. Probably because I had an account since when Twitter servers couldn't take it and used to display a dolphin image(But, don't check my Twitter account, I didn't use it much) although I knew Twitter is not that anymore.

So, I always told to myself that like most other enthusiast platforms Twitter is struggling to make money unlike Facebook where its users don't care about non-contextual ads as long as its attractive and Facebook will go to any length to get a click on the Ad even if it means they are from a click farm from Philipines, Bangladesh, India; its advertisers didn't seem to mind as long as the 'Page Like' count increased.

But then, after I started using Reddit; I thought this is never going to make any money as it is a much more enthusiast platform than Twitter and every subreddit is a platform on its own where non-context content will be brushed aside. Then when Reddit introduced 'Awards', it blew me away; it seems like they have figured out the best possible way to monetise their platform. I don't know how much revenue it has brought to Reddit, but I could calculate some threads having thousands of dollars worth of awards almost every other day i.e. Normal users paying money for Internet commendation.

Twitter needs to figure out what's its equivalent for Reddit awards without compromising its integrity and becoming a Facebook.

Even if 50k of rewards were purchased per day, which I strongly doubt is the case, then Reddit is only doing 18M per year off the rewards. Not much compared to their 100M ad revenue, and very paltry relative to their $3B valuation.

I do agree that the combined revenue from Ads+Awards+Premium subscription of Reddit would be nothing to boast off, but still making users pay for fake Internet awards is very impressive. Of all the karma based platforms, I don't know any other who has pulled this off.

It's pretty on par with anything that resembles a "game". Freemium iPhone games rake in most of their money from a few whales that spend thousands on coins in the games while 98% of players will never spend more than $20.

I don't think Reddit and Candy Crush are of same category.

> used to display a dolphin

Ah, the retired fail whale

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...

Ah ha! I had the image of the whale in my head but wrote dolphin! I'll let it be and thank you for the correction.

I bet a $12/year "Editor" option that simply allowed those users to use <i>italics</i> would be widely used, generating $$$ without disrupting what people love about Twitter.

Just googled the replacement hacks using unicode. If Twitter offered styles for a fee, people would probably use those workarounds, e.g. to get italics 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔.

Although these are probably not searchable.. Edit: hmm Ctrl-F actually finds "string"!

> Although these are probably not searchable.. Edit: hmm Ctrl-F actually finds "string"!

Depends on the search engine. And Ctrl-F is already unusable on Twitter Web anyway, because it only works on tweets in the viewport (or close to it)

Could you elaborate on what's meant by viewport in this context as, like this, it's new to me. TIA

What's currently displayed in the browser window [0]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Viewport

Is it browser's limitation?

I had issues, when tried to search in a very long <textarea> with scrollbar. Firefox was able to find only currently visible occurrences. That was not a viewport issue, of course, but looks very similar. Would love to know more about all this.

No, it's because Twitter Web removes elements from the DOM when they are far from the viewport.

There are two ways you can see it:

1. Open a DOM debugger, select an element in a tweet, scroll down. Eventually the element disappears.

2. In Firefox, scroll down, right click, "Take a screenshot", "Complete page". You'll see tweet far from the viewport, as well as header and sidebars are invisible.

The motivation is probably to make it faster, but it's unclear to me why removing (and later re-adding) elements in Javascript would be more efficient than the browser internally dealing with it.

The big problem with these hacks is that they completely break on screen readers. IIUC the software either skips them entirely or reads each letter out like "bold script t, bold script h, hold script e..."

The thing is: Am I paying as a content generator, or as a content consumer? I can't think a good feature for the second option, but I can think for the first one.

As a content generator, I'd pay for stuff like: 1. My tweets appear on my followers timeline always (or with priority, if they don't use Latest tweets). 2. I have better analytics, as: How many of my followers logged in on the last week, last month, etc? 3. My tweets re-appear automatically in different timezones when the other half of my public is waking up*

* This is because my main public is UK and USA. Tweeting something on UK morning is missed by USA, specially west coast. Waiting for it, it would make it useless for the UK people.

I would hate to know that my feed is now prioritized by those with the biggest wallets.

You are right.

It already is.

Almost exactly like Facebook, I'd think. Would you like to boost your comment to reach another 5,000 viewers for only $50?

I think no ads is a great option for consumers.

Even if a few million people signed up for that (which is a stretch IMO), it amounts to chump change that probably doesn't cover the cost of their content moderation team alone. You can't build a business on $12/year.

The trick is to charge Twitter business account $399/mo for something... like a business verified badge or the ability to edit and curate their own posts and replies.

>content moderation team

Twitter has one? Could have fooled me.

Just 2 days ago the content moderation was in the news including a very controversial hn thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23912455

And before that?

> You can't build a business on $12/year.

And yet they appear to have done that on $0 of user-contributed revenue. Can you help me understand why it's better to leave that money on the table?

Imagine that $12 is to remove ads. That on its own would destroy most of the ad revenue because the people likely to put their hand in their pocket are exactly the ones advertisers want to target.

Subscribe to our italics button?

Ya. L#l. N# thanks. I'm saving #p s# I can b#y a subscriptio# t# #se the last tw# v#wels. N# m#ney f#r italics ATM.

Italics are generally not used for Japanese text and maybe for other languages like Chinese. Bold looks like more general

It might be too little too late. Twitter made a lot of sense in 2010 when you only saw messages from the people you followed, and only discovered new people when those people specifically put their words into your stream. It was valuable, even if people were tweeting about their vacations and sandwiches.

App.net tried to launch a paid version of Twitter and it almost succeeded, but they weren't able to get a critical mass to convert all at once. Twitter was still more valuable as 8 out of 10 of your friends were still on Twitter, not App.

It has changed though. With more users and the new algorithmic timeline, If you are just starting out, you have no chance at getting good value out. Twitter decides what you see, whether you like it or not. It's like the TV from 1984 that is continuously bringing junk food into your living room. You don't get a remote, you only get a choice to have it, or not to have it in your house.

Twitter used to deliver unprecedented value 1:1, and now it extracts value from 100,000 and delivers it to 1. Unless you are the one, there is no sense in paying for it.

Lately all I see are tech ads and a few tweets from some people I follow who really should get back to work. There are a few that have a good signal to noise ratio, but it seems like the algorithms hide them. I'm not sure why.

I've switched over to some private blogs and better curated news feeds. It's just becoming dominated by the haters.

I started out loving Twitter. But not getting much interaction as opposed to reddit, and the force feeding of the algorithmic timeline, just put me off.

> App.net tried to launch a paid version of Twitter and it almost succeeded, but they weren't able to get a critical mass to convert all at once.

Did it really almost succeed? Looking at the numbers from the Wikipedia page, it got a decent number of people joining right at the start. Then it seems to have gotten very limited user engagement from those people, and after the first year the subscriptions could only barely cover the hosting costs.

I hate Twitter and think it’s a huge hassle and a waste of time, but I would pay for a domain verified Twitter handle / namespace that could be used for product feedback / support.

Ex: twitter.com/example.com

It would also be advantageous for incumbents to make a system like that the norm / expectation because it would reduce the gold rush effect for new platforms where people rush to reserve their handles.

> "We want to make sure any new line of revenue is complementary to our advertising business,"

I know the above probably means this is a longshot, but here's what I want from a subscription:

1. No promoted tweets 2. Permanently disable algorithmic timeline (what Twitter calls "Home")

That's it. I pay $12/month not to see ads on YouTube, and I'd easily pay that same amount for an ad+algorithm-free experience in the Twitter native app.

I suspect that the people willing to pay $12 to avoid ads are also the most valuable targets for advertisers. I suspect in aggregate, they are actually worth much more than $12 month.

I suspect many of those who are ad-averse like me use third party clients and ad blockers, and have an inherent distrust of ads, so I doubt I'm worth much to an advertiser considering my engagement rate is zero.

I always thought Twitter should just charge people to allow additional followers. So let's say your first 5k followers are free, and after that you need to pay some amount to let additional people follow you. Incentives are aligned with the vanity and self-promotion culture of Twitter.

I know people will hate this idea, but I would like to see what it would look like if they limited the amount of tweets a free account was allowed to send and even deprioritize those tweets to only show up on to their followers. Seems like it could curtail a lot of the toxicity. Obviously the other side of that coin is that it could limit discussions and interactions, but maybe it would show how useless a lot of the interactions are on the site.

Of course, I say this as someone who never tweets. I only use Twitter to aggregate news/interesting people. A bigger question is how can they make a user like me pay.

Sounds like it would give a stronger voice to the wealthy and suppress the voices of the poor who can't afford a subscription.

Even charge a one time $1 fee to unlock more tweets could help with that.

This is actually a good point that I didn't consider.

What I would like on twitter, and I would pay for it:

- Option to post 1 NSFW tweet, instead on that being per account

- My likes being private, and no one seeing them in their timelines

- not seeing anyone's likes in my timeline.

- not seeing any 'recommended' tweets on my timeline (tweets included because someone I follow, follow that account)

You may be interested in joining the Fediverse, a federated network of microblogging software (Mastodon, Pleroma, ...). Most of the implementations support all four of these features.

And most of it is free and/or donation-supported.

But of course, you don't get the same people as on Twitter.

I tried Mastodon a couple times. But the lack of search (can only search hashtags) made it hard to find people/discussions.

I use Twitter to follow some publisher/anime bloggers, and there's none on any federated network, at least not anyone relevant.

And people on my Twitter are more chill than the ones I met on Mastodon (and mainly the ones that used Pleroma). I remember 2 times I had problems there:

One was when I mentioned something about Windows, like, just said that I used it, so a few people started offending me (not mocking or joking).

Another time, I posted a picture when I was watching anime on the TV. Someone asked how I took screenshots from the episodes. I said that I just had a script that downloaded from Reddit. The person got furious because 'I was leeching from the community and not contributing'.

So, I dumped the fediverse and I got back on Twitter where, in 10 years, I don't remember something like that ever happening.

Charge for verified. 100 bucks should cover the cost of them actually verifying people, and allow us commoners to get access to the features currently gated off.

> to get access to the features currently gated off.

Such as? I had no idea verified users have more features other than the blue checkmark.

they get more quality filters, such as the ability to only see replies from other verified users, or only users who have verified phone numbers

A "member" tier subscription that let you restrict to seeing only content from other members (or verified users) might cut down on a lot of the noise there.

Can’t imagine paying for that. It’s one big pile of outrage that I’m not at all convinced is a net positive in my life

Nationalize it and get taxpayer money

A pro account for editing tweets? This can actually be quite profitable.

Everyone loves to hate on Facebook for ruining societal discourse but Twitter shares just as much of the blame. I hope they both go bankrupt.

You might enjoy: https://www.quitfacebook.org.

You're downvoted but I understand your sentiment.

From where I'm sitting, Twitter is doing so much more damage than Facebook that it's not even close.

My Facebook is full of old friends from school not saying much, and some local groups moaning about local goings on.

Twitter, on the other hand, is an absolute and total perversion of human communication. An arbitrary point-scoring game with a tiny character limit, dominated by activists whose skills at the game are carrying their piss-poor arguments. I've got a friend who obviously gets her opinions from Twitter and then can't formulate coherent sentences in real world conversation to defend them. It's total rot.

And to add insult to injury, so many otherwise sensible people seem to equate Twitter directly to the real-world and don't realize its being gamed by botnets and activists who are pushing political views.

Many very smart professionals literally look to Twitter for feedback and even emotional support for their work, and literally have meltdowns if the Twitverse takes them to task over some unforgivable transgression.

I got the sentiment, but maybe the downvotes are because that's really not relevant to the discussion

Could go something like this. Say Elon Musk, he will have a subscription tweet feed that users can subscribe to, all users of the subscription get to see the posts first. The free users will see them after 24hrs. Since twitters strength is real time, they can sell from that strength.

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