Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yaina | Hacker News Reader

I love Twitter and use it every day. Unlike many other sites, owned by tech-giants, I have a lot of goodwill for them and think if anyone can prove that social-media users can be paying customers, it's them.

It's just a bummer that Twitter Blue is not removing ads.

I assume they're not going ad-free because they don't want to cannibalise their ad-business. As in: You can't say your ads are so great and helpful and also offer a way to turn them off. That might decrease the value of their ads?

But it's also the reason I'm a bit on the fence here. I want to be part of the message that says: "Yes, I'm willing to pay for you Twitter!" but without removing ads (and frankly with a pretty bad value prop here) it's not an easy sell.

View on HN

Was excited to be able to pay to kill ads, and was shocked that that isn't one of the "features". Ever since cutting cable, I refuse to pay for any service that still tried to monetize me further (looking at you, Hulu.)

That's probably how they can hit the $3 price-point though, I'm sure targeted Twitter ads these days bring in a lot more than $3/user/mo.

According to this, Facebook revenue per-user-per-year is about $30, so $2/mo (post-Apple cut) is probably not far off for Twitter: https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average.... But of course, why replace that revenue when you could double it?

edit: here's an ARPU estimate for Twitter in 2016, it was around $2/quarter: https://www.statista.com/statistics/430874/twitter-annualize...

I would guess that the subset of users willing/able to pay for something like this is more valuable to advertisers than the average twitter user.

At this price point I wouldn't be surprised if they would lose money by offering no ads as part of the package.

A majority of Facebook users live in third worlds countries though, they wont generate a lot of money no matter what you do.

That $30/year figure is likely averaged over the globe, therefore their North American stat is likely quite a bit higher. Given the quality of ads on twitter that I see, I suspect my value to them is much, much lower. Their ad network just seems terrible compared to Facebook so it's surprising they didn't offer a $10/month ad-free version.

you should really get these kind of data straight from the source when you can. stastica is sometimes useful for some hard to get metrics. this is not one.

https://investor.fb.com/investor-events/event-details/2021/F...

this is their q1 earnings presentation https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/FB...

US/CA arpu is $48.03 for just q1 (just 3 month not for the year). Global arpu is $9.27.

there's no way $3/mo makes any sense.

There's also the fact that users willing to pay to cut adds are probably a very large chunk of Twitter's ad revenue.

That math is pretty easy to make a ballpark guess. Using stats from: https://backlinko.com/twitter-users

$3.72 billion (2020 revenue) / 12 = $310 million average monthly revenue

$310 million / 353.1 million (monthly active users) = $0.88 per user per month

Narrowing down to the monetizable daily active users, the users probably make up the vast majority of monetization:

$310 million / 152 million = $2.03 per user per month

Given that those users who are likely to pay for this service are probably even more skewed than that, yeah $3/month seems low. You're also somewhat selecting for users who have disposable income, which can't be great for ad value.

> You're also somewhat selecting for users who have disposable income, which can't be great for ad value.

Many years ago I worked for a company that had tens of millions of US subscribers, my job involved modeling their behavior in order to allocate resources at least a week in advance. The law of large numbers is pretty amazing to see play out in front of you like that, where you can clearly see the bright lines between your market segments - fundamentally different kinds of people. I have a feeling that there is only one kind of person who would pay for twitter, which will very likely end up as a flag in a marketing dataset that certain companies would find well worth whatever twitter charges them (or their data-broker). Not unlike Volkswagen, on the eve of a big sales push for beetles, wanting a list of everyone who regularly buys peanut butter and cat litter.

Isn’t advertising to people with disposable income more desirable?

Yeah, which is why serving ads only to people who don't have disposable income (so don't pay for this subscription) makes the ads less valuable.

But that doesn't sound right to me. Not all products and services are targeted at people with disposable income.

I think the truth is just that Twitter is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Why cut off advertising and data harvesting if people are willing to pay you just to change some colors and the app icon?

Hulu does have an ad free tier now just in case you weren’t aware.

> Hulu does have an ad free tier now just in case you weren’t aware

Well, it has a tier called (No Ads)*

However, the * is there because it still has ads on some shows.

Does it ever make sense to sell the ability to turn off ads?

I imagine the majority of people willing to pay for such an option are power users, the same group that likely generates the bulk of advertising revenues and lives in countries with high CPC.

Well, Youtube Premium does it, so does Hulu, and I'm sure there's other examples.

Youtube probably conceded that adblockers does it anyways for powerusers.

These services show ads in ways that delay you accessing the content you want, banner ads, while annoying do not have that property and are a harder sell

reddit did it years before all of those.

There are ads in YouTube premium? What is the point in it then?

There are no ads with premium.

There are not ads in YT Premium. The comment was listing services that sell the ability to hide ads.

Do power users click on ads though?

Power users use Tweetdeck, and there are no ads I'm just realizing

Google tried something like that called Google Contributor back in 2017. You could basically just put money in an account, and instead of advertisers buying ads for whatever site you were on, it just took that same money from you and gave it to that site. Honestly a pretty elegant system, but I can kind of picture why it wouldn't have worked out.

That's a little unfair, it's a concept, not a public demo. There's apparently only a few people testing it so far. It might have been overlooked or just easier for some reason to inline the normal twitter timeline view, or whatever they call it, and there might not be a dedicated premium adfree view yet.

Surely they'll reduce ads for the public when paid users en masse have access to this.

They're probably making more than $3 per user on the ads. IIRC Facebook makes somewhere in the neighborhood of $80/user per year.

Just out of curiosity: you are referring to Facebook Inc as a company, including Instagram, right? Not the Facebook platform itself.

Hmm, I think you're right. Also, I'm probably thinking of their North American market. They probably make less in the rest of the world.

The only thing I want to pay for is ad removal. I’d pay $10/month for Twitter without ads in a second. I already pay for YouTube premium, and while I wish they removed tracking in addition to the ads - it’s still great.

When I saw Twitter was launching a paid subscription then I figured it would probably be ad-free (like with YouTube Premium, Twitch Turbo, etc.). Odd that it isn't. It's a dealbreaker for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com