This is mostly my hot take just based on the press release, but color me dubious. Local news is struggling nationwide and this doesn't feel like a solution. It feels like silicon valley looking to increase profits for their shareholders to the detriment of the world.
Isn't that what they're already doing? Except the payer is the advertiser instead of the platform itself via the subscriber.
But that's not how most of us access news. We look at sources like Twitter, Hacker News, Facebook, Google News for links to articles.
Subscribing to a single website doesn't work in this model.
Subscription-only articles suffer from the opposite of the network effect. If I pick 1/n publishers to subscribe to, and you pick 1/n, the odds I can read something you tried to share are only 1/n^2. It might help if there were wire services for major topics I care about.
I think if the music industry can come out with a 1-subscription-fits-most model, I'm sure the journalism industry can figure out how to evenly distribute a modest $5-15 subscription fee.
Wouldn't payment integration with Twitter (if executed well) just make it easier for Twitter users to convert to paying the publisher after seeing the publisher's tweet? I don't see how it would increase the incentive for a publisher to post clickbait tweets, except perhaps for publishers whose in-house payment flow is very poorly implemented or nonexistent.
I don't mind paying for news. However, I do mind being on hold for 2 hours on a 1800 number that I had to dig up from some defunct webpage to cancel my subscription.
House link- https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3953
Senate link - https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/207...
Worked for me with several publications.
To what?
> https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a212721...
Being relatively optimistic about Twitter's size, and assuming they're just fantastic at it, Twitter might make what, half of that? So for 3$ a month you need about half of the userbase to be on board for data munging to no longer make sense as a business model.
I do wonder how high that mark is though, every SAAS I've worked with has been pay-to-use from the start, so this is not a metric I'm familiar with.
But maybe my worldview is wrong here, I'm definitely not the right person to estimate Facebook's reach.
I think you might be assuming that advertising revenue is evenly distributed among users.
I wonder if Twitter Blue customers will be omitted from the data stream that Twitter is selling to corporations and governments?
Canceled my subscription after that email went out. It's a shame. Kinda wish Mozilla had acquired it instead, although they don't have the leverage to promote it like Twitter does.
Only a small fraction of twitter users will sign up, and the overlap with the kind of users likely to spend money on advertisers products will be big.
I suspect this is true at nearly any price point. Even if it cost $50 per month, the tiny fraction of users who did sign up would be worth more than $50 in monthly ad revenue, since those are the kind of people who will subscribe to other high value services.
I just wonder if getting into channel business, instead of building more open of a platform where publishers control the prices themselves, was the right move for Twitter. Time will tell.