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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I suspect if Elon can get away with charging many, and probably most, heavy users of the platform a monthly fee, Zuckerberg will as well. In many ways such an outcome makes sense given Apple's ATT changes decimated targeted advertising revenue.

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Charging the people who create content for you is not going to fly.

For you maybe, but people are vain enough to pay 20 bucks and more for a little blue check. There were insider rings charging much more for it.

Time will tell though, if the easiness with which a blue checkmark is acquired will diminish the significance of having one, and to what degree.

It doesn't matter, charging all engaged users won't make enough money to be meaningful, the math just doesn't work out.

This. It's akin to charging YouTube creators $20/month. These are not the users that are making them money.

How many people will pay 2x the price of Disney+/Spotify/Netflix for a blue check on Twitter?

90% of the people who currently have them is my guess. Though the winds of social favor may shift as Twitter becomes open to more diversity of thought.

Blue checkmarks will be people paying to market to you. It won't take long to block people with blue checkmarks. Before it was some verification that this was a real person/official entity. As for twitter becoming open to more "diversity of thought" I mean, I guess if you want more ads, sure?

There's a great Dr. Seuss book called "The Sneetches" I think would help you to understand what's about to happen.

Twitter devolving into 4chan or as you say "diversity of thought" will not lend itself to having journalists wanting to keep their status on the site.

"as Twitter becomes open to more diversity of thought."

That remains to be seen. It might as well just lead to a shift of thought. Or that all opinions are welcome, but only those get traction and an audience, that happen to align to the opinions of Musk (and whoever else, who has invested heavily behind the scenes)

I use Twitter more than I should - though in a read-only context - and I don't understand what "diversity of thought" is missing at the moment. You can go on any leftist's Twitter and see replies calling them communist, calling trans people mentally ill, etc. The only stuff getting banned consistently is either incitement, like calling for "death con 3" on a group of people or outright racial/gendered slurs. There are mass-reporting campaigns (targeting individuals from both "sides"), but these are usually overturned and are not entirely Twitter's fault. Sure, better moderation would improve the outcome in mass-reporting cases, but it's less a case of bad policy and more a case of Twitter needing to invest more in moderation. Something I think is less likely now that Twitter is loaded up with debt.

That's an arbitrary anchor which is almost meaningless.

>Why buy a yacht when you can buy a blue check?

I'm sure a lot of peeps will buy it. It will bring mediocre revenue, though, particularly against that 44B (+ OpEx) tag.

Apparently there are about 400,000 currently verified users. So, assuming 100% buy in (or enough people buying the blue check mark that it makes up for those who don't), that brings the total revenue from this scheme to ~$100M a year, or about 2% of Twitter's current $5B annual revenue.

We'll have to see.

When it was "exclusive" and indicated some degree of notability, yeah, people who couldn't get it wanted it.

Now it signifies you're willing to pay $250/year for a virtual hood ornament. A nice signal for scammers, but otherwise like listing yourself in "Who's Who".

There are different ways it could work out. On Strava, more than half of the people I interact with are subscribers and that used to be more a signal of "willing to chime in for the platform to remain mostly ad-free" than a fee for extended freemium features (this has changed a bit, more paywalled features, and I'm not too happy about that despite being a subscriber).

I believe that it would be possible (even if not likely) for Twitter to shift into a lean state where they focus on just keeping the boat running and fostering loyalty with those who can and want to afford a subscription that's more a supporter badge than a gateway to extended features. Certainly depends on how much of their current cost is essentially ad sales and how much of that they can (and want to) cut. At least they are certainly much closer to that than anything Meta ever created or bought (with the exception of Oculus, which might certainly have been on a path to becoming a viable hardware company had it not received the Zuck's kiss of becoming deeply untrustable)

Some twitter users are clearly willing to pay for whatever it is they get out of using twitter - one just paid $44 billion :)

But it will definitely temper my social media addiction, which will make me a lot more productive. So I'm rooting for it.

I think a lot of them would pay a small amount to keep the cash flowing. They many not like it, but the leverage is on the platform's side until the audience moves.

People have an extremely dependent relationship with Twitter. It’s more like gambling than media. They will absolutely pay.

If we don't fund-raise and pay for $position_X_on_political_spectrum voices on Twitter to spread virtue and truth, the conversation will be hijacked by those goddamn $position_Y_on_political_spectrum shills and traitors!

It’s clearly a trade-off decision. If paying will give you access to a target audience people will pay. But I agree that you need some kind of business to be willing to pay.

Yes it will, if those people are creating the content for some other goal - e.g. political, commercial, publicity, etc.

I mean the entirety of Gab and the fediverse are based off of content producers paying to use the service

People pay gab? What?

Yeah Gab Pro, it lets you upload higher quality content, videos, and some other stuff including applying to get verified. It's how they made most of their money for a long time, ads are a recent thing for their site to my understanding. It's $15/month

You're more optimistic than I am that charging for verification would be an effective way to make money for Twitter. More likely I think it'll just lead to far fewer blue checks and no significant change of revenue.

And it may also make the blue ticks meaningless, if just anyone can pay and get them.

That's how universities with donor and alumni preference work. They let in notable people more easily and people that test well may even get a scholarship, and others can bribe to be included in the club.

Bribing your way into an elite college costs a lot more than $20/month, though.

As a society, we also confer prestige on a lot of things that basically amount to spending a prohibitively large sum of money: running a foundation; being an angel investor; owning a sports team, champion racehorse, Lamborghini, etc. But if just anybody can afford something and the only barrier to entry is cost, then it has no social currency.

There are plenty of goods that work essentially like veblen goods but that are not really out of reach for anybody who is a non-zero amount of disposable beyond starvation. Converse shoes, Ray Ban shades, there's an endless list of brands that people pay a premium for to show off, despite not containing even the tiniest trace of that exclusivity that stems from being prohibitively expensive.

The last clause in your comment is doing a lot of work. Prohibitive cost is only one form of exclusivity, but there are many others. For example, Twitter’s blue checks are free today but difficult to obtain. It sounds like Twitter is looking to replace the current system of exclusivity with one based on cost, and $20/month just isn’t very exclusive.

> Bribing your way into an elite college costs a lot more than $20/month, though.

So will the checkmark once they price discriminate on wealth or follower count.

I just don’t see how that’s workable as a business strategy. If Twitter charges you for a blue check, the social value of the mark will go down. If they simultaneously charge higher prices based on the wealth of the subscriber, that’s asking wealthy tweeters for a lot of money for something whose value has been significantly diluted.

It depends on if they still have the notability requirement; if they just charge $20 and anyone can get it then it definitely devalues the whole thing (the whole value of the mark other than as a signal is access to DM other notable people; if anyone can pay $20 to DM celebrities and stuff celebrities will turn off blue check mark DMs or if there is no option just ignore DMs entirely, which then kills the journalism loop on Twitter where journalists get access to celebrities, politicians, etc. by having the mark).

Not meaningless if they still do verification (which afaik they would).

Not meaningless, paid blue checkmark would mean that somebody has a business interest in their use of Twitter (which means they're marketing to me). Now I know exactly which accounts to not follow.

People fundamentally use Facebook differently than twitter, even if fb can be used as a public square, most ppl still use it to network with ppl they know (or used to know). Whereas twitter’s entire use case is talking to people who you’ve never met and likely never will.

The point is that engagement is very different and no one cares about verification on fb. Editable posts have been a thing for years and I’m blanking on what other features are part of twitter blue but I doubt it’ll be enough to charge people $19.99/m

I actually think we should pay for the things we use. Then we can retire the "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" excuse that many just automatically throw out to justify data collection.

Most keep collecting data (making you the product) even when you pay for the product. MS Windows, Smart TVs, your graphics card driver, your popular news source even with the ad-free plan...

It looks like you cannot pay them enough to get rid of the tracking.

You're going to be the product regardless.

They'll just charge you on top of collecting and profiting from the data they collect on you.

I would absolutely be willing to pay a monthly fee for a Facebook that wouldn't serve me ads or "suggested" things in my feed, and only showed me things that I explicitly said I was interested in. I'm curious how much I'm actually worth to FB under the advertising model, since that's going to dictate how much fee they would need to ditch advertising.

> I suspect if Elon can get away with charging many, and probably most, heavy users of the platform a monthly fee

That's going really well so far... https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144

Heavy users as in frequent posters: is just selling native advertising. It doesn't change the ad-suported model.

^ Been on twitter since the early days. I'm not much of a social creature by nature, but as a marketing channel, twitter has by far generated the most business for me over the years. I just be helpful in public, and when we need a new customer I literally just tweet "had some hours open up if anyone is looking for X" and just like magic we get a new customer. I wouldn't scoff at paying a little to keep that, but remove the non-native/boosted advertising from my feed.

Facebook or Instagram doesnt have monitization problem. Wouldn't this be short sighted / greedy?

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