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Comment by kristianbrigman | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand... it seems that Elon's long-term plan is to try to create a social media platform where the users are the customers instead of the product... that seems like it would have to rely less on advertising revenue to do that.

I am not sure how that will play out but I wish him well (as someone who is not a major user of most social media)...

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I'm not convinced he has any real long-term plans, considering how he tried so hard to get out of his ridiculously high offer.

What could convince you? He has said that over and over what his plans are (next 5 mins): https://youtu.be/P7wUNMyK3Gs?t=1881

He says a lot of things on the fly, most of which is a smokescreen. His legal actions, though, are quite clear: he wanted out of the deal.

Not at all. Not when he has public plans to name and shame advertisers who aren’t working with him. And he’s not firing any of the advertisers who are still working with him.

These additional revenue is in response to the extra $1B yearly in interest payments, not to replace advertisers.

How many $8/mo users does he need to pay the billion per year in interest he saddled Twitter with?

Twitter apparently has 166 million "monetizable daily active users", which seems enough to bring in $1B in revenue per month.

Do you have a source, and does that source define "monetizable" as "willing to pay at least $8 a month?

Bringing "monetizable" to "monetized" is a completely different story. YT premium has only 50 million premium+music subscribers with much stronger contents and a more suitable format for monetization. And they only could bring roughly only 2% of YT users with very aggressive marketing.

I would say the conversion rate would be closer to 0.2% for Twitter assuming the best scenario since it doesn't really have a content model and there's no incentive for good publishers to participate. This will give Elon precious ~$30M ARR at the cost of pissing advertisers off. Oh and don't forget that Elon still has to pay $1B just for annual interests.

Perhaps they could turn @elonmusk to a protected account and offer paid $8 subscription per month for "super follow" or whatever. Maybe it's a better monetization model given Elon's significant influence to the crypto market... :sigh:

You're assuming that everyone will pay. That's hardly the case. Best case scenario they will manage to convert 1% of users.

I'm intensely curious to know what you are thinking Twitter could do that would either be compelling enough to convince their active users to suddenly start spending an average of $6/mo in return for it, or somehow cause them become $6/mo more valuable as advertising targets.

95% of those are bots. Elon himself said it so it must be true.

Given the bots wont add to revenue, you need to up the $8 a month to $160 a month and have every single user pay which seems enough to bring in $1B in revenue per month.

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