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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Seems dumb of them. Cost is trivial and their competition that isn’t so politically motivated will have a much further reach.

The smart move would be silent on the policy change, pay, and support rival platforms as they can. Instead they will eventually pay and look like they lost.

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It's smart because Musk already blinked

The top 10,000 are getting exemptions and won't have to pay

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/twitter-business-month...

> Seems dumb of them. Cost is trivial and their competition that isn’t so politically motivated will have a much further reach.

It's wild hubris for twitter to try to invoice/penalize the very users and organizations that make twitter anything but insolvent. There should be money exchanged here, but it should be flowing generously and most importantly in the other direction.

maybe they can make their own twitter and give themselves a big blue check mark there

For the NYT to verify their official accounts plus those of their reporters (using the Twitter Blue Affiliations feature) would be $1m annually. This, for a budget line item that has heretofore been $0. In this economy, that's a reach.

I don't think the NYT is worried about "reach."

> I don't think the NYT is worried about "reach."

LOL they are desperate for reach. Incredibly so; have you not listen to any podcast by them? They are begging people to go to their site. They get a fraction of the organic traffic they used to and nearly everything is driven from other site like Twitter, Google News, Facebook, etc. The internet age has not been kind to classic news orgs.

The NYT has been doing great recently. They're probably the legacy news company that's doing the best online of anyone.

That's on the strength of having a lot of verticals like games, recipes and Wirecutter though.

have you seen @nyttypos and (to a lesser extent) @nyt_diff? NYT online editorial standards are hilariously abysmal.

https://twitter.com/nyttypos

https://twitter.com/nyt_diff

Yeah and it doesn't matter.

correctly writing words and punctuation on the page digitally printed by "the legacy news company that's doing the best online of anyone" doesn't matter at all? isn't that like the bare minimum of what their job consists of?

I was responding to a post saying they weren't getting online traffic by saying they are getting online traffic. Nothing about the quality of their content.

How do you get the 1 million figure?

An affiliated account to a verified org is $50 per month per seat, so NYT would have to authenticate 1,647 affiliated accounts to reach 1 million dollars per year

Exactly this. Use the published number of reporters at the NYT and multiply.

Are all of these 1647 reporters (they have that many??) and posting on Twitter? That’s a lot of traffic generators or not. Surely they could just do the bulk with 100 or so.

You're suggesting the NYT further tier its reporting ranks, along with all the internal difficulty that would entail. For ex: obviously the 100 have to include the most senior reporters, who are also older and therefore the least likely to create the viral content NYT wants affiliated with their account, so immediately they probably need to look at a much larger number. For another example: social media is different for each reader, or from the other side, each reporter has a constituency. In one season, the fashion reporters are driving views, while the following season it's the European war correspondents or the economics reporters (and all of these desks have subdivisions that wax and wane in popularity).

And all that discussion so that they can spend $72k annually with Twitter, a y/o/y increase of $72k from last year. With no guarantees of reach, because the whole paid-only verification thing is an experiment that began an hour ago. Let me just say that this whole pitch is going to be...difficult... at the point in the economic cycle where we find ourselves.

The NYT has revenues of 2.1 billion. I’m sure they have a marketing budget and probably already spending money on Twitter to get traffic. This isn’t something strange.

Facebook did they same thing btw, just more gradual. For years they changed the algorithm slowly to take away reach from Pages only to offer it back as long as you paid.

Seems like a fair cost to pump spam

> I don't think the NYT is worried about "reach."

Then why are they on Twitter?

Having a presence doesn't mean you can infer they are worried about not having a presence.

We’re in a time where ideology trumps revenue for some companies. You know, “Get woke, go broke.”

Everyone says that about things that made tons of money though.

Oh, I don't disagree. I wasn't necessarily (always) agreeing with it. As with anything it's a matter of degrees.

The phrase is "Better Broke Than Woke", we'll see how it works out for folks

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