X plans to use payment, phone and ID verification to stop bots, $1/yr fee
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
1. It’s not functionality people were already used to getting for free, so they wouldn't feel like something was being taken away.
2. It's something people have been, quite vocally, asking for for a very long time, so you know that they, well, actually want it.
3. It doesn't lend itself to complaints because typos feel like they're “your fault,” and so it feels more understandable to pay to "fix your mistake."
4. And it can be billed as a pure convenience: "you can always just delete the post and repost it". Even though this misses the point that you lose your retweets, it just adds to point (3) that it feels like a hack they're allowing you to do to fix your mistake.
5. It doesn't negatively affect any existing user dynamics. When you charge a subscription, it's natural to feel like you shouldn't see ads anymore. "What am I paying for if I still see ads?!" This feature is completely orthogonal to every other existing revenue stream.
If they would have just done this at the beginning, I think people would have actually cheered it on, and it doesn't affect any existing user dynamics. No devaluing of blue checkmarks, no risking losing tons of users by making it a for-pay service, and again, there's no hard ceiling on how much revenue you can generate from a single user.
And guess what... a year later, they can still also offer a subscription that gives you 20 edits a month, or 300 edits a year if you pay all year up front, or something like that. So you can still get your subscription payments. And critically, unlike previously, you know what you're paying for. The messaging is simple and you can spin it as a user-friendly move: "Oh wow, the new edits feature is so popular, we decided it made sense to give people a way to get edits cheaper. Our new subscription pricing saves you money!"
Some people pay to promote their tweets.
Other people pay to not see such tweets as promoted in their feeds.
Both sides are happy to pay!
what a weird thing to think.
Musk paid $43 billion dollars for Twitter.
previously it made something like $4 billion dollars a year, mostly from ads.
what pricing structure for editing tweets do you feel will bring in > $4 000 000 000 / year?
yes it does, since he's already destroyed so much of the advertising value and made paying for Twitter Blue poisonous.
They don’t need that many active users to transition successfully either, as long as it’s got scale.
Just look at the monthly active users and consider what a verified payment user like square or PayPal is worth to company valuation and you’ll see why 43B was worth it. It was the largest available userbase to roll this business model out onto.
KYC = Know your customer.
Lots of companies are moving toward this. Microsoft (Office products, maybe even their OS), Google recently with Youtube, Meta's IG/Facebook subscription plan and certainly Apple has mastered this.
I believe that the data analysis guys have determined that there is a large enough pool of people that are willing to pay for services.
I'm (subjectively) seeing a trend where more companies are relying on a segment of the population to help keep them afloat, profitable and in some cases... dominant.
Twitter may be experimenting (while curtailing bots) with getting people used to the idea of paying for their service. One dollar... sure! A year later, it's $2.99/yr or $1/month... Still not a bad deal for those who are already comfortable with $1/yr.
Saving user's payment information also makes it easier to segue into other ventures (stores, merch, donations, etal) because the wallets are now open.
Objectively... It's not a bad move overall for a company that has been struggling.
I wanted to see if X/Twitter's Premium service was a success and if so... it might have helped spur this move. Unable to find any info on that. Some other useful stats below:
One of the many reasons that almost NO ONE accepts less than $2-3 on the internet for things is that if you receive a chargeback from the bank due to fraud, there is a $20-$100 FEE that is applied to your account (in addition to the transaction being reversed), and if you get too many of these (both by percentage of transaction count and dollar volume) you will be banned from the payment processor.
With the proposed $1/yr fee, it would be trivial to pay a few hundred dollars on a shady website for stolen credit card numbers, ring up huge numbers of $1 charges, and induce tens of thousands of dollars of damage while harming X's relationship with their payment provider.
SA isn't trying to repay tens of billions of dollars of loans and hugely damaged the income stream it had with billions of dollars a year of advertising.
making people pay for niche random internet corners is of course a fine business model, but it doesn't make billions of dollars a year or satisfy someone with the ego of elon musk.
bot activity is far far far far worse than it was before Elon bought Twitter and fired loads of people, and much of the spam and most of the abuse I see comes from people who already paid for Twitter Blue! whatever the reason for this dumb idea is, it isn't to actually reduce the amount of bot crap on the platform.
May take time to spin up, but eventually being willing to pay a dollar for Twitter might mean the acct is more likely a bot than a human.
Lots of discussion over here:
For just $1 per year...
The unpoliced proliferation of absolute horseshit, buried under an insurmountable pile of "verification" checkmark replies, is a form of censorship in my opinion.