Twitter Is Considering Subscriptions Amid An Advertising Slump (entrepreneur.com) 68
Even though Twitter hit 186 million monetizable daily active users between April and June (up 34 percent year-over-year), it had an operating loss of $124 million during the quarter as ad revenue slowed. "With that in mind, the company says it's looking into other revenue streams beyond advertising, which could include some form of subscriptions," reports Entrepreneur. From the report: CEO Jack Dorsey said on an earnings call Thursday that "you will likely see some tests this year" of different approaches. He noted that he has "a really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter," however. "We want to make sure any new line of revenue is complementary to our advertising business," Dorsey said. It's unclear what types of revenue-driving products and subscription services Twitter has in mind. Without speculating too much, we could see an option to remove ads from the platform for a monthly fee, for instance.
Re: No (Score:1)
You can, and do!
Given many people do "journalism" on it.. (Score:2)
They could come with some non-free tool to help in this like some sort of timeliner or advanced search.
Or well, sell checkmarks.
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They are already doing that, and selling likes and pushing corporate main stream media twits. Ahh twitter losing money playing the censor game, who would have thunk it. Wish I could say sorry to see twitter go but to be honest, good riddance.
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The real question is how can we speed up the process? Asking the real questions.
Is this viable? (Score:2)
Hmmm, if there were a social media company that had subscriptions and fair TOS (so that arbitrary cancellation leaves you with legal recourse) that would be kind of interesting. I don't know if it would actually fly but it would be less dysfunctional than what we have now where social media exists primarily to harvest and monetize data about users (including behavioral data). Of course if we just have to pay for the privilege of having our data monetized by Twitter, well, that is not a particularly good dea
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It was difficult to see, because so rarely were things in life free as in beer. Now, we know another variation on the scam.
TANSTAAFL.
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Parler has moderators, and will ban you for saying a "wrong" thing. Already has [techdirt.com].
Gab offers a work-around [gab.com] for that too.
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Free speech is important. I am not downplaying the fact that Twitter is now deciding who to ban, block, etc (a daunting task). BUT, the other problem with social media is that they provide free service in exchange for datamining their users. This is surveillance capitalism.
What would be interesting is if facebook or twitter or instagram abandoned the data-mining and advertising model and switched to a subscription model instead. Would users actually pay? I think probably not. We are too stupid to turn away
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The censoring platforms are getting less advertising, just like the non-censoring platforms.
Turns out we're just in an advertising slump. Woke companies who are boycotting Facebook advertising were going to cut their advertising budget anyway. They're just using the opportunity to spin it as virtue signalling.
Looks like Facebook knew that censoring wouldn't make a difference to their revenues anyway.
This Reeks . . . (Score:2)
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That sounds like something the AVGN would say for some bad game.
Stupid Money (Score:3, Insightful)
revenues of $683 million, ..., with expenses rising to $807 million.
How? They run a website. It is not that expensive to run a website.
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People and real estate are hugely expensive. Especially if they reside in California.
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If only there were a solution to that problem....
Re:Stupid Money (Score:4, Insightful)
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Cheaper to have East Indians do the wokeful thing.
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revenues of $683 million, ..., with expenses rising to $807 million.
How? They run a website. It is not that expensive to run a website.
A lot money money is spent ensuring that only one side of any argument is heard.
Not "just a website" (Score:3)
How? They run a website. It is not that expensive to run a website.
It's a huge service, not just a web site. Twitter ain't BoingBoing. Over 320M active users. It's constantly evolving in terms of tech and dealing with threats (technical and legal). Also, the ads don't sell themselves.
In 2019, 682M was spent on R&D. 914M on sales and marketing. $540M on equipment and property. It's expensive to run something at this sale.
start with trump's unblockable account $299/mo (Score:3)
start with trump's unblockable account at $299/mo
Anyone wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's a shocking idea, but don't spit your soda onto your keyboard: Maybe all these Facebook advertising "boycotts" are actually a result of an advertising slump and an attempt to take credit for reduced spending on a platform that is widely considered to offer ineffective advertising?
Re:Anyone wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Anyone wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
It’s blood in the water.
The same thing happened on YouTube. Advertisers found some bs to use to pull ads and negotiate for lower rates.
Advertisers see the same opportunity to get lower ad rates again.
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It’s blood in the water.
The same thing happened on YouTube. Advertisers found some bs to use to pull ads and negotiate for lower rates.
Advertisers see the same opportunity to get lower ad rates again.
It might not work - those companies who are "boycotting" non-woke sites have entire departments of people whose jobs depend on advertising on social media. Those people in (for example) Disney whose jobs depend on facebook advertising have spent years convincing the company that facebook advertising is essential. No matter how woke they are they aren't going to show the company any figures that show facebook to be ineffective.
They'll spin like mad if need be.
Imagine how far up your ass... (Score:2)
But then, this is Jack Dorsey we are talking about.
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Freeze Peach (Score:2)
Maybe Twitter should just follow the lead of other social media companies like Parler and Gab and simply...fail utterly.
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Yeah, remember that great exodus of right-wing blue checks to Parler? Well, they're all back on Twitter because Parler is a ghost town. Plus, it turned out that Parler's rules are even more restrictive than Twitter's.
Parler has bitten the radish.
Twitter ought to charge corporate and celebrities (Score:3)
These folks can write it off on their taxes.
Hopefully they consider shutting down (Score:4, Insightful)
twitter is fucking cancer.
Ad opt-outs are the stupidest kind (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretend you're an advertiser. Who do you like advertising to? People who can pay for your product, right? People with disposable income.
People who subscribe to get rid of ads are what kind of people? People with money. People that SPEND their money to gain some convenience. People you would like to reach but now have spent their money specifically to thwart you.
Ads work, unfortunately. But why would you pay for advertising space on a platform where the best prospects have already selected themselves out of the pool?
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So I have to put up with ads AND pay for the privilege. Fuck that.
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Pretend you're an advertiser. Who do you like advertising to? People who can pay for your product, right? People with disposable income.
People who subscribe to get rid of ads are what kind of people? People with money. People that SPEND their money to gain some convenience. People you would like to reach but now have spent their money specifically to thwart you.
Ads work, unfortunately. But why would you pay for advertising space on a platform where the best prospects have already selected themselves out of the pool?
We all know where this leads: some ads will be "exempt" and also be shown to those who pay to get rid of ads. Perhaps the category will start with public service announcements. It will slowly expand until any advertiser can get his ad exempted by paying more. Then perhaps the cycle will start again, with consumers paying a higher fee to get rid of all but "very exempt" ads.
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It may be bad for advertisers, but who cares? It's good for the sites because they get a lot more revenue per user from a subscription.
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Unless you're advertising furniture rentals, payday loans, no-credit check cars, or one of the other industries that prey on people who cannot afford to do things any other way. Hell, or even if you're WalMart etc and advertising to people without disposal income but want them to choose your location for their daily needs.
Also, the people who opt out of ads are probably the least likely to get affected
just charge $0.01 per tweet (Score:2)
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Re: just charge $0.01 per tweet (Score:2)
Social media is becoming toxic (Score:5, Insightful)
And the rest of the internet will soon follow. Does not matter whether they try to censor, it can't be fixed and will only delay the inevitable. The cost of publishing (or spamming) on the internet is approaching zero. There are many actors who want you to believe ridiculous things, but they will settle for destroying your trust in everyone else. Sadly if you create a pool designed to be easy for people to piss in, it is only a matter of time before it is mostly piss.
10, 15 years from now, the internet will be 99% BS that even dedicated and knowledgeable people will have to wade through to find a nugget of usefulness. Once convincing deep fakes can be done on everyone's phone, you won't be able to believe anything you see or hear or read.
These are the golden days of the internet folks. Enjoy it while you can.
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Social media showed us that interest-based engagement algorithms are the same thing as self-radicalization algorithms. This can be solved. Social media showed us that direct feedback and gamification (e.g. likes) leads to unreasonable behaviors. This too can be solved. Wikipedia showed us that political structures and corruption is inherent to any system where som
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What you describe is a search problem and it can be solved.
Just append the word "truth" to your search. That'll work.
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The golden days of the internet are long gone. The current climate of corporate controlled censorship certainly aint it.
I'd pay for that (Score:2)
Somewhere around $6/year sounds about right. It's like paying for admission to a side show.
Simple path to profitability (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a solution as to how Twitter could make so much money, every employee could get a solid gold limo.
Charge 0.10 cents per edit to a sent tweet. That's it, that's all you'd have to do.
Would the entire user base be furious? Absolutely. But what are they gonna do, where would they even go? Lots of Twitter clones have tried already, none with traction.
It's not even like people HAVE to edit so it wouldn't keep people off the site. But it would be a very steady income stream given the size of the user base.
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I didn't even know you could edit tweets.
Makes the platform even more useless than I thought.
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I didn't even know you could edit tweets.
You cannot, that's the point. Adding that feature, for pay only, would be a goldmine as it's been the longest requested feature.
Makes the platform even more useless than I thought.
It makes it no more or less useless. Allow ten minute window to edit, let anyone see a tweet has been changed and see the older version(s). That's all you have to do, then it's not disruptive but lets people fix the most common errors immediately after a tweet...
Calling Twitter useless b
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You can't; I assumed that was part of OP's idea?
Charge by the post (Score:2)
Unfortunately corporations with deep pockets would have an unfair advantage over individuals, so it would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech, so I guess it's not such a good idea after all.
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A penny for your tweets (Score:2)
Just charge a penny per tweet. How hard can it be?
No pay? No tweeet.
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ActivityPub (Score:2)
ads are shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Advertising not working for you anymore? Good!
There is still hope that the ad-infected bullshit world we inhabit now will be temporary and maybe one day soon it is possible to look at something again without the content being hidden between ads.
I use aggressive ad-blocking on my browser because whenever I see the Internet without (e.g. a friend's computer or something) it is utterly unusable and I wonder why people put up with that. Seems they increasingly don't.
No (Score:2)
After how they got "hacked", no way, I don't trust them with financial data.
The real problem (Score:2)
Take my 2 buckets (Score:2)
Currently has 321 million active users... (Score:3)
...charging at all would reduce that down to around 1 million or less
everyone else would decamp to the next free platform