Twitter explores subscription-based option | Hacker News Reader

Twitter explores subscription-based option

in.reuters.com

136 pointse15ctr0n137 comments

$1/month for every 10k followers over your first 10k. Small price to pay for "fame". 1,000,000 followers is $99/month. You don't think Trump and the Kardashians would pay that for the voice it gives them to promote whatever they promote?

Twitter had $2.5B of revenue in FY '16. The average user with more than 10k followers probably only has slightly more than 10k followers (because the distribution of followers/user has most of its mass near 0), so the average rev. per 10k+ user is almost certainly less than $2/month.

So for this model to get TWTR near its current revenue, Twitter would need to have 104 million accounts with more than 10k followers. Twitter only has about 320 million MAUs.

If you think that the % of MAUs with 10k+ followers is closer 0.1%, then the avg. monthly charge would need to be $7,800/month.

Of these 320M MAUs, curious to know how many are bots or actually use their site instead of access it using an app?

Twitter sez 5% of users are bots/automated services. Reality is closer to 20%

319M

gettibg to it's current revenue levels implies replacing the ad model they have now. That seems like an unnecessary trade.

exactly. They lost $546m in 2016. Take that divided by the 320m mau's, and you have $1.425 per mau per year. make it an even $2 per year and they are profitable. Assuming they value the service enough ;) I like your plan better though

That's actually a great idea, you charge the people who benefit the most from the service (IMO) and you charge more the more they benefit from it.

It also correlates to the amount of resources used - the more resource intensive a user is the more he pays.

It's also completely backwards to how social networks tend to work - you incentivize engagement not penalize it.

If it works it will be a genius move, if it fails it will take the company with it.

Since the company is on such a strong financial trajectory now...

I think that is the parent posters point, most companies in the position Twitter is financially would go with a proven revenue model

Not to be snarky, but I would think most companies with 2 billion in revenue and no major manufacturing or inventory expenses wouldn't be in twitters position

It is, the speculators bid its shares too high. Its revenue model is pretty stable.

followers is not a 1-1 indication of service benefit

Interesting concept. Wouldn't this encourage people to create spam accounts to follow people to force them to pay / pay more?

There's no direct benefit to the spammer. More effort would go into pruning spammers (from those who are paying, spam protection services) and if twitter credited their account for any payments related to an account marked as spam it seems like it could work. Definitely an interesting model.

You are right but Twitter benefit from Spammer and the people that sells followers. They have no incentives to go after them.

Any person that uses Twitter knows that many of their followers are bots/Spam.

That's very similar to the situation with click-based advertising in search engines. I wouldn't say that it isn't working for everyone involved (except those who pay the ads).

Or encourage Twitter to generate fake accounts by themselves to adjust their revenue curve...

Fiduciary duty

true, but see wells fargo. though they do seem to be paying for it.

http://fortune.com/2017/01/13/wells-fargo-fake-accounts-scan...

Maybe. But then that would be the first time a Twitter had a spam problem to deal with. ;)

Does that block me from following someone who is maxed out?

If they were to copy the Facebook model you could follow them but the tweets just wouldn't show up in your timeline except occasionally.

Given that the major appeal of Twitter is the ease with which you can reach effectively unlimited numbers of people, I doubt that would be a very popular move.

It might be more feasible to charge people for following other people.

Or just offer a straightforward ad-free experience (maybe with some extra features) for a set monthly fee. Which is what I've wanted all along, but has the disadvantage of fracturing the userbase you can sell ads to and making Twitter a less valuable platform for advertisers, so they'd need a decent conversion rate to offset that.

I now absolutely hate this thing where the internet is made of free stuff and people won't pay for it. I know a load of people who practically live on Facebook but the idea of paying for it horrifies them. Do not understand that.

hahaha are you missing /s tag?

You don't get how business works, Trump does not needs Twitter, Twitter needs him and Kardashians. Twitter has already lost Kardashian followers to Instagram. As others have pointed out this fails to generate any revenue, let alone recoup cost of implementing this single "feature".

Will the service change the current top-comments-all-negative situation under all of Trump's posts?

Serious question: What are you implying?

Maybe if they had some CRM functions for brands to use, maybe using machine learning to automatically pick up on nasty tweets about your brand and add them to a queue of cases to investigate.

Seems like a lot of people turn to twitter to complain about products/services when things go wrong, give companies an easy way to handle those?

Yeah I built an integration like this for a hackathon at work (we did call center software, e.g. we serve the people that serve people). The system categorized tweets so that the customer could respond to issues and such - the obvious value add is it's unlikely a customer will come to you directly, but they'd likely complain online.

Somewhat related I've noticed that some of the really successful open source projects meet people where they are and are really accessible via channels like Twitter (SpringBoot and Auth0 are good examples of this, from my experience).

Basically the entire Japanese OSS community runs on Twitter. It's their medium of choice for communication, which is great since discussions are very very open (it's facilitated by their language's much higher information density compared to English, probably ~5x).

The vast majority of the contributors are eager to talk to users around the world, so if you use a project with a known Japanese maintainer, try shooting them a message on Twitter. Their English may be broken at times but you can usually understand what they're saying pretty easily.

Microsoft have a service their Dynamics CRM product that does something similar for a range of social media - Microsoft Social Engagement.

Wouldn't surprise if a lot of CRM companies support this kind of thing given the importance of social media to brands and customer service.

I also work on call center software. Care to say which company?

I left a year or so back, but it's based in IN (USA) and just got bought by a place in SF (USA). If there was any overlap that's probably enough to identify it :)

Why don't you start?

The celebrities were always lose leaders for twitter, although I am not sure they realized. The profitable piece would have always been the customer retention and not advertising, once they crossed into main stream. Purchasing is not the mode users are in when on twitter, it is almost always negative brand engagement when the use case is not interpersonal.

Social media monitoring is a small cottage industry that does the things you're describing (and usually extends the monitoring to Facebook, Instagram, and anyone with the API), with Hootsuite being (likely) the largest player.

Super hypothetically, Twitter could monetize something like Reddit Gold, basically as a form of "super upvote/retweet".

Yeah, I was thinking a similar thing, but making it more direct: I follow lots of "creatives" on twitter - webcomic artists, bloggers, opensource contributors, citizen journalists, etc. A quick "tip jar" feature in Twitter would be great. Buy up something like Flattr and bake it into the UI.

Holy crap, this is a great idea. Building a Patreon-style paid content/subscription platform on top of Twitter seems worth exploring. By all means Twitter probably already has the userbase for it.

Absolutely agreed, this is brilliant. Ideally partner with Patreon to bootstrap it, but allow anyone with a Twitter account to have patrons. (That also gets more people providing payment information, useful for other future purposes, such as making "sign in with Twitter" support "pay with Twitter".) Then start combining that with a Patreon-style "patron posts" mechanism, increase the limits on "patron posts", and perhaps later introduce a "circles"-like mechanism for non-patron accounts.

Imho Patreon isn't the right fit for Twitter. Twitter is about tiny impulses. Patreon is all about subscription-based stuff. Start with a tip jar of just "donate" - make only approved tweeters can host a tip jar for the first rollout. Make the TOS state tip jar cannot be used for conditional services, only for thanks for services freely provided.

Then expand to payment-locked content in tweets. "hey Johnathan Coulton posted a paywalled song click here to pay $1 to get it!". Make a platform where "1-click purchase" actually makes sense, since the patent's expiring anyways.

Giving users a direct financial incentive to game your system would probably turn your platform into a 'low-effort but popular' content mill in short order. (Imagine what would happen if people could withdraw reddit gold to cash.)

Drawing a line for 'quality control' becomes the next obvious step, but whenever money gets involved (especially other peoples'), any decision you make trying to decide for users how and for whom your system can be used ends up making it less viable to them, even if it's in the best interests of your platform or its quality.

"X with micropayments" isn't a new concept, and it's not a funding model panacea for a reason.

You can't game the system if you're getting paid by other users. We can argue about tweet quality, but it's no different than any other product or service that some people find valuable and others don't.

What you're describing is possible if Twitter agreed to pay top Tweeters to generate popular content, independent of user's volunteering to pay for that content. This would drive low-quality, low-effort content which nobody is interested in, but Twitter pays for anyways.

To keep scammers out they could start with restricting the feature to verified users. That would discourage beggars and hucksters until they work the kinks of admining and monitoring such a beast out.

> support "pay with Twitter"

For Jack, the best part might be that this is probably synergistic with his "other" company :)

This is what Twitter was supposed to be - the social graph, identity, trust, and payments layer for applications to build on top off.

With Facebook going the closed garden route, there was a real opportunity for a network player to play the open strategy.

It supposed to be that, but I lost my hope for openness of Twitter when they removed RSS feeds...

> With Facebook going the closed garden route, there was a real opportunity for a network player to play the open strategy.

There still is. If there's real irreplaceable value in the platform itself, such as with a mechanism like that, then making the client and network bits more open and protocol-based would help them.

During the last wave of 'reddit alternatives' pushes I saw several things which had that listed as their proposed or potential support model

Iirc Imzy and others were (are?) still pursuing it, though tbh I haven't visited most of them in a while so idk how that's going for them.

If they are going to pay out money they now have to deal with fraud, money laundering, terrorism funding, other questionable causes...

Microtransactions on interactions on Periscope too - each heart is like 10p/Flattr style proportion of those given, coming in like Twitch donations.

This is what Imzy (reddit clone) is doing.

That's actually a pretty smart idea. But the subscription idea seems pretty weak to me. I mean, how many people actually have 1 million+ followers to pay $99/month?

Kylie Jenner would be 1k per month Ronaldo would be 5k per month Trump would be 2600 per month

There are a few

Ever since Trump became President, I've started checking Twitter every day, just to see what he says.

I imagine there are at least a million others that have been brought back to twitter just to see what Trump says.

If he doesn't pay, then twitter loses all those eyeballs. That seems like a loss for twitter. I don't see how this will work.

And Trump does seem like the type who'd say "what, you're billing me? Well I'm going to build my own microblogging platform... with blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the microblogging."

> "Well I'm going to build my own microblogging platform..."

"..and it's gonna be the greatest microblogging platform, and we're gonna make Twitter pay for it!"

So you're saying with your idea Twitter, a company with 4000+ employees, can make around $10k MRR from its largest customers.

I'd pay if it had the effect where anyone mentioned with @whoever in the tweet would then have it pinned on their page, given enough gold.

My initial thought is this would only be used to spam/harass people but if it's tied to actual money maybe it'd be enough of a barrier to be semi usable.

They could sell antigold too. Or maybe semi hide it behind a "related gold tweets" tab.

I assume there's a pretty bad dark side, but it would enable a "premium customer support" of sorts...A very visible complaints box.

Would have been interesting in the Susan Fowler tweet. Would have cost Uber quite a bit of antigold to take that down

I run a small horror news publication and we'd love to spend money on twitter. We've tossed some money towards ads and have had a nice return from it. What we can't figure out is how much money it'll take before they'll verify us. Maybe that's something they could just offer to businesses without having to submit a request and ultimately be denied for whatever reason.

I think it's fair to say I'd be very interested in throwing more money at twitter.

Pardon my ignorace, but what do you mean by "small horror news publication"? And how do you monetize it?

No monetization yet. Although, we are building out some tools for people that run haunts that will for sure be monetized. Went into this knowing there isn't that much money in this sector for just websites.

This appears to be it: https://twitter.com/socialhorrornet

Very interesting. I tried similar experience once and it was pretty fun. Good luck with that project OP!

And what is the reason your business would benefit by being verified? I am unfamiliar with the concept I guess

Pretty simple, people see the checkmark and value you more. Also stand out in search and some threaded conversions.

I suspect it'll be a much weaker signal when every business has it.

Google at least claims that when showing your business in the knowledge graph, the social network profiles it links to have to be "verified."

> Google only shows verified profiles for sites with a verification process. In some cases, Google algorithms find information that is publicly available on the web. You can use this markup to override the information Google finds automatically, but you can't specify not to list a social profile.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/enhance-sit...

So that your users know you are who you say you are

I'd gladly pay $25 a year just to have a verified account. Be worth $10-20 million a year in earnings anytime they choose to simply turn it on.

They could easily have a bunch of different badges that only appear on accounts of people who pay.

A vanity item for sure, but if they had something like a 'star user' that gave you a gold star next to you name if you pay $5 a year, they'd likely make millions from it too.

Or how about

* an I Support Twitter! star on your name/icon/whatever * AND NO ADS EVER

Yup, definitely room for a "Twitter Prime" subscription. Some vanity icon & no ads.

On the plus side, users who pay Twitter monthly are less likely to be throwaway accounts.

If you have enough disposable income to pay for Twitter aren't you very likely also the most valuable target for advertisers?

What's Twitter's advertising ARPU?

As long as they price the subscription higher than that they come out ahead.

But that would be average across all users. If you remove valuable users the remaining ones will be worth much less to advertisers. There probably is some equilibrium at which point it's financially worth it but it could also piss up advertisers.

Disclaimer: ex-Twitter employee, views own, etc.

They'd have that in earnings if they laid off half the staff.

Interesting idea. Has this ever been discussed on HN before?

When the answer is obvious, it will always be brought back up. It's a severely bloated public company that is going through it's early death pangs.

$25 a year would be too low, everyone will be verified - which is kind of counterintuitive.

If they let you sort on it you could turn off anyone replying to your tweets that wasn't verified. A crude but probably pretty good filter for not seeing the Twitter mob.

One more thing, it's 2017 and if I am paying you money let me edit my tweets for a certain period after posting to correct spelling and grammar errors.

Not really, the point of verification is to verify that you are who you say you are, not to prove that you're somehow special.

>> $25 a year would be too low, everyone will be verified

I don't believe this.

Suppose it is true. This would be an excellent reason to start with a "quota" (say 10000 per day) - sort of a queue based FIFO system.

But each day, there will also be a few (say 100) which will open up for bidding allowing you to jump the queue.

If $25 a year is really too low, then some variant of this system should work.

Would it though? If anyone could get one wouldn't it totally remove the exclusivity of it?

Are you willing to post negative replies on the President's tweets? Seriously, go look yourself. It's all no names with blue check marks.

This should have been explored in its prime, not on its downfall.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

Companies are not trees that grow themselves.

If they tried to make money before the IPO it'd have only demonstrated how impossible it is for them to generate revenue.

Them actively searching for monetization strategies now seems to indicate an understanding that the capital well is running dry.

> Them actively searching for monetization strategies now seems to indicate an understanding that the capital well is running dry

Before they IPO'd they still had user growth. So they could get money from VCs by selling the "in 6 months we will have X million more users" story.

Now they're public, they don't have a growing user base, and the market expects them to stop losing money. They can't keep losing money forever as the VC option is gone now that they're public.

> demonstrated how impossible it is for them to generate revenue.

$2.5 billion in 2016

but they have been losing money? http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/21/technology/twitter-10th-anni...

They have WAY too many employees. They need to cut half, and become profitable.

ability to get income/revenue should not be questioned though.

When was Twitter's "prime"? And how does it compare to today?

If I were to peg a time, its when they had many 3rd party applications that hooked into your feed. They killed the integrations off in favor of their own app because Advertising.

Personally before it enabled inline images which turned it into a firehose of reaction gifs.

I'm starting to fail to see the difference between 4chan and Twitter at this point. Twitter is just 4chan with avatars.

Pretty sure POTUS is not on 4chan, but I could be wrong.

Depends on how you use it. As far as I know, my local police service, train company etc aren't on 4chan

Yeah, or when they started.

Twitter should leave the platform as is currently and clone into an alternate twitter-verse, ATV, where all kinda vices and foul language would be allowed and supported. Original Twitter would be more intolerant of trolls, related vices and foul language, outrightly deleting transgressing accounts even for incomplete, symbolized hybrids like f*$# and so forth.

Subscriptions to ATV would be based only on fake names and related credentials (including email addresses) and subscribers would be able to purchase troll units, (instanceOf)xVice units, etc.

To register, you would have to use your original Twitter email address initially and maintain an annual subscription to keep twitter-verse from disclosing your identity on Twitter. The revenue sources from ATV could be expanded further from this point.

You're essentially pitching "4chan, except you have to pay for it, and it's explicitly designed to blackmail you for using it."

> You're essentially pitching "4chan, except you have to pay for it

Funny you should bring up 4chan because some people actually do pay a yearly subscription to use it.

Interesting idea. As someone who's never found Twitter interesting, I'd love to witness such mayhem. I've always felt Twitter is too focused on who is saying what, instead of what was being said by who.

Of course even if the content was more interesting, the platform would probably still hinder my curiosity. It's like I'm walking into the middle of someone else's conversation, with little-to-no context.

They should name it Leprosorium.

The fact that this is Tweetdeck makes me believe this isn't a core initiative by Twitter's leadership, but probably a side project initiated by some individual contributors at Twitter. So this shouldn't be taken to be some big strategic shift by Twitter. IIRC Tweetdeck was also based in Europe so that accentuates the possibility that this is not a core project.

As long as the mere mortal users like me don't have to pay. I like IMDB way. They have a Pro subscription that normal users won't need. But then there's this that they are tied tightly with Amazon and what all it sells.

On the other hand they could do something like an account verification process (subscription? one time payment?) for non-celebrity users too. Maybe add a celebrity badge for the biggies or show other (something watered down) badge for non-celeb users that just says the account isn't some anonymous/throwaway account. Or sell more than 140 chars for tweets (and on the website at least they can collapse the more than 140 part).

I just hope they are not doing what Medium is trying to do.

There is a giant gap between the public client and their proprietary API.. something in the middle is the only sensible solution (50-100$ a year). I would definitely pay just for more options on getting their data.

This is going to cannibalize their gnip/API business but their pricing is in the thousands per month and any small or midsize companies have so many work arounds to get the same information it's laughable.

I love using Twitter, but what are the company doing ?

As a tech person, I understand that the platform can be difficult to scale, security, fake profiles, etc. But besides that? From an outsider, it seems like everybody is doing operations and no innovation in any area is present.

Twitter's homepage is still only a registration to closed social network like Facebook. People dont `get` twitter, and why join when it looks like just a facebook with text-limit?

Stop trying to be a social network, I dont have twitter friends.

Their trending topics are super nice, but nobody knows about it.

All the big tech companies work on speech, but not twitter ?

Tweets are mentioned all over the news, but still people are not using Twitter ? I can only imagine the amount of `Trump traffic` generated.

Their notifications simply blows!

Sorry the rant, I really want Twitter to succeed, because I dont like Facebook, I use Instagram because of family and Snap because of friends. But Twitter is like Hacker News a thing I just love.

I just can't get the appeal of Twitter. Who do you follow on it?

I'd pay $30/yr to twitter to keep the service running, in return I'd expect the option to opt-out of ads.

Price that low would not make sense to them. generously assuming 4% conversion to paid accounts (DropBox had 4% at some point) from their 320M MAU, they would make just 15% of their current revenues with your model.

I still think that their best bet is to work on their ad engine. Two of the 4 biggest tech firms, GOOG and APPL, make insane revenue on ads.

I assume you meant FB? Without checking numbers, FB average revenue per user is probably triple that of Twitter. Because of FB's scale, scope, etc, I can't see Twitter getting too close to FBs numbers. But yeah that still means Twitter should potentially be able to double its revenue.

Would this change affect 'anonymous' posters? With KYC legislation anyone with a sufficient amount of followers who was unwilling to be unmasked (via payment trail) would result in removal?

I am unfamiliar with the intricacies of the verified account system, so perhaps large anonymous users are already suppressed.

Welcome to 1998.

http://www.nathanargenta.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Ebay...

I would HUGELY pay for twitter feeds that actually provide useful information. Imagine having a twitter feed that actually gives you clueful summaries and links of critical information that helps you out in your work everyday.

Honestly, I would love to pay Twitter to manage something like a Kafka queue. I would build entire apps with Twitter as my "DB". The subscription cost would come with tiered rate-metering, so I could make a small app feed for free, but a larger app would start to incur costs when I wanted to up the throughput.

This must be part of the reason why you can't view profiles with_replies now if you're not logged in

It still works if you clear the cookies or open in incognito mode.

I started using TweetDeck because it remained untouched by Twitter's awful changes like promoted tweets, rearranging my timeline... I hope they keep their changes to TweetDeck to a minimum.

Weibo already has such subscription thing for quite a while ...

Twitter steadily follows Weibo's footsteps to roll out features and business models :)

I was begging for this five years ago. However, they have messed with so many parts of the service now that I find it almost unusable.

I guess app.net was on to something after all.

Interesting.

gab.ai just added subscriptions as well.

Here is the thing : paid subs means customer service. I think Twitter doesn't want to bother with that. They'll have to get a customer service for each country in which they operate, pay some people locally to manage it, ...

I'll pay $500 a month for an all-you-can-ban button.

Finally. I would easily pay 100 a year for this

I wonder how this will impact HootSuite.

No sale.

...here come the ads....

Twitter does not support the 10bn market cap. 3bn maybe, but it's overpriced by 300%

Ah, fun to see the inevitable cash grab technique overvalued internet tech companies make as they drive off the stockholder cliff. All it takes is a hungry competitor. Maybe time to synthshort twitter.

I hope reddit is next.

I have a completely different take on where twitter needs to go. The YC application I am submitting today is based on a twitter-like.

Sounds great, would love to see fewer shitposts and spam. #BuildThePayWall

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