Twitter explores subscription-based option

http://in.reuters.com/article/twitter-subscription-idINKBN16U389

by e15ctr0n • 9 years ago

136 137 9 years ago

in.reuters.com

cft• 9 years ago

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

SteveNuts• 9 years ago

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?

nerdwaller2• 9 years ago

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).

softawre• 9 years ago

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

hkmurakami• 9 years ago

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.

arethuza• 9 years ago

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.

prostoalex• 9 years ago

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.

_wp3r• 9 years ago

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.

dawnerd3• 9 years ago

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.

tomashertus2• 9 years ago

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

exolymph• 9 years ago

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

dawnerd3• 9 years ago

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.

crizzooo• 9 years ago

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

dawnerd3• 9 years ago

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

Navarr2• 9 years ago

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...

hsod• 9 years ago

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

overcast3• 9 years ago

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

DaiPlusPlus• 9 years ago

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

bluthru• 9 years ago

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

JamesLeonis2• 9 years ago

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.

Nition• 9 years ago

Yeah, or when they started.

ISL• 9 years ago

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

overcast3• 9 years ago

Companies are not trees that grow themselves.

koolba2• 9 years ago

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.

kogepathic• 9 years ago

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.

nimchimpsky2• 9 years ago

demonstrated how impossible it is for them to generate revenue.

$2.5 billion in 2016

rmason2• 9 years ago

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.

superioritycplx• 9 years ago

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.

imron2• 9 years ago

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.

egypturnash• 9 years ago

Or how about

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

ProAm2• 9 years ago

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

paulcole• 9 years ago

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

untog• 9 years ago

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

psychologistt• 9 years ago

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

thr0waway1239• 9 years ago

> $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.

rmason2• 9 years ago

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.

NeutronBoy• 9 years ago

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.

ganfortran• 9 years ago

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

elvinyung3• 9 years ago

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

tyingq2• 9 years ago

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.

koolba2• 9 years ago

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.

Cyph0n• 9 years ago

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?

goatherders6• 9 years ago

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

There are a few

Pxtl4• 9 years ago

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.

elvinyung3• 9 years ago

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.

abricot2• 9 years ago

This is what Imzy (reddit clone) is doing.

wastedhours• 9 years ago

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

TorKlingberg• 9 years ago

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

recursive• 9 years ago

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

argonaut• 9 years ago

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.

concernedctzn• 9 years ago

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

berns• 9 years ago

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

blazespin• 9 years ago

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.

goatherders6• 9 years ago

$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?

rorosaurus• 9 years ago

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

goatherders6• 9 years ago

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

RileyJames• 9 years ago

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.

ekianjo• 9 years ago

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

xname2• 9 years ago

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

tmalsburg2• 9 years ago

Serious question: What are you implying?

mdonahoe• 9 years ago

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

guelo• 9 years ago

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.

Illniyar• 9 years ago

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.

goatherders6• 9 years ago

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

Navarr2• 9 years ago

followers is not a 1-1 indication of service benefit

sl8r• 9 years ago

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.

ddebernardy• 9 years ago

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

goatherders6• 9 years ago

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

mathw• 9 years ago

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.

kernelpaniced• 9 years ago

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".

simplehuman• 9 years ago

Finally. I would easily pay 100 a year for this

Sir_Cmpwn• 9 years ago

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.

guyzero• 9 years ago

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

balladeer• 9 years ago

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.

mrmondo• 9 years ago

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

dirtyaura• 9 years ago

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.

skinnymuch2• 9 years ago

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.

Ros2• 9 years ago

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.

carsongross• 9 years ago

Interesting.

gab.ai just added subscriptions as well.

LeicaLatte2• 9 years ago

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.

camus2• 9 years ago

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, ...

DaniloDias• 9 years ago

No sale.

LeicaLatte2• 9 years ago

Welcome to 1998.

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

JamesLeonis2• 9 years ago

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.

arca_vorago• 9 years ago

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.

hulahoof2• 9 years ago

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.

wenbin• 9 years ago

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

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

aestetix• 9 years ago

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.

gregjw• 9 years ago

I wonder how this will impact HootSuite.

mdekkers• 9 years ago

...here come the ads....

zargath• 9 years ago

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.

skinnymuch2• 9 years ago

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

skynode• 9 years ago

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.

Pigo• 9 years ago

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.

RodgerTheGreat• 9 years ago

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

intoverflow2• 9 years ago

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.

bushin• 9 years ago

They should name it Leprosorium.

Twitter explores subscription-based option

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