I wouldn't bet on this! For this, Twitter would have to divulge how many among the say 1000 followers are bots. Also, this is prone to abuse! An unnecessary follow will now be considered spam, and Twitter would have to build toolings to prevent that. It will drive creators out of Twitter. Sharing ad revenue with creators will be an excellent first step

This seems like it would get abused instantly.

It's like the ultimate DDOS opportunity- tell everyone to go follow <account you don't like> to drive up their costs to bankrupt them or force them off the platform. Create bot accounts to follow all the up-and-coming politicians of your opposition party or your startup's rival or the media company with a bias opposed to yours.

Then the arms-race component would kick off, and you'd have secondary accounts retweeting primary accounts to spread the followers over hundreds of alt accounts.

The fun part would be they'd have to place caps so hobby users didn't accidentally go viral and get lots of followers, which in turn would create scarcity for the users who follow the now capped account. Imagine someone bragging they're part of the elite 1,000 first followers of whatever random account is popular at that moment.

I agree with the method, even if not with the bands directly. The value for a user is in the number of followers. Anyone with a huge following is deriving a large value, and it's the most obvious point for Twitter to cut into.

All of the large accounts will pay a reasonable fee.

I like it, but that might encourage the top profiles to take their audience off platform entirely. Unlike say Youtube, I don't think Twitter creators are able to monetize directly on platform?

I do no think that would happen. Someone having 1M followers usually has $10k/mo to spare. And the value they are getting from amplifying their message for branding purposes certainly outweighs the cost by couple of orders of magnitude.

I'd probably pay $10k/mo for my brand if it allowed me to talk to 1M people interested in my products as frequently as I wanted. How much would the same cost me on other platforms? A comparable business is something like mailchimp where you pay $300/mo to message just 10,000 contacts.

And yes, Twitter would need to get better at purging bots, but that is a good thing and a nice incentive to have.

I agree with you here. There's a huge value in the amplification of messaging and Twitter's pretty much giving this away for free.

Media and institutions have the budget to pay here.

Is Twitter a platform or a publisher? If Twitter is a platform, it might make sense to charge the most prominent users the most. But if Twitter is thought of as a publisher, it makes sense for Twitter to pay its top creators big bucks.

Free-to-use is somewhere in between: the notable users get compensated with access to attention, and Twitter benefits from the attention-time of their audience.

So, the underlying point that I think you're making -- that notable users get a fantastic deal on social media at the expense of society -- is well taken.

Let's hope that a new mass communications technology emerges to disrupt this dynamic.

It tried very hard to be a publisher all these years, when deep down it is a platform.