There is so much untapped potential in Twitter. An ad-based business model was the only proven option in the late 2000s, but in the era of Patreon, Twitch, Substack, and Onlyfans, the landscape has resoundingly demonstrated that the old wisdom of "no one wants to pay for content on the internet" is no longer true.

Making something people want to pay for, of course, is the challenge, and Twitter Blue is a very limited start to that. But for the position Twitter has come to occupy in culture, a bold product vision could leverage that to incredible effect.

Twitter has two subscription models. In addition to Twitter Blue (which you mention), they also have "Super Follow", which is more analogous to Twitch/OF subscriptions, in that you pay a bit to a specific creator, so you get a bit of perks from them.

The fact that you don't know about it should say something about how enthusiastically the feature was received. Most creators are probably happier with their existing Patreon/OF platforms.

Do people really like having everything on one platform like that? Personally I kind of like having things separate and companies just do what they do well.

A lot of Patreons and Substacks are very reliant on Twitter to drive traffic too- Twitter should have a natural advantage in the space.

Look at the payout model I used at finclout.io There are ways to now ways to reward people for good content that are not ad-based not gifting/tipping.

>at this point is a platform for rich people to post incredibly vapid, narcissistic takes about politics and society that say nothing.

It's clearly not, since it's still one of the largest social networks in the world.

I'm not a fan of twitter or social networks in general, but it's clear that they are used by a teeny hundreds of millions of people more than some celebrities.

There are very few companies that would want to buy Twitter and can afford it. And because of heightened antitrust scrutiny, none of them have any interest in trying when there's a very low chance of clearing such a merger with all the regulators in USA + EU + UK. (The last one even blocked Facebook's acquisition of Giphy. They'd have a field day with Twitter.)

So there probably won't be a competing offer.

Can you imagine if they pivoted to an onlyfans model and allowed certain people to charge followers a few?

They already did this with Super Follows.

Any data on how that does? My guess is not that we’ll unless the content is richer than just text… and effectively largely becomes Patreon / onlyfans. It’s kind of hard to pull that off fully when the rest of the platform is fully free.

It's a ridiculous idea because it doesn't have any cultural or product fit. It reads like they looked at Substack, thought "ooh, money, gimme some of that!", and rolled out the same thing for their own product – but a tweet is a couple of hundred characters and nobody is paying for that. (Short of the small percentage of pathetic creeps who probably also send money to female streamers just to feel noticed.)

Reddit gold is an example of how to nail something like this, because it was done with tremendous sensitivity to the culture of the site. It's quirky, slightly ironic, riffs on the obvious silliness of a 'gift' that goes 99% to Reddit's coffers, and it's perfectly pitched to the user at the point where they are already feeling the value of Reddit's product & the other user's content. Twitter's, by contrast, is an example of how not to do it, for the converse of all those reasons and more besides.

There are a lot of politicians, activists, fundraisers, etc who communicate primarily through Twitter but send people to Patreon or GoFundMe or somewhere else to donate. That's an existing culture of soliciting donations on Twitter, and Twitter might be able to become the payment processor for some of those donations, if they do it right.

Twitter is for building an audience. Patreon and other platforms are where you best monetize that audience.

Putting both together could be incredibly lucrative but also would be treated very cautiously because of potential deplatforming.

Musk actual commitment to minimal moderation (what my mental model is for his free speech bent) could thread that needle and at the very least be a fascinating experiment to watch from the sidelines.

Think they are calling on Bezos? He bought WaPo and that worked out in their mind.

> They are probably going to desperately try to find a white knight, and fail because Twitter lost the mass market years ago and at this point is a platform for rich people to post incredibly vapid, narcissistic takes about politics and society that say nothing.

Ironically, this suggests that people like Elon Musk are exactly the problem with Twitter.