Some twitter users are clearly willing to pay for whatever it is they get out of using twitter - one just paid $44 billion :)

People have an extremely dependent relationship with Twitter. It’s more like gambling than media. They will absolutely pay.

If we don't fund-raise and pay for $position_X_on_political_spectrum voices on Twitter to spread virtue and truth, the conversation will be hijacked by those goddamn $position_Y_on_political_spectrum shills and traitors!

For you maybe, but people are vain enough to pay 20 bucks and more for a little blue check. There were insider rings charging much more for it.

Time will tell though, if the easiness with which a blue checkmark is acquired will diminish the significance of having one, and to what degree.

How many people will pay 2x the price of Disney+/Spotify/Netflix for a blue check on Twitter?

90% of the people who currently have them is my guess. Though the winds of social favor may shift as Twitter becomes open to more diversity of thought.

There's a great Dr. Seuss book called "The Sneetches" I think would help you to understand what's about to happen.

Twitter devolving into 4chan or as you say "diversity of thought" will not lend itself to having journalists wanting to keep their status on the site.

Blue checkmarks will be people paying to market to you. It won't take long to block people with blue checkmarks. Before it was some verification that this was a real person/official entity. As for twitter becoming open to more "diversity of thought" I mean, I guess if you want more ads, sure?

"as Twitter becomes open to more diversity of thought."

That remains to be seen. It might as well just lead to a shift of thought. Or that all opinions are welcome, but only those get traction and an audience, that happen to align to the opinions of Musk (and whoever else, who has invested heavily behind the scenes)

I use Twitter more than I should - though in a read-only context - and I don't understand what "diversity of thought" is missing at the moment. You can go on any leftist's Twitter and see replies calling them communist, calling trans people mentally ill, etc. The only stuff getting banned consistently is either incitement, like calling for "death con 3" on a group of people or outright racial/gendered slurs. There are mass-reporting campaigns (targeting individuals from both "sides"), but these are usually overturned and are not entirely Twitter's fault. Sure, better moderation would improve the outcome in mass-reporting cases, but it's less a case of bad policy and more a case of Twitter needing to invest more in moderation. Something I think is less likely now that Twitter is loaded up with debt.

That's an arbitrary anchor which is almost meaningless.

>Why buy a yacht when you can buy a blue check?

I'm sure a lot of peeps will buy it. It will bring mediocre revenue, though, particularly against that 44B (+ OpEx) tag.

Apparently there are about 400,000 currently verified users. So, assuming 100% buy in (or enough people buying the blue check mark that it makes up for those who don't), that brings the total revenue from this scheme to ~$100M a year, or about 2% of Twitter's current $5B annual revenue.

It doesn't matter, charging all engaged users won't make enough money to be meaningful, the math just doesn't work out.

This. It's akin to charging YouTube creators $20/month. These are not the users that are making them money.

We'll have to see.

When it was "exclusive" and indicated some degree of notability, yeah, people who couldn't get it wanted it.

Now it signifies you're willing to pay $250/year for a virtual hood ornament. A nice signal for scammers, but otherwise like listing yourself in "Who's Who".

There are different ways it could work out. On Strava, more than half of the people I interact with are subscribers and that used to be more a signal of "willing to chime in for the platform to remain mostly ad-free" than a fee for extended freemium features (this has changed a bit, more paywalled features, and I'm not too happy about that despite being a subscriber).

I believe that it would be possible (even if not likely) for Twitter to shift into a lean state where they focus on just keeping the boat running and fostering loyalty with those who can and want to afford a subscription that's more a supporter badge than a gateway to extended features. Certainly depends on how much of their current cost is essentially ad sales and how much of that they can (and want to) cut. At least they are certainly much closer to that than anything Meta ever created or bought (with the exception of Oculus, which might certainly have been on a path to becoming a viable hardware company had it not received the Zuck's kiss of becoming deeply untrustable)

It’s clearly a trade-off decision. If paying will give you access to a target audience people will pay. But I agree that you need some kind of business to be willing to pay.

I mean the entirety of Gab and the fediverse are based off of content producers paying to use the service

People pay gab? What?

Yeah Gab Pro, it lets you upload higher quality content, videos, and some other stuff including applying to get verified. It's how they made most of their money for a long time, ads are a recent thing for their site to my understanding. It's $15/month

Yes it will, if those people are creating the content for some other goal - e.g. political, commercial, publicity, etc.

I think a lot of them would pay a small amount to keep the cash flowing. They many not like it, but the leverage is on the platform's side until the audience moves.

But it will definitely temper my social media addiction, which will make me a lot more productive. So I'm rooting for it.