This is mostly my hot take just based on the press release, but color me dubious. Local news is struggling nationwide and this doesn't feel like a solution. It feels like silicon valley looking to increase profits for their shareholders to the detriment of the world.
I don't mind paying for news. However, I do mind being on hold for 2 hours on a 1800 number that I had to dig up from some defunct webpage to cancel my subscription.
But that's not how most of us access news. We look at sources like Twitter, Hacker News, Facebook, Google News for links to articles.
Subscribing to a single website doesn't work in this model.
Isn't that what they're already doing? Except the payer is the advertiser instead of the platform itself via the subscriber.
Wouldn't payment integration with Twitter (if executed well) just make it easier for Twitter users to convert to paying the publisher after seeing the publisher's tweet? I don't see how it would increase the incentive for a publisher to post clickbait tweets, except perhaps for publishers whose in-house payment flow is very poorly implemented or nonexistent.
To what?
Canceled my subscription after that email went out. It's a shame. Kinda wish Mozilla had acquired it instead, although they don't have the leverage to promote it like Twitter does.
Only a small fraction of twitter users will sign up, and the overlap with the kind of users likely to spend money on advertisers products will be big.
I suspect this is true at nearly any price point. Even if it cost $50 per month, the tiny fraction of users who did sign up would be worth more than $50 in monthly ad revenue, since those are the kind of people who will subscribe to other high value services.
I just wonder if getting into channel business, instead of building more open of a platform where publishers control the prices themselves, was the right move for Twitter. Time will tell.
>"On iOS and desktop, Twitter Blue members will enjoy a fast-loading, ad-free reading experience when they visit many of their favorite news sites available in the US from Twitter, such as The Washington Post, L.A. Times, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, Reuters, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, Insider and The Hollywood Reporter."
My understanding of the argument with network neutrality was that the combination of the network provider as a natural monopoly and the network provider's ability to render content inaccessible would result in a fragmented Internet - you can only run so many wires to a house, and if Provider B cut off Content A, you might not get Content A anymore.
I don't see how this is the same thing.
*(This friction can be zero. You needn't take any positive action to subscribe to the Nth website; rather the platforms you subscribe to abstract that away for you, as they monitor all your clicks and visits, and handle the income-splitting transparently behind the curtains. Basically the Spotify model, for the open WWW).
You're free to obtain a subscription to any of those media companies personally and simply follow the link without Twitter Blue.
Most people likely aren't going to want to manage multiple subscriptions and will instead opt to not read the article. At least with Twitter Blue the user doesn't have to worry about multiple subscriptions and can simply read the story when they want to.
Additionally, they now have a notification that indicates that they won't immediately hit a paywall when they click on the link.
Ultimately, media companies need to be compensated, and this doesn't seem to be disadvantaging anyone...
just looked it shows me $5.99 a month for wapo add on.
If so might be worth it for me even though I don't use twitter. The rest I think are mostly available on news+
Full bloomberg on apple news is $34.99 a month, though they do have more free articles than WaPo it seems and at least I can understand the value and niche of financial news not really worth reading about unless you're in finance.
I don't think NyTimes is even an option anymore. They make enough profit on their walled garden seems they won't ever participate in this stuff again.
The Apple News subscription I already pay for seems to be more for magazines. It used to have everything.
Plus they want to be more in control what gets shown.
It works great for me on my Mac, less so on my iPad when following links in Twitter. The Twitter browser view doesn't seem able to handle logging into Amazon, then reporting success to WaPo so I can read the article. I think it works OK if I remember to open the link in Safari.
If people are looking for in on the web client, it's in the left menu under "More".l
Yeah, except Twitter Blue does do that at all. They are just double dipping. You still get just as many ads as before.
More importantly, this is going to introduce a whole new kind of thinking to people who work on the consumer side of Twitter. Previously, impact on ad revenue was the only financial metric they'd have to think about. That makes many optimization questions appear simple. Introducing other kinds of revenue complicates the calculus, allowing better decisions to emerge.
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/forecast-of-the-day%3A-twitt...
It's can be a Catch-22 in some cases. The same people most willing to pay to opt-out are the ones most coveted by advertisers.
FB, for example, pulls 4-5x the ARPU for US users compared with international. I'd expect twitter to have a similar pattern (though it depends on what 'international' means: Europe is only half the US).
The other issue with this is that the most engaged twitter users are going be the likeliest to sign up for a paid twitter service. These are also going to be the people pulling the average up.
- Is not compatible with any news paywalls (they just strip ads out of already free-to-access articles)
- Edit Tweet isn't Edit Tweet. It's an option to delay your tweets by 60 seconds. After that, you cannot Edit Tweet. "Slow Tweet" is more accurate but probably less marketable.
Even if I were still using Twitter, and even though I support journalism when I can (paywalls for a few sites, etc.), I still wouldn't pay $3 for this.
I think Twitter has a lot of work left to do on their business model. This move, IMO, is at least 5 years too late (if not 8-10). Considering Twitter has been unprofitable for most of its life, including in 2020[0], it's only now that they're thinking about alternatives to their ad network.
0. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/29/twitter-twtr-earnings-q1-202...
YouTube Red is the best product experience, and it's something I would pay to have elsewhere.
I hate ads. I never buy products from ads. They just distract me.
I'd pay $1000/yr for a completely ad-free Google. (No search result ads, no AMP, no "McDonalds" in Google Maps, ...)
Twitter confirms Twitter Blue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27316115 - May 2021 (722 comments)
Twitter's subscription service might cost $3 per month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27168200 - May 2021 (66 comments)
As soon as Twitter Blue comes to the UK I’d pay for it even without it being totally ad free (while complaining about that). Between Tweetbot and comprehensive ad blocking I never see ads anyway and I’m happy to pay for something I get that much value from.
Ad-free article access could be $1.
"""Editing""" tweets could be $1.
Ad-free Twitter could be $4-5 (as that's what Twitter makes per US user per month via ads).
Etc.
IMO Patreon has already broken through the mental mode of "sign up for multiple sub-$5 things and have a single bill at the end of the month."
Any big services out there doing a-la-carte premium features?
This might seem like a tweet soundbite,but it goes to the root of the problem - twitter develops its features in a vacuum and actively refuses to listen to its users.
I'd also argue that they picked a horrible price point - it's too expensive for most twitter users, and too cheap for the ones willing to pay. The demographic of people willing to pay for twitter is not extremely price sensitive, and going for a lower price point will only insignificantly expand it. Going for a higher price point with more value add (remove "promoted tweets" garbage) would be significantly more appealing.
Is this not just listed as a feature? To be honest, I would pay 4.99 a month to get that blue check mark
Seems like a good way to push a ideological/political agenda, too.
The changes we are paying for are client-side features only! There's no change to twitter.
For example, you can't edit a tweet, you can only delay sending the tweet for a few seconds while you stare at the tweet!
- Undo/Edit is just basic functionality being sold for money.
- Reader View wouldn't be necessary if twitter threads weren't hot garbage to begin with.
I really don't mind paying for a good product, and overall I like twitter the most out of all the other big social sites. However, what I've been seeing for years now is that they refuse to build the best product possible for most of their users, and they would rather stagnate than improve it "for free".
Disclaimer: Not associated with the tweet above, but I was the TL for Reader :)
I’m going to guess that I won’t find any NY Post stories about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop on this filtered platform.
Honestly this just sounds like a door fee for an echo chamber.
