
Twitter explores subscription-based option - e15ctr0n
http://in.reuters.com/article/twitter-subscription-idINKBN16U389
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goatherders
$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?

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

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RileyJames
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.

~~~
cuchoi
You are right but Twitter benefit from Spammer and the people that sells
followers. They have no incentives to go after them.

Any person that uses Twitter knows that many of their followers are bots/Spam.

~~~
lazyjones
That's very similar to the situation with click-based advertising in search
engines. I wouldn't say that it isn't working for everyone involved (except
those who pay the ads).

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SteveNuts
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?

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nerdwaller
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).

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

~~~
nerdwaller
I left a year or so back, but it's based in IN (USA) and just got bought by a
place in SF (USA). If there was any overlap that's probably enough to identify
it :)

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

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Pxtl
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.

~~~
elvinyung
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.

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JoshTriplett
Absolutely agreed, this is brilliant. Ideally partner with Patreon to
bootstrap it, but allow anyone with a Twitter account to have patrons. (That
also gets more people providing payment information, useful for other future
purposes, such as making "sign in with Twitter" support "pay with Twitter".)
Then start combining that with a Patreon-style "patron posts" mechanism,
increase the limits on "patron posts", and perhaps later introduce a
"circles"-like mechanism for non-patron accounts.

~~~
nebabyte
Giving users a direct financial incentive to game your system would probably
turn your platform into a 'low-effort but popular' content mill in short
order. (Imagine what would happen if people could withdraw reddit gold to
cash.)

Drawing a line for 'quality control' becomes the next obvious step, but
whenever money gets involved (especially other peoples'), any decision you
make trying to decide for users how and for whom your system can be used ends
up making it less viable to them, even if it's in the best interests of your
platform or its quality.

"X with micropayments" isn't a new concept, and it's not a funding model
panacea for a reason.

~~~
baumandm
You can't game the system if you're getting paid by other users. We can argue
about tweet quality, but it's no different than any other product or service
that some people find valuable and others don't.

What you're describing is possible if Twitter agreed to pay top Tweeters to
generate popular content, independent of user's volunteering to pay for that
content. This would drive low-quality, low-effort content which nobody is
interested in, but Twitter pays for anyways.

~~~
Pxtl
To keep scammers out they could start with restricting the feature to verified
users. That would discourage beggars and hucksters until they work the kinks
of admining and monitoring such a beast out.

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dawnerd
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.

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

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

~~~
acangiano
I suspect it'll be a much weaker signal when every business has it.

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rmason
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.

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

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rmason
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.

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

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koolba
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.

~~~
nimchimpsky
> demonstrated how impossible it is for them to generate revenue.

$2.5 billion in 2016

~~~
ljk
but they have been losing money?
[http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/21/technology/twitter-10th-
anni...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/21/technology/twitter-10th-anniversary/)

~~~
overcast
They have WAY too many employees. They need to cut half, and become
profitable.

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skynode
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.

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

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intoverflow2
> 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.

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argonaut
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.

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balladeer
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.

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Ros2
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.

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zargath
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.

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

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mrmondo
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
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.

~~~
skinnymuch
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.

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hulahoof
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.

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LeicaLatte
Welcome to 1998.

[http://www.nathanargenta.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/03/Ebay...](http://www.nathanargenta.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/03/Ebay-Seller-Account-Profile-3_2015.png)

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blazespin
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.

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JamesLeonis
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.

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

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

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Sir_Cmpwn
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.

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

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

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aestetix
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.

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

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carsongross
Interesting.

gab.ai just added subscriptions as well.

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camus2
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, ...

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

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simplehuman
Finally. I would easily pay 100 a year for this

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gregjw
I wonder how this will impact HootSuite.

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DaniloDias
No sale.

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mdekkers
...here come the ads....

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

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arca_vorago
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.

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LeicaLatte
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.

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

