I'm likely to pay for it at that price. For reference, I have a bit more than 14K followers on Twitter.
Why? Two reasons.
1) Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes like outrage being more visible than high-quality content. I’m in favor of alternative revenue streams, although they have to provide value, and removing ads doesn't count as providing value.
2) My Twitter account is part of my consulting business. Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility or perceived legitimacy. I'd be willing to try it for a year and see how it works out.
FWIW, I wouldn't have been willing to try it at $20/mo.
> Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes
> Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility
What you're describing in that second quote is advertising. You are paying for additional reach, in this case you'd get those additional impressions via "priority" in replies, mentions & search. What they've done is dressed up advertising as a membership feature because it'll make people like you more likely to advertise.
Although you’re technically correct, I think there’s a qualitative difference here. Traditional advertising is priced on number of impressions. As a result, publishers are incentivized to juice engagement numbers. Practically speaking, that means outrage-generating content and similar garbage.
This sort of “advertising” is a class system, with one class of users getting some sort of visibility bump over a second class of users. The incentives are aligned with making sure the verified content is perceived to be high quality, so that being verified is a status symbol.
You could argue that a system with literal second-class citizens is worse than the current one, and you might be right, but I’m interested to see how it turns out. Nothing is perfect—everything has tradeoffs—and the current engagement-driven approach is a dumpster fire.
I’m an advertiser and I think you understate how ad platforms incentivize quality content (via quality scores that affect price) and overstate how this twitter blue proposal would do so.
Also you greatly simplify how current advertising works. It’s not anywhere as simple as you describe.
If you’re evaluating value, it’s helpful to think about it in those crude terms. If you’re likely to get, say, 4-5 new followers a month from the increased impressions then I think this is good value as an ad product. Part of your point, not the main one admittedly, was grappling with whether to sign up, aka the value here.
I understand you were mostly making an incentives point and there I think we just disagree.
In terms of value, I think it's going to be more about avoiding anti-value—specifically, I expect that accounts lacking the checkmark will be seen as spam, scams, or bit players.
Here's what I expect to happen:
1) First, Twitter introduces paid verification. They cut back on their content moderation efforts on unverified accounts, but they exercise more control of spam and scams on verified accounts, including permabans (which are easier to enforce, due to better knowledge of the people behind the accounts—a credit card number, at the very least).
2) Next, they introduce an option to hide all non-verified tweets, other than from people you follow. People will use it because non-verified tweets have a much higher proportion of spam and scams.
3) At this point, they've successfully price discriminated between professional content creators (such as myself) and consumers / casual creators. I expect additional price discrimination to follow, such as charging for API access in order to target people using tools such as HootSuite to manage large fanbases.
All of this is predicated on people adopting #1, which is why it's important for Musk to find the right price point. It looks like he's just spraying out ideas, but I think he's doing price research.
This is all speculation about what they could announce -- even most of the items in (1). You could always re-evaluate if these things come to pass. Once this initial plan rolls out, whether the check itself continues to hold value once it's open to anybody with $$$ depends on how users in the network use it. That's why I prefer to think in terms of the specific reach/advertising question.
But we'll see! My own speculation is that they lean more into trying to convince ordinary users (or content creators like you) to get more into the advertising game to replace some brands that may leave. Think of dating apps and features like Super Likes, Boosts, etc. Tinder and others figured out how to get money out of regular folks without a traditional ads interface. If I were them, I'd hire folks from Match Group.
Frankly, I'd rather see an ad for a random content creator than for some of the weird brands that advertise to me. Right now the top "Who to follow" for me is Lamps Plus, "the nation's largest lighting retailer." As you could imagine, I'm not interested. Instead, they could give everyone a free 30-min account boost and give their premium Blue members four or five more a month.
Oh, it's absolutely speculation. I won't be paying a dime until I think the value is there. Although I'm willing to speculate a bit... it's only a hundred bucks.
Getting ordinary users into advertising is their old game. My middling popular tweets all have a "Boost" button I can click. I've clicked it a few times, but they're looking for bigger campaigns than I have appetite for... $50/day, minimum two days, reach of only about 2,000 people each day. I'm not willing to throw away $100 on a two-day campaign that's very unlikely to move the needle in any meaningful way.
But, obviously, I am willing to throw away $100 to try a status symbol for a year... but only if it actually is a status symbol. The difference is the longevity. Nobody makes the decision to hire me after two days; they make the decision after seeing my content and name for months and years. Four thousand people seeing my name once is basically worthless to me. Fourteen thousand followers have a better chance of seeing my name for a year is quite likely to be worth it.
(2) should be what you get in return. Pricing should be what customers care about, not what Twitter cares about.
If you're going to be a luxury product then all of your prices and/or offering has to be luxury or exclusive.
Disincentiving follower counts by how much VIP accounts costs doesn't make much sense. Unless you have some high end super VIP bracket that caps at 100-500k or whatever.
Elon's idea of rewarding creators as a byproduct of checkmarks sounds better than arbitrarily gatekeeping the checkmark system through some VIP criteria (like follower counts or public influence).
Everyone is a creator by default, creators should be rewarded after a certain level of contribution - always - but that's not the role of checkmarks (or the base level one at least).
1) Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam
2) Ability to post long video & audio
3) Half as many ads
I also expect the following:
4) Increase in perceived legitimacy
#1 and #4 are valuable to me. #2 I don't care about at all, because my long-form content goes on my blog and YouTube. #3 is 'meh'--it'll be nice to have fewer ads, but my brain glazes right past them anyway.
Why? Two reasons.
1) Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes like outrage being more visible than high-quality content. I’m in favor of alternative revenue streams, although they have to provide value, and removing ads doesn't count as providing value.
2) My Twitter account is part of my consulting business. Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility or perceived legitimacy. I'd be willing to try it for a year and see how it works out.
FWIW, I wouldn't have been willing to try it at $20/mo.