The following article is based on my own interpretation of the said events. Any material borrowed from published and unpublished sources has been appropriately referenced. I will bear the sole responsibility for anything that is found to have been copied or misappropriated or misrepresented in the following post.
Ritarshi Chakraborty, MBA 2020-22, Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur
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It has been an all-around more ambitious year for Twitter. Following activist shareholder action last year that aimed to oust CEO Jack Dorsey, the company has been making long overdue product moves, buying up companies and aiming to push the envelope on how it can tap its network and drive new revenue streams. Things seem to be paying off for the company, as their share price sits at an all-time high, that is double that of its 2020 high.
Twitter has announced it will launch a “super follow” feature, which lets users charge followers for access to exclusive content, later this year. The move comes as Twitter is branching out from advertising to find more ways to make money both for itself and for its most prolific users. In an investor presentation on Thursday, the social media company announced the new feature that will let users charge for extra, exclusive material not shown to their regular followers. This can include subscriber-only newsletters, videos, deals and discounts. Users would pay a monthly subscription fee to access the extra content.
Twitter users and the company’s investors have long been asking it to launch a subscription-based model. This as a growing number of internet creators and influencers use tools like Patreon, Substack and OnlyFans to make money from their online popularity. The subscriptions will also allow Twitter to tap into a broader range of revenue sources in a world where online advertising is dominated by a Facebook-Google duopoly. Twitter did not detail what percentage of the revenue it would share with celebrities and others who sign up paying subscribers.
Exploring audience funding opportunities like Super Follows will allow creators and publishers to be directly supported by their audience and will incentivize them to continue creating content that their audience appreciates. Super Follows is not available yet but Twitter says it will have “more to share” in the coming months. Another coming product, “Revue,” will let people publish paid or free newsletters to their audience. There’s also “Twitter Spaces,” a Clubhouse competitor that lets users participate in audio chats. It is currently in private beta testing, which means it’s not yet available to the general Twitter audience.
Direct payment tools have become increasingly important for creators in particular in recent years. Patreon has been hugely successful, and other platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and even GitHub have all launched direct creator payment features. Twitter will presumably take a cut — the company has been hinting at subscriptions features that would offer it a new source of revenue — though it doesn’t appear to have said yet what that fee will be.
Screenshots shared by Twitter showcase a feature that allows Twitter users to subscribe to their favorite creators for a monthly price (one screenshot details a $4.99 per month cost) and earn certain subscriber-only perks, including things like “exclusive content,” “subscriber-only newsletters,” “community access,” “deals & discounts,” and a “supporter badge” for subscribers. Creators in the program will also be able to paywall certain media they share, including tweets, fleets and chats they organize in Twitter’s Clubhouse competitor Spaces.
The San Francisco-based company also said its revenue goal for 2023 is more than $7.5bn, more than double its 2020 revenue of $3.7bn. The payment feature will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content. That could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscription to a newsletter, or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $4.99 per month to receive a series of perks. Twitter sees it as a way to let creators and publishers get paid directly by their fans.
Twitter has also announced a Facebook group-like feature called Communities. Although Twitter has not shared much about this feature, it has something to do with a lot of people at once. People can create groups about topics and people who share the same interest can join the group. The feature would be the same as how it happens in Facebook. For instance, if you want to either create a group about dogs or join a group that is about dogs. You will be able to do that with twitter’s communities feature. Groups have been a huge success for Facebook (and a huge moderation problem, too), and they could be a particularly helpful tool on Twitter, since the service’s open-ended nature can make it difficult for new users to get started on the platform.
Apart from this, Twitter is also said to be working on a feature called Safety Mode that would block potentially harmful tweets. As per reports, this feature once turned on would block “automatically block accounts that appear the Twitter Rules, and mute accounts that might be using insults, name-calling, strong language, or hateful remarks,” the company revealed during an analyst event. This will stop the account in concern from tweeting at you for seven days straight.
There’s no timeline yet for when either of these features will launch. Twitter listed them as “what’s next” for its platform during a presentation for analysts and investors this afternoon.
References
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