Twitter: Would you pay to be a Super Follower?
Twitter is racing to “push the envelope on how it can tap its network” of more than 300 million users, said Lucas Matney in TechCrunch.com. Long reluctant to add features, Twitter is stealing the best ideas of the competition, planning changes that “combine the community trends of Discord, the newsletter insights of Substack, the audio chat rooms of Clubhouse, and the creator support of Patreon.” Last week, Twitter shared “early details on its paid product, a feature called Super Follow,” which will allow users to “subscribe to their favorite creators for a monthly price.” One screenshot the company shared suggested a typical price could be $4.99 per month. The payments would let creators put content behind a paywall, or perhaps offer badges that fans could buy to flaunt their support. Twitter did not announce a precise launch timeline but said the changes are intended to “double its revenues by 2023.”
Twitter needs to do something, said Kurt Wagner in Bloomberg .com. It’s been “too precious with its product, moving too slowly and simply missing a chance to change something for the better.” Its early video feature, Vine, “could have become TikTok if it hadn’t been mismanaged,” while Twitter’s lack of tools that would let creators get paid for their work has allowed competitors such as Patreon to gain a foothold. Fortunately, despite those misses, it’s still “well positioned to take advantage of prevailing media trends.” The danger for Twitter is that in the push for greater revenue, it could lose trust from users, said Laura Forman in The Wall Street Journal. “The very appeal of Twitter lies in its ability to allow anyone and everyone to follow hard news bulletins together with the real-time musings of people of interest.”
Seriously, said ShaCamree Gowdy in the San Francisco Chronicle, all we wanted was an edit button. The reaction (on Twitter, of course) has not been pretty, with the hashtag #RIPTwitter trending. “The people I follow have some pretty hot takes from time to time, but I will absolutely not pay to read them.” But others will, said Casey Newton in Platformer.news, and Super Follow could reshape how we get the news. “For the past 15 years, reporters have steadily been building escape hatches from their employers.” Now Twitter is accelerating that process and giving journalists and other creators a powerful out. A top reporter who can convert even a tiny fraction of her Twitter audience to Super Followers might easily double the salary she gets at a major publication. That’s a crisis for the traditional media model. “If a publication’s top stars all begin making significantly more via Twitter than they do from their salaries, what’s to keep them working for the publisher at all?”