You Might Have to Pay to Use Twitter Soon

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Twitter might come with a fee soon. While speaking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at an AI discussion, Twitter (or whatever it calls itself now) CEO Elon Musk suggested he wants to make the social media platform come with “a small, monthly payment” because it’s the only way to get rid of bots. As Variety explains, this comes as advertising revenue has diminished significantly, and the charge of $8  per month for Twitter Blue – and the blue checkmark that comes with it, along with other perks – was introduced. Rumors that Musk has been considering charging for Twitter have been going around since November of last year. Bloomberg reporter Dave Lee first tweeted the news:

Elon Musk revisiting an idea apparently floated privately in the past — charging *everyone* to use Twitter. A lower tier than premium. "We’ve moving to a small monthly payment for use of the X system," he just told Benjamin Netanyahu, saying it's only way to stamp out bots.

— Dave Lee (@DaveLeeBBG) September 18, 2023

This kind of flies in the face of Musk’s declaration of Twitter as the “town square” while arguing for allowing free speech on the platform. He was right, but it undermines the idea of charging people to use it. I assume he’s going to use a “Freedom Isn’t Free” argument for the fee (especially when it becomes clear that nobody buys the bot excuse and certainly doesn’t care about them enough to pay for their disappearance), which the advertisers who ran away as soon as Musk allowed people they disagree with to speak are helping him make. I have no idea if this is a mistake; I’m not business-savvy enough to make that kind of determination. I would guess that they’ll lose at least some Twitter users, but if it’s a small enough amount, the charge could more than make up for it. But the charge has to be small, too. You can’t go from making something free to forcing people to pay $8 a month for it; that worked for content creators looking for new ways to market themselves and people narcissistic enough to want the clout of a blue checkmark (read: actors and politicians), but it’s not going to work on Tom, Dick, and Harry, who just want to tweet pictures of their cat, the occasional news article, and their thoughts on Barbie. And it’s important to keep in mind that there are other social media platforms that are free; Twitter is the most popular, but if it starts charging for its use, it’s feasible that people will migrate to Facebook or Instagram or some burgeoning network ready to take advantage of the angry consumers this will surely produce (Truth, for example).

The flip side is that Twitter can be addictive, and if the fee is low enough – say, $3 a month – perhaps enough people will go for it. The Variety article says that Twitter has, according to Musk, 550 million active monthly users; half of that paying $3 means more than that amount in dollars every month (gross). And that’s not mentioning something else, which I suspect is at least in the back of Musk’s mind: how many people who begrudgingly pay the (for argument’s sake) $3 fee will decide it’s worthwhile to spend an extra $5 for Twitter Blue? They’re already going to pay for a service that was once free; why not get the benefits of a Twitter Blue subscription for a few bucks more? Wouldn’t it be nice to edit misspellings or remove a hasty clause from an otherwise socially acceptable tweet? And sometimes, you want to get out some thoughts that are a little more complicated than 280 characters can cover. That’s not even mentioning the video sharing and advertising revenue it makes possible; a platform without YouTube’s stifling restrictions may bring out the burgeoning artist in more Twitter users. So, I’m not thrilled about this, and I selfishly hope it doesn’t happen, but I’m not saying it won’t be beneficial to the company just yet. I do think some serious cost/benefit discussions will happen shortly, though, if they haven’t already.