[emeerson]

Both the 5c/per ad and user-willingness-to-pay estimates are way optimistic. Ads you see probably has a CPM (cost per milleu, or thousand) of at $5 on the upper end and I'm guessing average around $1 CPM, which would be .5c and .1c respectively.

Facebook's per-user revenue in the US as of Q4 2015 was around $11/yr (source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-average-revenue-per-...) although its grown by 50% yoy.

Chances are if FB / Twitter / Instagram had high confidence that could monetize their product with a subscription model averaging even $10/user a year I think they wouldn't hesitate to implement such a model.

[criddell]

Yeah, I tried to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt. It's kind of depressing to me that they are willing to make their product shittier to earn a fraction of a penny.

I think comparisons with Facebook are a big part of Twitter's problem. They aren't Facebook, never will be, and shouldn't try to be. If they use Facebook numbers as a benchmark, then they are totally screwed.