[manningthegoose]

As someone who was an initial skeptic when this was first announced, I really appreciate what twitter is trying to do with Blue, especially around direct payments to publishers. Any step to get the internet off of the ad-based data-harvesting revenue model is ultimately better for almost all parties.

[tootie]

But, it's not direct payment to publishers. It's indirect via twitter. You can pay publishers directly already by buying subscriptions. Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.

This is mostly my hot take just based on the press release, but color me dubious. Local news is struggling nationwide and this doesn't feel like a solution. It feels like silicon valley looking to increase profits for their shareholders to the detriment of the world.

[darth_avocado]

> You can pay publishers directly already by buying subscriptions.

I don't mind paying for news. However, I do mind being on hold for 2 hours on a 1800 number that I had to dig up from some defunct webpage to cancel my subscription.

[slg]

This is already illegal if you are in California and you can call your representatives and tell them to support the Unsubscribe Act to make it illegal nationwide.

House link- https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3953

Senate link - https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/207...

[pc86]

OK but for the ~88% of Americans who don't live in California the point stands, at least today.

[jdeibele]

I've mentioned this before: switch your address to a California one, cancel now that you're a Californian, optionally switch it back to your proper address.

Worked for me with several publications.

[captainredbeard]

Sending physical mail can be effective, too, and can use less of your time in a trade for additional walltime.

[gwbas1c]

> You can pay publishers directly already by buying subscriptions

But that's not how most of us access news. We look at sources like Twitter, Hacker News, Facebook, Google News for links to articles.

Subscribing to a single website doesn't work in this model.

[tootie]

Who is "we"? I look at aggregators but I also subscribe at the source for publications I value.

[rch]

It's difficult to find valuable sources though. I'm currently spending over $100 a month on subscriptions, and and I still feel like my sources are biased and myopic.

[mikojan]

Why wouldn't it work? You simply subscribe to a publisher you are valuing.

[erik_seaberg]

How many different publishers did I visit once or twice this week? Probably a lot, but I’m not sure which, or how much all of them would cost.

Subscription-only articles suffer from the opposite of the network effect. If I pick 1/n publishers to subscribe to, and you pick 1/n, the odds I can read something you tried to share are only 1/n^2. It might help if there were wire services for major topics I care about.

[gwbas1c]

If I subscribed to every publisher I valued, I'd pay more than I pay for Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Disney+ combined!

I think if the music industry can come out with a 1-subscription-fits-most model, I'm sure the journalism industry can figure out how to evenly distribute a modest $5-15 subscription fee.

[chaorace]

It's quite the feat to convince someone to pay for something they already get for free, particularly in the digital space... Aha! The answer has been right under our noses the entire time: we need to sell online media subscriptions as NFTs!

[manningthegoose]

> Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.

Isn't that what they're already doing? Except the payer is the advertiser instead of the platform itself via the subscriber.

[terr-dav]

Professional journalism has always had this problem to a degree; there's always been an advertiser or other funding source you don't want to piss off. Twitter just exacerbates this by rewarding the most sensational, attention-grabbing posts.

[Robotbeat]

Editors writing clickbait headlines have been guilty of this for so, SO long. And it has gotten worse over time, even as the actual articles are increasingly behind paywalls. Complain about headlines which have almost no bearing on anything that could be called truth, and you’ll be accused of not reading the article… as if that’d get the headline-writers off the hook.

[tootie]

If you've noticed a lot more paywalls going up it's because the era of clickbait is actually dying. Serious newsrooms have always hated it and shriveling ad revenue has finally tipped back towards subscriptions being the most viable path to profit. Content farms and their SEO game is far less valuable than it used to be.

[tshaddox]

> Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.

Wouldn't payment integration with Twitter (if executed well) just make it easier for Twitter users to convert to paying the publisher after seeing the publisher's tweet? I don't see how it would increase the incentive for a publisher to post clickbait tweets, except perhaps for publishers whose in-house payment flow is very poorly implemented or nonexistent.

[kooshball]

disagree with this point. I rather have more objective ads driven journalism than subscription "professional journalism". subscription are even more biased and create further silos for mis/information.

[nuker]

> Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.

To what?

[ghawk1ns]

Who said the data-harvesting would stop?

[manningthegoose]

You're right, it probably won't, at least not while it's still printing money for all the corporate entities involved. But it's my understanding that most of the data-harvesting tools in use today were originally created to enhance ad-targeting and drive up CPM. At the very least we can hope products like Blue might put a dent in this incentive structure.

[otrahuevada]

Facebook makes maybe about 30USD a year from any given profile:

> https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a212721...

Being relatively optimistic about Twitter's size, and assuming they're just fantastic at it, Twitter might make what, half of that? So for 3$ a month you need about half of the userbase to be on board for data munging to no longer make sense as a business model.

I do wonder how high that mark is though, every SAAS I've worked with has been pay-to-use from the start, so this is not a metric I'm familiar with.

[contravariant]

What's weird here is that I would estimate it to be very difficult to find a person who generated over 30USD of revenue through ads for anyone other than the people selling the ads.

But maybe my worldview is wrong here, I'm definitely not the right person to estimate Facebook's reach.

[sodality2]

Reminds me of: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

[bookofjoe]

John Wanamaker; https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/wanamaker_h...

[webmaven]

> So for 3$ a month you need about half of the userbase to be on board for data munging to no longer make sense as a business model.

I think you might be assuming that advertising revenue is evenly distributed among users.

[otrahuevada]

Twitter Blue is being offered at 3$

[kevin_thibedeau]

Cable television was supposed to be a direct funded, ad free alternative to broadcast.

[dylan604]

Something about a road being paved with good intentions feels appropriate here.

[vosper]

> At the very least we can hope products like Blue might put a dent in this incentive structure.

I wonder if Twitter Blue customers will be omitted from the data stream that Twitter is selling to corporations and governments?

[dralley]

As someone who used and appreciated Scroll (now Twitter Blue) for the same reasons, I'm pissed that they shut down the standalone service and locked it behind Twitter accounts.

Canceled my subscription after that email went out. It's a shame. Kinda wish Mozilla had acquired it instead, although they don't have the leverage to promote it like Twitter does.

[londons_explore]

Unfortunately, I suspect $2.99 per month isn't sufficient to make these publishers whole with what they would have earned from the same users.

Only a small fraction of twitter users will sign up, and the overlap with the kind of users likely to spend money on advertisers products will be big.

I suspect this is true at nearly any price point. Even if it cost $50 per month, the tiny fraction of users who did sign up would be worth more than $50 in monthly ad revenue, since those are the kind of people who will subscribe to other high value services.

[smugglerFlynn]

I think it depends on what kind of product Twitter Blue would become. Getting all the publishers in one app, and getting “news reading experience” designed right, may attract users who were not paying anything to publishers before.

I just wonder if getting into channel business, instead of building more open of a platform where publishers control the prices themselves, was the right move for Twitter. Time will tell.

[giga_chad]

Why would I pay publishers?