[OldTimeCoffee]

> Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported.

I don't think that's true, because they would charge for access and have ads. These are fairly rare.

>Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they weren’t, I’d pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye.

Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads.

>plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model

That's not really true, you have massive consolation because their business model is nonviable any other way.

[TheTrotters]

> Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads.

They make money from ads… which people see when they use search.

Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t pay a lot for those services if they were paywalled.

Of course if, say, Google charged for search, users could defect to Bing.

But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.

EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. And that’s only a different (presumably better for the buyers) front end, not the core service.

[OldTimeCoffee]

> Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network.

This logic is backwards. Having a large userbase allows them to sell ads in the first place to the user base that won't pay for the service in the first place.

Pretty much every large tech website has a building phase where they make no money and sell no ads while building a user base large enough to start selling ads. None of the large web companies today have charged to use their product and at this point it's unlikely they could.

>But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.

Which is a terrible argument written by someone who doesn't understand the market. It's like saying no one will move away from AIM in 1999. Yes, people will. There are lots of historical examples, including the Digg to Reddit exodus. Even Facebook itself has had the problem of users migrating away from Facebook. Facebook has literally bought companies where users have migrated to (Instagram/WhatsApp).

> EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps.

Virtually none. No one was paying for TweetDeck and now it's part of Twitter. Consumers aren't using HootSuite or Sprout Social, they target businesses. Going down the Android list most Twitter apps are free, the few that cost anything have small install bases (Fenix 2 <100k purchases, Talon for Twitter is ~ 100k purchases). Twitter has an daily active users of over 300 million users. So maybe 0.1% are willing to pay a one time fee for a client? I don't think Twitter can do much with that.

Virtually no one,on a consumer level, is willing to pay for a messaging service. WhatsApp (one-to-one) is free, Facebook is free (broadcast), Instagram is free, Snapchat is free, YouTube is free, TikTok is free, Skype is free, Zoom is free (to individuals), Google Chat is free, SMS/MMS/RCS usage is free (depending on how you look at the service cost).

On a business level you can extract payments (think Slack), but on a consumer level, messaging has no value people are will to pay (so it's ad supported instead).

[jimmySixDOF]

What I don't fully subscribe to here is the statement on Stratechery that:

>and given that some of Twitter’s most hard core users use third-party Twitter clients, and thus aren’t monetizable, the revenue per addicted daily active user is even lower

I don't see how this must be true going forward, either by having a standard cost for open access to the API or through inclusion of twitter ads and metrics in the endpoint streams.

As pointed out they are just in the middle of re-opening the API developer ecosystem & it would be a shame to have this reversed by activist investors for the second time.