| I would be surprised if Twitter doesn't already have some kind of behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level users to protect their accounts and do whatever other special things. If Twitter doesn't already do this, then it's dumb, quite frankly, from a business sense due to all the extra labor (in terms of engineers, support, etc) to provide services for these VIPs compared to normal users. Like you said, if these Twitter VIPs are having their cake and eating it too with monetizing Twitter for their own benefit, why wouldn't Twitter ask for a cut. Twitter's already done what even other major social platform has done and become dependent on advertising revenue. If Twitter becomes all paid and charges even $1/mo, that would wipe out a huge amount of "normal" users that are accustomed to paying the price of free, and then that's going to impact the ad revenue because of lesser targeted normal people to advertise to. I think the problem Twitter is going to face is how to balance all the plates they have in the air with realistic expectations. It's the "classic" problem that these platforms want to solve to keep up with investor expectations. So far, there's mostly a bunch of 'little' approaches to this like selling some random digital trinkets or paying for some 'meh' extra features, but these things are like side-dishes that don't reap enough benefits to compensate for appetites of continuous profit expansion. This is sort of like being torn different ways. From one angle, if Twitter "changing the formula too much" makes the platform worse and people leave, then they don't grow and face shareholder backlash. From another angle, if Twitter hits a wall on monetization and can't figure out how to boost their cap, then Twitter becomes an unattractive investment and will just kinda flatline growth. And finally, people could still just find a new thing to go to anyways and if Twitter does not and stays Twitter, people still might get bored and move over to TikTok or Reddit or whatever. Basically, even Twitter shows it's still hard to balance reality with desire with mission. |
They probably drive a ton of engagement, which benefits twitter.