[tmellon2]

Does someone have a better sense of economics of charging $8/Month ?

At best assuming approximately the 420,000 [see Ref.1] folks currently on twitter will pay $8/Month - which gives about $40 Million in annual revenue.

Will the economics work if the advertisers stay out ?

Also, why charge $8 in the first place if the number is too low ( < $40 Million), given as Mr.Musk puts it, twitter is losing $4 Million a day !

Source : [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/28633/verified-users-on-tw

[mrtksn]

I think we can't really have a guesstimate without knowing the rest of the story because the rest of the story is about what you get by paying $8.

The blue tick as an ornament definitely doesn't bring 8USD of value but it can bring value as something else and IMHO that value would be much higher if they keep identity verification intact and much less if anyone can buy it.

If it was "account maintenance fee" I suspect brands and politicians would have paid much more than the $8.

If it is going to be anyone who pays gets in, then for example a politician with a few millions of backing can have hundreds of thousands paid accounts to run their campaign. There is already reporting about countries like Russia and Turkey running large scale social media operation which probably cost much more than $8 per account and Turkey's Erdogan already expressed interest in Twitter's new paid blue tick[0] and said it would talk with Musk for localised pricing.

But in this case, the Twitter becomes much less interesting for the regular people and they might reduce or even stop using the service if all they see is paid propaganda.

I would have paid monthly subscription fee just to use the site if the content was spam and bot free but that's not happening. It looks like the best Musk can do is to optimize monetisation up to a point that the site doesn't die, he needs to strike a point where the content is good enough to gather an audience when charging the content creators that want to do something to the audience(sell them something, convince them in something) because the model he seems to be creating is essentially native advertising for monthly fee.

[0] https://onedio.com/haber/erdogan-mavi-tik-ucreti-icin-elon-m...

[fabian2k]

As far as I understand Twitter had a paid option for $5 before, the change now is that they're raising the price to $8 and more importantly they are coupling this to the blue verified mark. But the reports also indicate that there won't be any verification of identity anymore, which to me sounds like it would entirely defeat the purpose of the thing. If random scammers can just buy blue checkmarks they will very quickly lose their meaning, and why would you pay for them then?

[minraws]

Linking the account to a credit card/debit card should be some sort of a proof or way to track someone as well no.? seems like they just make it more intrinsic, which is good and bad. not sure how I should take it as.

Don't care much about twitter either way.

[treffer]

I think there is more to it.... They will probably require a non-anonymous credit card and if things line up you are verified.

So it is probably +$8/month -75% of the cost of that feature.

"Pull out your credit card and pay" is a nice anti-spam feature and verification is a bank duty anyway. So it is pretty likely that any abuse can be pushed down to the person doing the impersonation.

Plus it is most valuable to brands (even personal brands), so $8/month isn't much.

[luckylion]

> "Pull out your credit card and pay" is a nice anti-spam feature and verification is a bank duty anyway

And if you wanted to pivot into also handling payments, you'd now have a payment method to settle with your customer, massively removing onboarding friction into the payment system.

[homeland221]

Advertisers now are in "victim of blackmail" position. Think about it, Volkswagen tweet handle being auction off to "anyone" with free reign to post using "Volkswagen" name worldwide. They have reach the Yelp position (even bigger) and more entrenched. There way more celebraties and companies than restaurants. Nearly every westernized governments (and their ministries and agencies) use tweeters to disseminate information.You are looking at easily 1B per month simply from this kind of susbcription. 8 dollar might just be the retail pricing. There is always the premium-enterprise special pricing.

[kondro]

I think he expects a large portion of the other 300m+ accounts to pay $8 too.

[sofixa]

Didn't he himself claim a lot of them are bots?

[shapefrog]

95% of them are bots, that leaves only 15mil accounts.

If they all sign up, they will make an extra $1.4 bil a year, which would certainly help. But they will be getting half as many ads, so if you halve the advertising revenue that is losing $2.5 bil a year - net net a reduction of twitter revenue of $0.9bil

[dmak]

That depends. There might be a premium for advertisers to pay to target the half of ads that blue users can see.