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by HillRat 1304 days ago
As advertisers are saying, what Twitter really had going for it wasn't that it was a great place to advertise so much as it was a very engaged ad sales team that leveraged their agency and advertiser relations for all they were worth. Gutting ad sales (and mocking the concept of brand safety) is Musk -- whether he realizes it or not -- burning the advertising bridges behind him and forcing him to commit entirely to this idea of Twitter being a subscription-funded service. Now, Riedy's a long-timer who's held senior positions in both US and EMEA ad sales, so there's what normally would be considered a steady hand at the tiller, but not clear to me if he can keep the ship afloat under such a mercurial owner.
1 comments

The subscription thing won’t work either.

Discord is the closest thing to a successful subscription only social media business. Compare what Nitro offers to Twitter Blue.

Twitter Blue is like buying the “I am rich” app while Discord Nitro solves actual customer pain points.

Discord has about 10% of their active users paying for Nitro by my calculation based on available information. Twitter getting anywhere close to that level is not likely. Discord has been building their service around paid features for years.

Luckily, Twitter has a large and skilled engineering team capable of quickly rolling out valuable new features to entirely change their business model!

(Sidenote: has anyone ever heard of a generally stable ~10 year IPOed tech company pivoting so drastically? It’s insane)