Under increasing pressure from investors to get out of its slow growth, it seems Twitter is taking seriously the possibility of offering a subscription product in order to create a new revenue stream. Advertising will continue to be the main social media product for the foreseeable future, but according to Bloomberg, we could receive an update on our subscription plans as soon as the most recent Twitter calls are on Tuesday.
Twitter gains last quarter exceeded expectations, but its new user numbers disappointed on Wall Street and there is a growing perception that the platform could be reaching a ceiling with its audience. This means that it is time, once again, to think of new ways to draw blood from this stone. Bloomberg sources claim that several Twitter teams compete to develop subscription options with features like tip and / or charge a fee for TweetDeck that wants to be the most likely option for the launch.
The idea of escaping a fee from tips users send to their favorite influencers has already been successful on Twitch and other services, so trying it on Twitter seems relatively painless. The idea of charging a subscription fee for some sort of enhanced version of TweetDeck would be more of a gamble, but it could work as a test of advanced users ’tolerance of a payment model.
New York University professor Scott Galloway turned into a punching bag last week when he he tried to explain the explosion of GameStop actions as a product of funny guys who don’t have enough sex. But Galloway’s galaxy-brain take eclipsed a rather compelling article for which he wrote New York Magazine who argues that Twitter leaves the money of influence on the table. The professor, who is a disgruntled investor on Twitter, sees a future in which Twitter charges users a monthly fee when they exceed a certain number of followers. The fee would cover access to improved analysis tools. According to Galloway’s calculation, Twitter only needs 15% of its user base to cough up $ 10 a month to completely replace its advertising revenue.
But the direct replacement of advertising revenue does not seem to be the important thing for the company. In a statement sent to Gizmodo, Bruce Falck, head of revenue revenue at Twitter, said the main goal is to increase “revenue sustainability” and that the company will experiment with non-advertising-based revenue in 2021. “These they can include subscriptions and other approaches that will give people and businesses of all sizes on Twitter access to unique features and enhanced opportunities for content creation, discovery and interaction, ”Falck said, noting that the team doesn’t expect none of these experiments will produce “any significant income” next year.
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A subscription version of TweetDeck could give Twitter some indication of the level of interest companies and influencers would have in a full tweet payment model. If the company’s top users cough up some money to get an ad-free experience with better organizational options and stronger analysis, they might be willing to do it all.
According to Bloomberg, other table revenue options include charging for: ad-free feeds, higher-quality video uploads, verification, and custom profile appearance. These options seem quite minor separately, but can be appealing if included in a package.
Perhaps the most radical idea presented is an option for popular users to provide a separate feed of exclusive content for subscribers. Twitter could make a small subscription reduction and should never ask users for money directly. But that could lead to long-term problems, as the company’s top users put their best tweets behind pay walls instead of feeding the wider network.
Twitter has long launched ideas like this, and while investors watch the stock price of Facebook with envy, the fact that Twitter has barely changed is one of the things that makes it unique. We may get some amazing announcements during tomorrow’s earnings call, but we don’t expect Jack Dorsey to come out of his comfort zone soon.