Suddenly we are considering Twitter's mortality after Elon Musk piled debt onto the platform and erratically "managed" it for a fornight. He now wants wanted to charge allcomers $8 per month for more visibility in search and replies, as well as for these users to see half the amount of ads.
There were even reported discussions of putting all of Twitter behind a paywall. With visions of 4chan, advertisers have taken fright at his talk of 'freeing the bird’. Some users appear to be abandoning Twitter for a mostly ad-free, distributed Mastodon.
Can Musk's erstwhile plans succeed? It depends on how you define success. However, it raises an interesting set of questions about the business model of social media. Does something like Twitter have the potential to be a paid service? To what extent are ads a good or bad way to support a global public sphere?
A paid for social network
Free is an unbeatable price. But if Twitter was a paid-for-to-post (but one could still read it for free) service what would happen? Some fraction of users would decide not to pay. Since these non paying users would no longer be part of the network, the network would be of less value to some new fraction of users, who would also not pay. That's basic network economics.
The impact would not be uniform. Some networks of interest might be more vulnerable than others (EconTwitter vs BlackTwitter). If you were to raise prices to cover this loss in revenue this could cause another round of user departures.
It is difficult to predict where the stable equilibrium will lie. But it will be a smaller network than when it was free and ad-supported. The price charged would have a dramatic (non linear) effect on what the equilibrium size will be.
All these considerations are complicated by the fact that less than 20% of Twitter's regular daily users are based in the US. Prices elsewhere must be different to reflect purchase parity (often dramatically so), otherwise one would see a larger drop in users in those locations' networks. (Meta's US and UK users have subsidised users elsewhere, because their advertising markets are so developed.)
If there is differential pricing depending on the country you find yourself in, some users will use VPNs to mask their location to get cheaper access. To counter this, will some content be location specific?
And then there is Apple's payments tax. In the 1st year 30% of revenues of those users that use an iPhone would go to Apple, regardless where these users sign up to premium Twitter.
The bottom line is that Musk's vision of Twitter as a global town square would be affected if it were paid for.
Benefits?
What could the upside be? If ads are not very relevant (and quite frankly Twitter has been bad at targetted advertising) users will not experience this nuisance. In theory at least it will please the vocal if-you-are-not-paying-you-are-the-product-brigade.
Musk will not have to worry about “brand safety”. The non agressive and less risky environments brand advertisers demand. This could allow him to spend less on moderation. Though it’s an open question if a free for all would also see some users leave the platform.
It’s arguable that Twitter’s userbase has skewed male precisely because in the past it was seen as an aggressive and antagonistic space where harassment was rife.