Scholarship table
But would you pay a premium (say $10 a month) to be able to follow any verified accounts? That would include not just people, but news organizations, etc.
No, I'm not paying $10 a month to see a link to an article that is already behind a paywall. I've considered unfollowing the news outlets that paywall all of their articles.
Thanks for the info.I always thought Twitter was awful. For once, I'm on the right side of history!
I've considered unfollowing the news outlets that paywall all of their articles.
Google has free search and paid search. It’s not all free. Charging a fee to post your content to reach millions is a commercial bargain, will remove many fake accounts (and multiple accounts…trolls will need an identifiable form of payment), and will improve content and targeting. Stephen King cannot afford $8 per month to pump his books and movies? Oh, the woe and injustice.
Question about twitter: Do content creators get paid by Twitter, like on other platforms?(I know twitter people can get endorsements, get paid by 3rd parties.)
Obviously King can afford $8/mo. He never claimed otherwise. He's not really using Twitter to promote his books and movies. On the one hand, he's one of a handful of authors who have no need of *any* publicity. His very existence is going to sell through books at a rate that 99.999% of authors would kill to achieve. BUT if he wanted to use Twitter to do so, he has the same option as all of Twitter's *customers* have, which is to purchase ads promoting his books and movies.What King is aptly pointing out is that his contributions to the website, along with everyone else who logs in and tweets, is creating the traffic which Twitter turns around and sells to its customers--the advertisers. He's the product being sold and Musk wants to charge him to continue creating that product? That's what he's objecting to.And, as was pointed out in the WSJ article quoted below, this whole endeavor is going to be a lot of sound and fury to contribute virtually nothing to Twitter's topline. It's the wild veering of a poster put in charge of a company with no guardrails. Musk just lurching from shower thought to ambien-fueled-fugue-musing and back again in the desperate hope that he can drive enough increase in cash flow to service the insane debt load he took on.
Outrageous when businesses ask you to pay for some of their products.
Brother Hards:If you don't pay for it, how do you expect someone to produce it?One of the major problems with news organizations of all stripes has been the transition from paper or electronic broadcast to digital transmission over the internet. Too many readers think the content should be "free" to them. That's fine if the outlet can generate enough revenue from ad placements to make the site work. Sadly, advertisers too have found new and better vehicles to communicate their wares than traditional news organizations.I'll grant you the quality of journalism has declined in recent years and news organizations frequently find themselves competing against new forms of journalism, often advocacy journalism from organizations promoting a cause or causes. Nonetheless, if you want objective journalism, you have to pay for it one way or another.The Wall Street Journal's content is almost completely behind a paywall and it remains one of our nation's most successful publications.
The world could use a lot less "Content Creators"
I mean, if you want to misrepresent what I said, go nuts. I pay for some news sites, but I weigh the value of each.
I mean, you literally wrote that you consider unfollowing sites because they have a paywall, no other reason. Not sure how that was misrepresented, but OK.
What Musk is trying to do is improve and verify the quality of that traffic, while monetizing the high dollar audience. It's a Good-Better-Best model that every successful SaaS network has in different forms. The the cost of free is no more.As to King, he is being a baby and two faced if he denies he is not on Twitter for self-promotion. Let's be real.
He never said that it was outrageous that they are making people pay for content. Just that he won't follow them on Twitter because he doesn't find their content worth the cost.
If all it takes to "verify" traffic is the payment of a subscription fee, then my bet is that the "value" of a verification tick will plummet because anyone (scam artists included) will have access to the thing for $8.Besides, this it's NONSENSE for him to view this lever of monetization as worth pursuing. There are aprx 400k verified twitter users. At $8/mo, that's $38.4M/yr. at $20/mo that's $96M/yr. Twitter's topline was $5B. Wtf is all this smoke worth (maybe) increasing your topline by .07%?Regardless, I think the practical effect of this pricing change is that anyone who does not *need* "verification" will simply drop it. The value that verification provided was not to the holders of the checkmarks, but to the other users of the site so they didn't get dunked on by parody accounts or scam artists. For that reason I'm guessing brands and journalists will maintain their checks, but every marginal public figure who is big enough to get verified but doesn't really need the checkmark will drop it. Stephen King, for example, derives no particular value from having the checkmark compared to not having it.If he's trying to create GBB pricing tiers and is applying that to the users of the site, he's, again, conflating users with customers. Social media account holders are the product, not the customers. Charging people to consume their feeds is going to decimate his DAU numbers, which is the only thing he's able to sell for any amount of money that matters.
But ... he didn't write this. He wrote:"I've considered unfollowing the news outlets that paywall all of their articles." Nothing about the value of their content, etc. (He added that later). Just the mere presence of a paywall is enough.Which, by the way, is totally fine. I just find it a weird kind of entitlement that people are surprised/unhappy when they're asked to pay for the product of others' labor.
But ... he didn't write this. He wrote:"I've considered unfollowing the news outlets that paywall all of their articles." Nothing about the value of their content, etc. (He added that later). Just the mere presence of a paywall is enough.
But it was 100% your conclusion that because I considered unfollowing those sites that I think they should all be free. Which is obviously not the case. That was your conclusion that you jumped to. But you just wanted to dunk, I get it.
It was pretty clear what he was implying. Sorry that you have to be so pedantic about everything.