Twitter Blue is now available in the US and NZ
blog.twitter.comAs someone who was an initial skeptic when this was first announced, I really appreciate what twitter is trying to do with Blue, especially around direct payments to publishers. Any step to get the internet off of the ad-based data-harvesting revenue model is ultimately better for almost all parties.
But, it's not direct payment to publishers. It's indirect via twitter. You can pay publishers directly already by buying subscriptions. Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.
This is mostly my hot take just based on the press release, but color me dubious. Local news is struggling nationwide and this doesn't feel like a solution. It feels like silicon valley looking to increase profits for their shareholders to the detriment of the world.
> You can pay publishers directly already by buying subscriptions.
I don't mind paying for news. However, I do mind being on hold for 2 hours on a 1800 number that I had to dig up from some defunct webpage to cancel my subscription.
This is already illegal if you are in California and you can call your representatives and tell them to support the Unsubscribe Act to make it illegal nationwide.
House link- https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3953
Senate link - https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/207...
OK but for the ~88% of Americans who don't live in California the point stands, at least today.
I've mentioned this before: switch your address to a California one, cancel now that you're a Californian, optionally switch it back to your proper address.
Worked for me with several publications.
Sending physical mail can be effective, too, and can use less of your time in a trade for additional walltime.
> You can pay publishers directly already by buying subscriptions
But that's not how most of us access news. We look at sources like Twitter, Hacker News, Facebook, Google News for links to articles.
Subscribing to a single website doesn't work in this model.
Who is "we"? I look at aggregators but I also subscribe at the source for publications I value.
It's difficult to find valuable sources though. I'm currently spending over $100 a month on subscriptions, and and I still feel like my sources are biased and myopic.
Why wouldn't it work? You simply subscribe to a publisher you are valuing.
How many different publishers did I visit once or twice this week? Probably a lot, but I’m not sure which, or how much all of them would cost.
Subscription-only articles suffer from the opposite of the network effect. If I pick 1/n publishers to subscribe to, and you pick 1/n, the odds I can read something you tried to share are only 1/n^2. It might help if there were wire services for major topics I care about.
If I subscribed to every publisher I valued, I'd pay more than I pay for Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Disney+ combined!
I think if the music industry can come out with a 1-subscription-fits-most model, I'm sure the journalism industry can figure out how to evenly distribute a modest $5-15 subscription fee.
It's quite the feat to convince someone to pay for something they already get for free, particularly in the digital space... Aha! The answer has been right under our noses the entire time: we need to sell online media subscriptions as NFTs!
> Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.
Isn't that what they're already doing? Except the payer is the advertiser instead of the platform itself via the subscriber.
Professional journalism has always had this problem to a degree; there's always been an advertiser or other funding source you don't want to piss off. Twitter just exacerbates this by rewarding the most sensational, attention-grabbing posts.
Editors writing clickbait headlines have been guilty of this for so, SO long. And it has gotten worse over time, even as the actual articles are increasingly behind paywalls. Complain about headlines which have almost no bearing on anything that could be called truth, and you’ll be accused of not reading the article… as if that’d get the headline-writers off the hook.
If you've noticed a lot more paywalls going up it's because the era of clickbait is actually dying. Serious newsrooms have always hated it and shriveling ad revenue has finally tipped back towards subscriptions being the most viable path to profit. Content farms and their SEO game is far less valuable than it used to be.
> Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.
Wouldn't payment integration with Twitter (if executed well) just make it easier for Twitter users to convert to paying the publisher after seeing the publisher's tweet? I don't see how it would increase the incentive for a publisher to post clickbait tweets, except perhaps for publishers whose in-house payment flow is very poorly implemented or nonexistent.
disagree with this point. I rather have more objective ads driven journalism than subscription "professional journalism". subscription are even more biased and create further silos for mis/information.
> Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.
To what?
Who said the data-harvesting would stop?
You're right, it probably won't, at least not while it's still printing money for all the corporate entities involved. But it's my understanding that most of the data-harvesting tools in use today were originally created to enhance ad-targeting and drive up CPM. At the very least we can hope products like Blue might put a dent in this incentive structure.
Facebook makes maybe about 30USD a year from any given profile:
> https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a212721...
Being relatively optimistic about Twitter's size, and assuming they're just fantastic at it, Twitter might make what, half of that? So for 3$ a month you need about half of the userbase to be on board for data munging to no longer make sense as a business model.
I do wonder how high that mark is though, every SAAS I've worked with has been pay-to-use from the start, so this is not a metric I'm familiar with.
What's weird here is that I would estimate it to be very difficult to find a person who generated over 30USD of revenue through ads for anyone other than the people selling the ads.
But maybe my worldview is wrong here, I'm definitely not the right person to estimate Facebook's reach.
Reminds me of: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
John Wanamaker; https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/wanamaker_h...
> So for 3$ a month you need about half of the userbase to be on board for data munging to no longer make sense as a business model.
I think you might be assuming that advertising revenue is evenly distributed among users.
Twitter Blue is being offered at 3$
Cable television was supposed to be a direct funded, ad free alternative to broadcast.
Something about a road being paved with good intentions feels appropriate here.
> At the very least we can hope products like Blue might put a dent in this incentive structure.
I wonder if Twitter Blue customers will be omitted from the data stream that Twitter is selling to corporations and governments?
As someone who used and appreciated Scroll (now Twitter Blue) for the same reasons, I'm pissed that they shut down the standalone service and locked it behind Twitter accounts.
Canceled my subscription after that email went out. It's a shame. Kinda wish Mozilla had acquired it instead, although they don't have the leverage to promote it like Twitter does.
Unfortunately, I suspect $2.99 per month isn't sufficient to make these publishers whole with what they would have earned from the same users.
Only a small fraction of twitter users will sign up, and the overlap with the kind of users likely to spend money on advertisers products will be big.
I suspect this is true at nearly any price point. Even if it cost $50 per month, the tiny fraction of users who did sign up would be worth more than $50 in monthly ad revenue, since those are the kind of people who will subscribe to other high value services.
I think it depends on what kind of product Twitter Blue would become. Getting all the publishers in one app, and getting “news reading experience” designed right, may attract users who were not paying anything to publishers before.
I just wonder if getting into channel business, instead of building more open of a platform where publishers control the prices themselves, was the right move for Twitter. Time will tell.
Why would I pay publishers?
This seems eerily similar to what people feared could happen to the web in the absence of net neutrality, only with the role of the ISP this time replaced by a platform content referrer. A multi-tiered web: premium lanes for corporate sponsors with money changing hands.
>"On iOS and desktop, Twitter Blue members will enjoy a fast-loading, ad-free reading experience when they visit many of their favorite news sites available in the US from Twitter, such as The Washington Post, L.A. Times, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, Reuters, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, Insider and The Hollywood Reporter."
I don't think the fear with network neutrality was ever the idea of a content aggregator buying content on behalf of a subscriber, was it?
My understanding of the argument with network neutrality was that the combination of the network provider as a natural monopoly and the network provider's ability to render content inaccessible would result in a fragmented Internet - you can only run so many wires to a house, and if Provider B cut off Content A, you might not get Content A anymore.
I don't see how this is the same thing.
It's qualitatively different, but there's some similarities in appearances. The end-user viewpoint, if this trend grows, is that the majority of the internet could present as a set of subscription packages -- the more you buy, the more of the internet you can access, and at higher service levels. Because of these new financial incentives, previously open, ad-supported websites will shift to becoming closed, subscription services: as the friction for end-users to subscribe to things goes down (because of federation*), this becomes more common. The open web goes dark. Conversely, since this is also an income source for the platforms/referrers, they'll want to boost referrals to partnering companies higher than non-partners -- tiered service. It's true this isn't the hard severity of an ISP throttling, or cutting off, non-partnering websites; but it's a soft analogue of it.
*(This friction can be zero. You needn't take any positive action to subscribe to the Nth website; rather the platforms you subscribe to abstract that away for you, as they monitor all your clicks and visits, and handle the income-splitting transparently behind the curtains. Basically the Spotify model, for the open WWW).
> Conversely, since this is also an income source for the platforms/referrers
But in this scenario it's not. The platform is funneling part of it's revenue to the partners. There could be less direct incentives for boosting the partners (subscribers feel like they're getting more value when articles come from an ad-free partner, etc...)
Maybe they just mean that when you don't load all the ads, things can actually load pretty fast? 0:-)
Yes, they're providing different quality experiences, but not actually throttling bits like in the net neutrality scenario.
How is this any different from any other sort of bundling done by Apple news or Google news?
You're free to obtain a subscription to any of those media companies personally and simply follow the link without Twitter Blue.
Most people likely aren't going to want to manage multiple subscriptions and will instead opt to not read the article. At least with Twitter Blue the user doesn't have to worry about multiple subscriptions and can simply read the story when they want to.
Additionally, they now have a notification that indicates that they won't immediately hit a paywall when they click on the link.
Ultimately, media companies need to be compensated, and this doesn't seem to be disadvantaging anyone...
Yeah my first thought re: news/scroll was that it sounds exactly like Apple News.
Not bad, Twitter product design team. They managed to take essential UX improvements and stick it behind a paid subscription.
I first learned this technique from product managers in F2P games. If players are asking for a QoL improvement, make it a consumable item and sell it.
Cheeky. Charging for a send tweet delay, so you have time to "undo" it.
Is the WaPo subscription full or is it more like Apple News where you only get access to a couple headline articles and have to pay even more beyond news+ for full access?
just looked it shows me $5.99 a month for wapo add on.
If so might be worth it for me even though I don't use twitter. The rest I think are mostly available on news+
Full bloomberg on apple news is $34.99 a month, though they do have more free articles than WaPo it seems and at least I can understand the value and niche of financial news not really worth reading about unless you're in finance.
I don't think NyTimes is even an option anymore. They make enough profit on their walled garden seems they won't ever participate in this stuff again.
The Apple News subscription I already pay for seems to be more for magazines. It used to have everything.
Yes, news backed off from Apple News because they want to track users more than Apple News allows, basically.
Plus they want to be more in control what gets shown.
If you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can get a full WaPo subscription for $3.99/month.
It works great for me on my Mac, less so on my iPad when following links in Twitter. The Twitter browser view doesn't seem able to handle logging into Amazon, then reporting success to WaPo so I can read the article. I think it works OK if I remember to open the link in Safari.
I just signed up not because I'm particularly interested in the Twitter Blue features, but because I believe in paying for things I use. I also want Twitter (and other companies) to start reducing their dependency on advertising dollars, which come with a lot of perverse incentives.
If people are looking for in on the web client, it's in the left menu under "More".l
>Twitter (and other companies) to start reducing their dependency on advertising dollars
Yeah, except Twitter Blue does do that at all. They are just double dipping. You still get just as many ads as before.
No, that's not quite correct. If we measure dependency as the proportion of income coming from something, then this still reduces dependency, albeit not as much as I'd like.
More importantly, this is going to introduce a whole new kind of thinking to people who work on the consumer side of Twitter. Previously, impact on ad revenue was the only financial metric they'd have to think about. That makes many optimization questions appear simple. Introducing other kinds of revenue complicates the calculus, allowing better decisions to emerge.
I'm glad to support independent journalism while gaining ad-free access to quality content on a platform I frequent.
Ideally you'd also get ad-free access to Twitter itself, which I would certainly consider paying for. Considering the annual per-user revenue is ~ 12USD [1], this seems like something that would be financially interesting to Twitter.
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/forecast-of-the-day%3A-twitt...
The average across all users is $12, but I suspect the average over people willing to pay for Blue is likely higher than that.
It's can be a Catch-22 in some cases. The same people most willing to pay to opt-out are the ones most coveted by advertisers.
Some how I don't think the people that want to pay to get rid of ads are the ones clicking on them.
Anecdotally someone I am close to doesn't seem to mind ads and regularly buys products from them, I block ads and rarely ever buy products from them. I'd pay for not being served ads in the first place
It's not necessarily about clicking the ad, it's also about brand awareness and the subconscious effect of having seen it.
In the back of your head when you see the product the next time, you might think to yourself "I've seen this somewhere before... it's probably reputable." Or when you're in need of something, that brand's product might pop into your head sooner as something to assess.
Anecdotally, I click ads and buy things from them all the time and I have all ad free subscriptions: YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, WSJ, Economist. Lots of stuff. Instagram doesn’t have an ad free thing but I would have paid for it in the past. Not any more though.
For some users this might be true, but not for everyone- whether the advertisers realize it or not. I refuse to buy anything from an ad. If I want to buy a widget and happen to see an ad in the search results for the widget, I'll then refuse to buy the widget because I saw an ad for it. I block every promoted tweet, and enable as much ad blocking as I possible can on all of my devices. I am probably worth a negative amount to advertisers because seeing their ads actively makes me disinclined to buy the product.
On the other hand, I realize that services cost money to build and maintain, and if the subscription came with ad-free (and data-mining free! "ad-free - same great ad-tech data-mining flavor" doesn't count) I would definitely subscribe.
That's worldwide. Their revenue per US user from ads is $4/month. Selling an ad-free subscription for $3/month can't work for them just from those numbers, and it gets worse when you consider that Apple will be taking 30% of the latter but not the former.
You can subscribe outside of the App Store, and I’d likely pay more than $4 a month to see only tweets, without ads. The only thing holding me back from paying for something like TweetBot is that Twitter has intentionally hobbled notifications for third-party apps.
It can work it just wouldn't be profit maximizing in the short term
Per international user is extremely misleading. Ad costs are wildly different based on geographic area, with the US being far higher.
FB, for example, pulls 4-5x the ARPU for US users compared with international. I'd expect twitter to have a similar pattern (though it depends on what 'international' means: Europe is only half the US).
The other issue with this is that the most engaged twitter users are going be the likeliest to sign up for a paid twitter service. These are also going to be the people pulling the average up.
Is this not covering promoted tweets? That's what I'd like to pay to not see.
Nope, it just provides access to articles without ads. Certainly has its uses if you use Twitter as a news aggregator, but it’s not that useful for me.
I love engaging with brands!
- Doesn't remove ads on Twitter itself
- Is not compatible with any news paywalls (they just strip ads out of already free-to-access articles)
- Edit Tweet isn't Edit Tweet. It's an option to delay your tweets by 60 seconds. After that, you cannot Edit Tweet. "Slow Tweet" is more accurate but probably less marketable.
Even if I were still using Twitter, and even though I support journalism when I can (paywalls for a few sites, etc.), I still wouldn't pay $3 for this.
I think Twitter has a lot of work left to do on their business model. This move, IMO, is at least 5 years too late (if not 8-10). Considering Twitter has been unprofitable for most of its life, including in 2020[0], it's only now that they're thinking about alternatives to their ad network.
0. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/29/twitter-twtr-earnings-q1-202...
I would pay this to kill the promoted tweets. I know it sounds super tin-foil hat but in the days or weeks leading up to Twitter's earnings reports the promoted tweets are absolutely out of control. This year I took screenshots of my feed where out of 14 tweets 10 were promoted!
Yeah I hate the promoted tweets, I just try to block them all... hoping that one day I will have blocked them all.
Can they let us pay to remove all sponsored tweets? That's all I want. I'd gladly pay $10/mo.
YouTube Red is the best product experience, and it's something I would pay to have elsewhere.
I hate ads. I never buy products from ads. They just distract me.
I'd pay $1000/yr for a completely ad-free Google. (No search result ads, no AMP, no "McDonalds" in Google Maps, ...)
Ad-free twitter doesn't seem like good value to me, but a completely ad-free Google sounds like a winner. I'm slightly terrified to hear what my net value to advertisers is to defray that lost profit for goog.
Never? Or never actively. i.e. do you unknowingly buy a product at a later date because you at one point saw an ad for it.
The "unknowingly" caveat makes that one a bit difficult to answer.
The unknowing aspect is why I would also be willing to pay quite a bit to have no ads.
Past related threads:
Twitter confirms Twitter Blue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27316115 - May 2021 (722 comments)
Twitter's subscription service might cost $3 per month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27168200 - May 2021 (66 comments)
This came from an acquisition of scroll, which used to allow browsing partner websites without ads. Twitter Blue seems to require that we visit those sites from a tweet, which is a degraded functionality
I pay for YouTube Premium and spend a lot more time on Twitter. I’d pay the same for ad free Twitter.
As soon as Twitter Blue comes to the UK I’d pay for it even without it being totally ad free (while complaining about that). Between Tweetbot and comprehensive ad blocking I never see ads anyway and I’m happy to pay for something I get that much value from.
Before anyone else wastes their money on this: it doesn't make Twitter ad-free.
You want me to pay to join the toxic cesspool?
You can join for free and just pay to reduce the toxicity levels slightly.
I'd find it funny to pay and be cancelled off the toxic cesspool
They want you to pay to join the toxic cesspool.
Yes, you're very cool.
I have been an elite troll since the original doom deathmatch days. I have a true skillset in the arts. Twitter Blue is going to require some serious passive trolling but I have just taken the challenge. If I get banned after paying then I'll be the one that is foaming at the mouth with rage!
This idea would probably be a headache to implement, but has any service tried something like charging $1/$x for specific features? Feels like Twitter would be the prime candidate.
Ad-free article access could be $1.
"""Editing""" tweets could be $1.
Ad-free Twitter could be $4-5 (as that's what Twitter makes per US user per month via ads).
Etc.
IMO Patreon has already broken through the mental mode of "sign up for multiple sub-$5 things and have a single bill at the end of the month."
Any big services out there doing a-la-carte premium features?
strava (exercise tracking app) was doing it for a while, they had safety/training/metrics premium bundles each centered around a single standout feature at somewhere between $1 and $2 each, but have since gone back to a single premium tier.
I signed up for it, and immediately cancelled. The ability to undo tweets is a bit of an annoyance after a while, and none of the features really justify the $3/mo price tag for me. If they charged me $3/mo to make my feed ad free, that would have been worth it. This...not so much.
You can just use uBlock Origin and use mobile Twitter as a pinned app to block ads. That works for me.
... and still no edit feature.
This might seem like a tweet soundbite,but it goes to the root of the problem - twitter develops its features in a vacuum and actively refuses to listen to its users.
I'd also argue that they picked a horrible price point - it's too expensive for most twitter users, and too cheap for the ones willing to pay. The demographic of people willing to pay for twitter is not extremely price sensitive, and going for a lower price point will only insignificantly expand it. Going for a higher price point with more value add (remove "promoted tweets" garbage) would be significantly more appealing.
I'm very shocked that paying for twitter like this does not automatically get you verified.
Is this not just listed as a feature? To be honest, I would pay 4.99 a month to get that blue check mark
The Washington Post, L.A. Times, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, Reuters, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, Insider and The Hollywood Reporter.
Seems like a good way to push a ideological/political agenda, too.
their TA primarily uses Twitter
The amount of propagandists on Twitter is mindblowing. They removed Trump but they have people like Chen Weihua, some actual Taliban recruiting accounts, the BJP IT Cell, tankies (who support DPRK/CPC or unironically think communism is better)
I really want to like Twitter Blue. I'm having a hard time deciding if I'm cynical, or if it's Twitter product people being cynical:
The changes we are paying for are client-side features only! There's no change to twitter.
For example, you can't edit a tweet, you can only delay sending the tweet for a few seconds while you stare at the tweet!
I find it quite astonishing that Twitter is gating UX improvements like Undo/Edit and Reader view behind a paywall — both are problems of their own doing!
- Undo/Edit is just basic functionality being sold for money.
- Reader View wouldn't be necessary if twitter threads weren't hot garbage to begin with.
I really don't mind paying for a good product, and overall I like twitter the most out of all the other big social sites. However, what I've been seeing for years now is that they refuse to build the best product possible for most of their users, and they would rather stagnate than improve it "for free".
Does it also makes my likes private, and stop showing me suggested profiles, other people's likes, etc?
No you need to get Twitter Blue for Enterprise for that
This is actually something that seems pretty useful to me, and it's not outrageously priced. Good job.
I'd love to pay handsomely to remove ads from my Twitter feed, but Twitter Blue only remove ads from _other_ websites? please Twitter folks if you see this :pray:
I'm not sure who this is for. The features don't interest me much, and I use Twitter quite a bit (though mostly not to tweet things myself).
Some profit taking there - US$2.99 is not NZ$4.49 more like $4.20 - it's not like it costs extra money to NOT ship ads across the Pacific
Just what the world needs, people Twittering harder.
Anyone have a look at what Reader View looks like? That was the only screenshot they didn’t post and yet the only one I care about.
Which platform? Here's one on iOS: https://twitter.com/NoelDavila/status/1458134578544185346
Disclaimer: Not associated with the tweet above, but I was the TL for Reader :)
I havent heard of Blue... It looks almosy like an RSS reader in some of the screenshots.
underwhelming. now if they would roll out a feature that ensures i never reread a tweet and shows me a true 'done'/'inbox zero' after my feed has been consumed they might have something.
Neat, you can pay for the experience you'd get for free with uBlock.
Twitters algo is broken and it's idea is old.
No alt-text on screenshots, seriously twitter?
> In continuing our commitment to strengthen and support publishers and a free press, a portion of the revenue from Twitter Blue subscription fees goes directly to publishers within our network.
I’m going to guess that I won’t find any NY Post stories about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop on this filtered platform.
Honestly this just sounds like a door fee for an echo chamber.