This essay was inspired by Professor Scott Galloway's take on Twitter and my own obsession with the product.
Twitter has made a series of newsworthy moves besides banning @realDonaldTrump. Most of their other major announcements have signaled monetization strategies beyond advertising, almost as if they agree subscription products are less prone to devolving into pits of rage and trolls. They launched Spaces, a Clubhouse competitor, and snatched up Revue, a miniature Substack. Most recently, they pitched "Super Follows" to investors, a new feature that would enable users to provide exclusive content to a group of paying followers/subscribers… essentially a Patreon ecosystem within the Twitterverse. Add in their Snapchat copycat product, Fleets, and Twitter seems poised to become the Frankenstein of the consumer internet.
I like Professor Galloway's proposal that Twitter start charging accounts above a certain follower-count threshold a monthly fee to maintain their audience and blue-check status symbol. But my follower-count currently lacks a comma, so I'm not the expert on who would pay how much for the privilege of being Twitter-famous. I do think Twitter needs to have additional strategies for monetizing the long tail of users beyond advertisements. My proposal: Passport, a punch-card that lets you jump the paywall for news articles you discover through Twitter.
Publishers and journalists could set individual rates for access to each ordinarily paywall-protected story, likely at some premium for circumventing their own subscription products. When users click on the link within their Twitter feed, they would be prompted to spend X number of Twitter credits to view the story, using the same popup card that kindly reminded us not to retweet a news story we hadn't read a couple months ago. Twitter could offer several tiers at varying price points for different credit amounts that either roll over or don't. A $4.99 subscription that allows me to read 10 paywall protected articles each month would be a no-brainer, at least for me.
Especially after observing the dispute in Australia with Google and Facebook, I think Twitter must better align its incentives with news organizations. Twitter would be encouraged to directly traffic to higher quality news outlets so they can claim a cut of the microtransactions. Publishers could even set nominal prices on articles that would be free on their native site, because 90% of us are too lazy to switch apps for a nickel. Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey, claims he doesn't want Twitter to keep fostering echo chambers, so wouldn't a product that provides equal opportunity access to content from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times serve that aim?
One critical downside to more quality news content moving behind a paywall is that lower-income, more casual news consumers are left with the most click-baity (ad-funded) information from the least credible outlets. One mitigation strategy: offer a free tier of Passport (for 3-5 articles per month) to anyone who verifies their identity on their account. Twitter should be able to demand a higher price for their own native ads if they can guarantee a real human is on the other side. That incremental revenue could offset the cost of a couple free articles each month.
Professor Galloway has also advocated for Twitter to purchase CNN and structure a subscription product around their content. While the Twitter-CNN fusion would be a juggernaut, I personally don't see Twitter willingly declaring itself a publisher after all these years. A more appealing path for Twitter might be to challenge Google as the internet traffic controller for news content. The Times and WSJ will continue to be very successful capturing $20/month directly from the elite news consumers, but there's still a win-win-win opportunity for news organizations to reach the long tail of semi-casual news consumers. I don't want to pay the equivalent of Disney+ and Netflix to be married to the New York Times' stories indefinitely, and there's literally no chance I would pay upwards of $50/month to subscribe to multiple outlets. But ~$10 to pick and choose the stories I care most about each month? The flexibility to ramp up and down my subscription to keep up with the news flood of an election cycle or exclusive content about my favorite sports team during the season? The ability to patronize a variety of local and national news outlets (including spending all my leftover credits each month supporting my local newspaper)? Sign me up, Jack.