So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX **Threadbans in OP**

what she is is a product. a product sold to advertisers.

Given he has been handing out twitter blue for free I strongly suspect he will not be cancelling her, I assume she is not big enough to get it for free but he still won't be cancelling people making content. Apparently Elon has pondered the value of twitter blue.

Twitter content is a two way street. It gives people a platform but content also keeps people coming back to twitter. Certainly how many people is relative to your follower base but a lower follower base also gives you a smaller platform so it scales. This is why blue ticks were pushed, because it brought users to log onto twitter more often.

Now paying gets you blocked by a large proportion of those that do see your tweets. People just don't care what they have to say. Famous people will still have more reach. They will have more followers and more reshares. Meanwhile ordinary people will just have their accounts blocked by people who get annoyed at random people they don't care about all across their timelines. The value of the blue tick was not for those who had it. The real value was for those who didn't to know whose tweets they were seeing. As I said above the point of social media is to get people to log on to sell them advertising, most people don't care about their posts getting boosted but they do care about the content they see on twitter and if that goes down then twitter loses value as the quality of the platform goes down.

Well that's not weird, that's not weird at all.

So, you're saying there is ample fuel to keep a platform going then...?

This is exactly what I have been saying.

It doesn't really matter whether it's dominated by one tribe or the other. Once there is plenty of loonies making a fool of themselves, then twitter will be doing just fine. I think Musk understands this very well... he's been an intimate part of it for a while now. He gets the mass appeal, and it's mostly cringe media. He has just shook the place up a bit, and welcomed in more of the oddballs from the other tribe! 😂

Except hes still not making enough money to keep twitter in the black let alone service the debt hes loaded the company with

Of course I understand the different models of YouTube and Netflix, not stupid! I would query which financially works better and I doubt if anyone knows the full story there.

What is apparent and what you and others seem to be wishing away, is just how you run a service like Twitter and make it pay? What's your idea?

It's quite understandable that media services like this start off as free as various portals vie for market share. But as things mature, the costs of running & developing them further escalate.

Advertising works to a certain extent, when it's new to a site and adverts are thinner, they have impact. But you start selling more & advertising and those purchasing same start to see diminishing returns. You can't flood a social media site with adverts.

So how do you finance the likes of Twitter or on a much lesser scale Boards here? Either a) a large benefactor, philanthropist b) the state i.e. taxpayer or c) subscriptions from those who use the service?

I'd also tack on to that that another money-generating feature that Musk has introduced is the ability to subscribe to some Twitter users, where those users would essentially put some of their content behind a paywall and you can only view it by subscribing to the individual user. However any users who want to generate more income from their content likely already have a Patreon, or Substack, or any of the various "tip"-type systems in place.

What bonus content are you going to get from, say Musk's subscription? Get to see recycled memes from Reddit and 4chan?

I don't know how profitable Twitter was before Musk took over, or indeed how much money it was losing which I believe was the case. But the best course of action would have been increase ads (slightly, not enough to annoy people, but enough to get a bit more revenue), increase the cost of ads, and reduce overheads of the company. Musk has shown there was clearly a bit of fat which could be cut off. I think he's likely gone too far with that in ways that will eventually become evident, and the site has definitely been more glitchy with more downtime than before he took over, but there was likely operational costs which could be cut regardless.

But as Quin_Dub said, Musk has burdened the site with billions in debt. You cannot take a free service which people have used for free for 10+ years and suddenly start locking all advantages of the site behind paywalls and subscriptions without causing an exodus of users who have numerous other sites to go to instead, thereby also affecting ad revenue in the meantime (even ignoring how he p*ssed off so much of the existing advertisers which was a huge portion of their income).

Hey as much as I dislike Musk myself, I hope Twitter keeps going. For what I like about it, it still operates as I want to use it for (ie. never ever talking to anyone or discussing anything or posting anything myself, but just following accounts for general news, info, jokes etc) and is always one of my go-to sites throughout the day.

And it's one of the best places for people making fun of Musk, so win-win.

If you don't understand this, then you have no concept of the problem. It's like you turning up for work and paying your boss for the privilege of working there.

I did think of one way Twitter could have made more income, but the ship has already sailed as Musk has ruined everything😁

For want of a better phrase, a cross-contamination of media. You subscribe to a purse that you control, twitter takes x% of each deposit. Now, when the like of the Irish independent, Times etc. puts up an article behind a paywall, you can unlock just that article by going through twitter and clicking the link. Instead of paying for an annual or monthly sub, you get to choose what content to pay for. Papers make a little bit more money, but also can tailor their content to what makes money. Eventually people may realise a subscription works out cheaper, and subscribes.

Part of the problem with so many different sites etc having a subscription model is that consumers then become a lot more picky about what services they subscribe to. Netflix had the streaming market sewn up, but because more and more companies started their own subscription streaming services, piracy has risen substantially because people don't want to or can't afford to have all the streaming services. Likewise with news websites or social media, people will use them all when they're free, but when they start paywalling behind subscriptions, people will pick one or two and not visit the rest.

When it comes to social media, subscription is an even harder sell, because the whole thing about social media is being able to connect with as many other accounts as you want, and people have accounts on different social media sites. Once they start going behind subscription services, the main benefit of social media is gone because everyone will disperse to different sites (if at all). And while you get news from news sites, films/tv from streaming sites etc, social media is going to be something a lot of people just don't pay for.

Its nothing to do with financial viability, the issue is the debt hes lumbered the company with. He likely could make it financially viable and at the very least break even but on top of that servicing 1 billion dollars of debt this year alone is a task he is nowhere close to reaching.