What’s Elon Musk brewing up now for Twitter? Following what can only be described as ‘controversial’ progress, including a recent plan to charge users $8 for verification, Musk is now looking at other money-making ventures to claw back some of his $44 billion investment. So far, all of his ideas have been ‘cash-grabby’, but perhaps that’s just how billionaire minds work? We’ll let you know once we become billionaires ourselves.

Show Me The Money

According to a report from The Washington Post, Twitter’s team is currently exploring a new ‘paywalled’ video approach that would allow creators and publishers to charge people a fee to watch exclusive or ‘premium’ videos in the app. As per WP:

“According to an internal email describing the new video feature, which has not yet been announced, “When a creator composes a tweet with a video, the creator can then enable the paywall once the video has been added to the tweet.” They can then choose from a preset list of prices, such as $1, $2, $5, or $20.”

The idea is that this would facilitate direct revenue generation from longer-form video content in the app, though it may also lean into an idea that Twitter had already explored in the past; Twitter shelved the idea when it found out that its systems ‘cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale’, which is the wiser choice. Under Musk, it seems that Twitter might be willing to give it another shot, though many advertisers have already paused their activities on the platform, and agencies are advising clients to reconsider until they get a clearer idea of Twitter’s new policies and methods.

There’s also talk about monetizing DMs – like, what? Check out this reply from Danny Singh when reverse engineering app expert Jane Manchun Wong discovered a reference to ‘Paid DMs’ in the app’s back-end code. Though not overly surprising, Meta is also exploring a similar option due to the rise in users sharing content via direct message, as opposed to posting on their social Feeds. On Twitter, it seems that it’ll be less guided by trends and more by Musk’s desire to monetize everything as fast as he can – they should’ve cast him for the last Fast & Furious movie.

The last has something to do with unbanning banned users. Musk has already shared various criticisms of Twitter’s approach before, including the banning of former President Trump’s account. The expectation is that Musk will allow Trump to return, but he isn’t pushing down on the pedal just yet. This process relates to Musk’s previously announced ‘Content Moderation Council’, which, according to him ’will include representatives with widely divergent views, which will certainly include the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence’. To add, Musk is also looking to gamify Twitter and incentivize engagement, with more loose-cannon monetization schemes being floated around.

The Wrap

There’s one thing we can conclude from all this – Twitter will soon go through a cyclone of change, and it’ll be interesting to see what comes out on the other side of that. Will it be Twitter’s evolution or downfall? Well, Musk seems confident in its potential. He’s banking on that to be true because if he’s looking to charge people to get things they’ve otherwise already had access to for FREE, he better hope that they really want them.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/3zHBtaz