Whoa, what?! This was totally unexpected! And by that, we mean totally not surprising at all. In its latest showing, Twitter’s looking to gate off another element for Twitter Blue subscribers – creator subscriptions. Soon, creator subs will only be available to paying Twitter users, which is as cash-grabby as it can get, without any sort of push-back.
Double Exclusive Subs?
Based on a screenshot shared by Nima Owji, Twitter’s creator subscriptions, which it had re-launched earlier this month, will soon only be available if you pay $8 per month to subscribe to the app. This almost directly equates to forcing advertisers to also sign up for Blue, which is an odd paradox in that you need to pay Twitter in order to be paid by it – or, in the case of advertisers, pay Twitter to then pay more again for ads.
Twitter’s updated creator subscription program, originally called ‘Super Follows’ when it launched in 2021, will now allow all users with 500 followers to monetize their Twitter presence, by offering add-on and exclusive content for paying subscribers. The program was originally restricted to users with over 10k followers. This refreshed variation will allow a lot more Twitter users to make money from their content.
Creators will be able to charge $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99 per month for access to their exclusive elements, with all of the revenue being passed on to creators for the first year (well, maybe around 80%). Now, creators will also need to add an $8 per month tax for Twitter Blue, too, further limiting their revenue potential. Some will see this as a necessary and logical expansion within Twitter’s ongoing subscription revenue push, which Twitter claims is designed to weed out spammers and scammers in the app.
Still, having to pay will only further bottleneck take-up, especially in developing markets.
However, Twitter’s determined to make as many people as possible pay, with Chief Twit Elon Musk seeing paid social as an inevitable, necessary step in ensuring the long-term viability of the app. All that Musk needs now is for people to agree. To his credit, Twitter Blue is making some money, but it’s still mainly a risk to force users to pay just so they can access ‘sidegradable’ features.
It also remains to be seen whether users will care about Tweet subscriptions at all; they didn’t give a hoot when Super Follows was launched, resulting in it quickly flopping as subscribers realized that they shouldn’t have to pay for what they previously got FREE. Essentially, the whole system rides on individual creators being able to establish viable monetization pathways, and most will likely fail as they struggle to introduce and maintain new incentives, at mostly lower returns, at least during the early phases.
The Wrap
This is all now part of Twitter’s expanding Twitter Blue push, which could end up being a stroke of genius and eventually generating millions in subscriber revenue for the app. Either that or it ends up a massive failure, which will force Musk and Co. back to square one. At this stage, the latte looks more likely to happen, but it is the early days, so maybe we shouldn’t count Twitter out just yet.
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