With the relaunch of the Twitter Creator subscription program, which will provide users a way to monetize their tweets and create a company in the app, another piece of Elon Musk’s Twitter 2.0 strategy is coming together.
Twitter’s ‘Super Follows‘ project has been renamed as the new ‘Subscriptions‘ program, and the admission requirements have been lowered to encourage more people to sign up and start charging for their material.
The initiative would allow Twitter users to charge subscribers for premium services like exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Spaces, special badges on their tweets to show their affiliation, and a Subscriber-only tweets tab on creator profiles, similar to Super Follows: “Navigate to the profile of the person you Subscribe to, and select their Subscription Tweets tab. This tab lets you see all of someone’s Subscription Tweets in one place, and you’ll have access to it for as long as you’re Subscribed.”
Twitter Creator subscription features
Users had to have at least 10,000 followers in order to be eligible for Super Follows in its initial version, but Twitter has since lowered that need to 500, even if some parts of its documentation still make reference to the 10,000 cap.
Despite the fact that it appears as though a lot more users can now access the option, at that much lower audience threshold, that will make monetization for Twitter Creator subscriptions available to millions more Twitter users.
In order to profit through the service, users must currently be US citizens over the age of 18 and have tweeted 25 times in the last 30 days (but subscribers from all over the world can sign up).
For the first year, all proceeds will go to the creators. They can choose to charge $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99 per month for access to their premium elements.
That’s not totally accurate, but in general, any subscription-related income from Twitter Creator subscriptions will go to the developer until Twitter starts taking a cut in the second year.
In his redesign of the network, Musk has made creator monetization a crucial component. He believes that by giving users more opportunities to earn money through the app, this will keep them more engaged with Twitter and encourage them to publish more material more frequently.
Longer video uploads and tweets have already been added to Twitter for Twitter Blue subscribers, and in Musk’s opinion, these features will discourage users from uploading their content on external websites in favor of keeping it all on Twitter.
To get Twitter users more in line with long-form material in the service, some very significant behavioral changes are required. While YouTube and Meta still offer larger revenue potential, even with Twitter passing on any benefit to its users, for the first 12 months at least, people are already irritated by the longer tweets, which you have to tap through in the feed to read the whole thing.
And after the first year, Twitter will undoubtedly take a portion of any profits from the Twitter Creator subscriptions, which has not yet been determined. That will bring in another source of income for the business, and when combined with Twitter Blue, might, at least theoretically, lessen the platform’s reliance on ad revenue, relieving it of any potential moderation duties to please ad partners.
We’re not sure if that will work; it’s also important to remember that Twitter has already tried subscriptions, long-form content, and other options with little success prior to Twitter Creator subscriptions.
Lower entry barriers will undoubtedly encourage more users to at least attempt to monetize the app, so maybe things will be different this time. However, we’re not sure that the majority of users, or even 99% of users, would ever pay for tweets or related information, or that what people tweet is worthwhile.
