I have been going back and forth for sometime about the advent of Twitter Blue: a subscription service for premium features within Twitter. My internal conflict on the issue is complex. On one hand I have bemoaned Twitter’s lack of product velocity. On the other hand, it seems a bit rich that I should have to pay for them (even if it less than 3$ a month).
The barometer that I measure a company like Twitter by is of course the ad-tech, social media gold-standard, Meta. If Meta can prove to be immensely profitable, and grow quickly off of advertising alone, then so should every other social media site. On reflection I think that this is incorrect. People happily pay for content on all kinds of mediums, and Twitter’s value proposition is primarily based on text-rich content in a select number of highly value-add and specialised fields. As I have written about before, Twitter offers a virtual infinite value proposition to users; anyone could spend 24 hours a day engrossed in their favourite interests with bona fide experts.
Twitter’s appeal is extremely compelling for users who are engaged in those fields well suited to the platform - finance and investing, politics, journalism, sports, entertainment, and current events. The inverse of this value proposition is that, by definition, its appeal has to be far more limited than the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok.
One of the characteristics that invited shareholder activism by Silver Lake and Elliot Management in 2019, was that while the company has this infinite value proposition, it has failed to properly monetise the user-base that derived that value. It has long been a trope amongst users that their consumer ads are typically wildly off-point (think a 35 year-old male portfolio manager being offered the opportunity to purchase a brand new make-up kit). Brand advertising is better suited to the platform, and better suited to Twitter’s ad-tech, but one always gets the feeling that they are only scraping the surface here.
So challenge is that Twitter creates immense value, but has a hard time capturing some percentage of that value. The traditional advertising model needs a lot work, and is not the only way for Twitter to grow it’s top line. Out of the features release by Twitter in the Twitter Blue, I am most interested and excited by Top Articles . This allows any user to access a list of shared articles, curated by accounts that a user follows. Strategically, I thought this was brilliant. This is a way to condition users to the idea of paying for content on Twitter.
The company is already moving towards this kind of monetised social commerce, a la ticketed spaces, super follows, tipping, and newsletters. The value add on top of this perpetual content generating machine, will be adding additional features that get you to information you want to read quicker. In this vein, the thread-reader is another feature which is genuinely value-add. These features make sense of the unending stream of content, and make it more digestible.
I was less excited about some of the more functional upgrades included in Twitter Blue - the undo feature, themes, etc. Making the site functional and easy to use is a way to make it appeal to an greater audience; hiding what should be basic features behind a paywall is not value-add.
On balance, I think the move to a subscription model is smart. There is a concentrated number of super users (who generated all the content) and a growing number of creators who have launched a career through the site, who would both be happy to pay and derive real value from these features. I believe that broadly, there are enough engaged content consumers who will also find value in these offerings. Furthermore, Blue has acknowledged a commitment to both release new features (hopefully at velocity) and offers the spectre of tiered subscription services and a genuine way for Twitter to participate in the value that it creates.