Full-Time Twitter CEO and Part-Time Tesla Enthusiast Elon Musk said Saturday that users of its social media platform will be able to skip media subscriptions and pay per article starting “next month”. Musk says Twitter’s future “one-click” service “should be a major win-win for media organizations and the public” by allowing media companies to charge a higher per-article price to readers who wouldn’t necessarily pay a full subscription price. .
Musk did not specify what percentage Twitter would pocket for itself or what terms media publishers would have to meet.
As with all of Musk’s timelines, it’s best to take the “next month” estimate as the absolute best-case scenario for the arrival of Twitter’s pay-per-view micro-transaction service. But I don’t doubt Musk’s urgency. Twitter is in a race to increase revenue even as it alienates longtime users and antagonizes media organizations – which are actively testing the waters elsewhere. Today’s latest Twitter alternative is Bluesky, which recently added Twitter royalty Darth, Dril, and AOC to its ranks.
Musk is desperate to add new monetized eyeballs and other revenue streams to pay off debt, while valuing the company at less than half of what he paid. Twitter Blue subscriptions are not doing well enough to compensate for the loss of advertisers who have fled the platform since Musk’s takeover. The company also introduced a new fee structure for API access that could cost some companies up to $42,000 per month for what was previously free.
