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this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Technology
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Well, he could try to actually make it a usable platform and offer features people might be willing to pay for?
Think about it, this blue checkmark subscription would have absolutely worked two years ago. You have to prove who you are, pay 10 bucks a month and then you'll get the checkmark. A lot of people and institutions would have done that.
Offering advanced, paid features for professionals might also help. Like user management or thread based user mappings, so that large accounts can get management by a team efficiently. Companies are definitely willing to pay substantial amounts of money for things like that.
Could he though? I don't think he is that smart. He has smart people running his other companies, but he is running the show at twitter. I think this is us seeing him fail when left on his own.
That is not the question. He does have option, whether he is willing and able to realize them, is another question.
Anyway, unless there is some serious change of policy (and realistically, ownership) happening over a Twitter, is will slowly die off.
The first thing he did at Twitter (as it was called back then) was to fire most developers. There’s no way he can introduce significant new features.
Not anymore, no. But that would have been an option.
Companies are only willing to pay for enterprise features if you have users (and the features are meaningfully above and beyond what they can do on a free account).
Users aren't willing to pay jack shit for social media and there's no path to forcing people to pay for it that can possibly work.
If you're paying several thousands a month for social media managers, paying an extra 500 a month is not that big of a deal.
That's only massive companies. There aren't that many of them. $500/month from a couple hundred big enterprise clients won't pay the bills.
You need medium sized businesses to pay to use it.
And even massive companies won't pay $500/month when you completely remove the userbase by making it impossible to use without paying. $5/year would remove 99% of the userbase overnight.
You're convoluting several things here.
First of all, even medium sized businesses often enough employ several people as their social media managers, not all in full-time, but there's already a big cost associated with just "being there". Then, you are severely underestimating what businesses usually pay for in support roles. Databases easily cost six figures in licenses per year, for example. All the MS365 stuff isn't free either. 500€ is a drop in the bucket - especially for marketing, and especially, if there are compelling enough features, to reduce SM-team staffing.
And finally, you're arguing ex post - the question/my point was: would it ever have been possible for him to turn a profit? You're basically arguing "the patient could not have been rescued at any point, as he is currently dead". Also, Twitter is definitely not "dead" as you're implying. Yes, user base is dwindling, but it's an erosion, not implosion.
PS: we're both using oxymoronic handles, so I guess we have to be best friends now.
A medium sized business isn't going to just pay for shit if it doesn't actually add meaningful value to do so. 6 grand a year as a dropped in extra cost is absolutely something that is going to make companies that aren't mega-conglomerations stop and re-evaluate their social media presence.
I don't think it was ever possible for Twitter to ever be profitable at the point of Musk's takeover. There's just way too much cash lit on fire already. You can change the fundamentals so you earn more than you spend, but it's not capable of making anywhere near the money speculatively thrown into it.
It's not dead yet because they haven't forced payment yet. But it's dying hard, and will die overnight the day they add a paywall.