Elon Musk’s plan for content creators to put a price tag on their tweets

Entrepreneur Elon Musk is full of ideas to get out of the economic abyss into which his latest investment, the social network Twitter, is sinking. Without going any further, Friday he announced a plan for his platform to allow tweeters to charge users an exclusive monthly subscription.

The company has officially announced the implementation of paid subscriptions for exclusive content on their platform. Through this new system, content creators who meet the eligibility requirements will be able to earn monthly income from their most engaged followers.

This monetization approach by Twitter adds to the trend of other social networks, such as Patreon and Twitch, looking for avenues for content creators to earn revenue. directly from his followers.

Through a tweet, Musk highlighted the platform’s commitment to innovation and support for content creators. Those interested in joining the paid membership program for exclusive content can apply through the main menu of their Twitter application.

This announcement comes in the context of Musk’s struggle, amid frequent controversy, to make Twitter profitable.

Interested persons wishing to participate in this program must be over 18 years of age, have at least 500 followers and have been active in the last 30 days.

To set the subscription value, you can choose from several options provided by the platform. Until a creator reaches $50,000 in cumulative earnings through products, they will be able to earn up to 97% of the revenue generated by their followers.

If this method succeeds in taking off, the next step will be to bring this model to the tweets published by the mainstream media. “This allows users who don’t have a monthly subscription to pay a higher price per article, when they want to read an occasional article,” the owner of Tesla and SpaceX also tweeted.

Twitter media plan

The intention is for this plan to start rolling next month, though it didn’t provide details on the price or percentage the platform would take. “It should be a huge win for both media organizations and the public,” Musk added.

Even the media has spent years struggling to formulate subscription plans which allow them to cover their operational costs, especially when readers have become accustomed to receiving free news on the Internet.

Musk’s plan raises some questions about how he expects his form of micropayments to work and how to make it viable, as others have tried and failed.

Along these lines, British journalist James Ball listed several problems with micropayments, an idea that “surely occurred to major publishers around the planet,” he wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review.

However, some on Twitter reacted positively. “Great idea,” user Greg Autry tweeted. “As a frequent author of publications such as Forbes, Foreign Policy and Ad Astra, I am often frustrated when my work ends up behind a paywall that my followers aren’t willing to subscribe to. This is the right fit.”