One of the biggest features of the social platform Twitter is the maximum number of words in a tweet. The maximum number of words written in English is 280 characters, and the maximum number of characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean is 140. Now, Twitter wants to let users pay for these "short and powerful" tweets.
At the shareholder meeting a few days ago, Twitter announced that they would launch a content payment feature called "Super Follows." Users can charge followers a subscription fee starting at US$4.99 per month. Paid followers can see subscriber-limited tweets and e-news, get "sponsor badges" and join clubs established by content creators.
Technology media TechCrunch pointed out that Twitter will directly become a competitor to content payment platforms OnlyFans, Patreon, and the electronic newspaper service Substack. Since Twitter has already gathered a variety of celebrities, it is anticipated that it will be able to find a niche in this market.
Recently, due to payment issues for news, social media leader Facebook and the Australian government both took a step back in the end. Australia revised the legislative provisions and Facebook promised to pay US$1 billion to the media industry in the next three years. Does the media have to rely on social platforms to survive? After the launch of the new feature on Twitter, some people believe that the reporters of the newspapers stationed on Twitter can earn independent income, but it is difficult to say whether the media themselves can benefit.
The function called "Communities" is also a new update of Twitter this time. It is a Facebook-like community with "Super Follower". The goal of Twitter is to strengthen the "community" of the platform and to stimulate users. It increases participation and expansion of sources of income other than advertising.
In the past, compared with Facebook, Twitter was very conservative and rarely added new features. This time, Twitter released this "subscription bundle" in one fell swoop, combining voice, community, and e-newsletter, which pushed its stock price to rise 7%. Although some users joked that Twitter actually pushed subscriptions first without adding the more "basic" function of "tweet editing", according to market reactions, the outside world is quite optimistic about Twitter's emerging plans.
Twitter announced a new goal to increase the number of Monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAUs) from the current 192 million to 315 million by 2023, and plans to double revenue.
（三和一善・Maruyama Osamu)
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