There Is A Chance Twitter Could Cease To Exist
The news around Twitter over the past few days has...not been great. It's no secret Twitter has been losing money but other than firing people and cutting perks like free food for employees, there doesn't seem to be a concrete plan to bring in revenue. Well, there was the $8 verification but when people started to use the blue check mark to imitate companies, it didn't go very well.
Using Twitter Blue as verification was gone within 24 hours and now it leaves some people wondering how long Twitter will exist. I'm sure a lot of people reading this would take that news with either a shrug or elation. Pew Research states that about 23% of Americans use Twitter which sounds more impressive than the reality if you look a little closer. 80% of all tweets are done by only 2% of the population. Would the other 98% care that much if Twitter vanished tomorrow?
I think social media as a whole could be in trouble. Or at least social media as we know it today. Meta (which covers Facebook and Instagram) just laid off 11,000 people last week. Is social media a profitable enterprise and if not, can it exist long term? Or is this just a Twitter issue?
Anyone who watched The Social Network knows that you have to be up and running all the time to be successful. If a site is going to be buggy or unreliable when you try to open it, you're fucked. Even if Elon doesn't get bored with his new toy in a few weeks and pull the plug, people (and the existing advertisers) could leave in droves if Twitter doesn't work consistently.
I have no clue what will happen next. Even when the Twitter Blue verification was up, it wasn't a success.
SOURCE - New Twitter Blue subscriptions were put on pause on Friday, just after the updated program launched on Nov. 9. Fake accounts were impersonating brands and notable individuals, which certainly did not please the advertisers that remain on the platform.
The mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower provided Mashable with revenue stats for Nov. 9 and Nov. 10 when subscriptions were open for anyone with Apple iOS devices in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
Twitter Blue brought in $488,000 in those two days. Accounting for the $8 price tag, that's 61,000 new subscribers at most.
Elon hasn't hinted at any new ideas to bring in revenue and for a world used to getting a product for free, telling them they now need to pay for it sounds like a tough task. Twitter is an awesome resource to get sports news really quickly. If it went away, I'd miss that. It's also 2022. Maybe something better will come along. Some people have been touting other options like Mastodon. But the world existed just fine before Twitter and if I have to wait an additional couple of hours to find out the Astros re-signed Rafael Montero, I'm guessing the world will keep spinning.
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