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Elon Reportedly Wants To Auction Off Unused Twitter Handles As Part of Some Sad Scheme to Create A New Revenue Stream

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(Live look at Elon.)

Time are tough at Twitter.

Don't believe me? 

Twitter's sales team is one quota miss away from offering free handies to anyone that'll buy a promoted a tweet. Once again the microblogging site is allegedly offering up yuge incentives for ad partners (see: buy $250,000, get $250,000 free!). Well, that or the team over at Mastodon is feeding the Journal fake news about the competition…

WSJ - Twitter Inc. is offering advertisers a new incentive in an attempt to woo brands back to the social-media platform, which has seen its ad business deteriorate following Elon Musk‘s $44 billion takeover. 

The tech company is dangling free ad space by offering to match advertisers’ ad spending up to $250,000, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The full $500,000 in advertising must run by Feb. 28, the emails said. 

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The incentives are the latest effort by the company to get brands to spend on its platform. Recently, Twitter offered advertisers $500,000 in free ads as long as they spent at least $500,000.

Do you think Jack Dorsey sits around and says stuff like "look how they massacred my boy"?

Given Elon's current (pathetic) circumstances, it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that he's considering selling dormant handles to raise some cash.

TechCrunch - Twitter is considering selling usernames as a way to boost revenue, according to a new report from The New York Times. The report comes as the social network’s owner, Elon Musk, has been looking for ways to generate revenue for the company.

The report says engineers at the company have considered organizing online auctions where people can bid for usernames, also known as handles. The potential new revenue stream has been discussed since at least December. It’s unknown if the idea will come to fruition, and if it does, it’s unclear if the plan will affect all usernames or only some of them.

Twitter’s username squatting policy does not allow the buying and selling of usernames. Despite this rule, people have been able to buy coveted Twitter usernames on the black market for years. The practice of selling desirable usernames has also attracted hackers in the past. 

I'd like to be the first to point out that @realDonaldTrump is currently inactive (but no longer suspended). Auctioning off that handle alone could probably pay the back rent for Twitter's SF HQ (friendly reminder: Elon hasn't been paying rent).

And there are plenty of other dormant accounts that Elon and Twitter could sell off. In fact, Elon thinks there are ~1.5 billion…

Before you write Elon's latest idea off, let's not forget this dude isn't above gimmicks, especially gimmicks that print money. Does Not-A-Flamethrower ring a bell? Or what about Burnt Hair perfume? And more recently he jacked up the price of Twitter Blue under the guise of giving everyone a blue check mark. 

I'm not saying this is a masterstroke of genius on the part of Elon, but you can't knock the hustle. It's kind of impressive that Elon is still scrappy as fuck. I guess that's what dropping to the second-richest person in the world will do to a guy.

PS - I'm not sure how, but if I had to guess this will backfire spectacularly. Like that time Elon let anyone get a blue checkmark (before the organization checkmark was a thing) and people were out here posing as pharmaceutical companies and saying wild stuff like "insulin is now free" which sent real life share prices tumbling. I'm not sure exactly how the internet would ruin this, but I know they would.

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