this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
517 points (83.7% liked)
Technology
59578 readers
2917 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Granted he's backing into this stupidly, and I can't imagine he'll do this right.
But the basic idea of transitioning away from the ad model toward a user funded model is a good move.
I'd go with something where people can create accounts and follow others for free. Then posting rights cost $5 per year. With an additional $5 for every 5000 followers you get.
That way X can monotize people with hundreds of thousands and millions of followers. At that level, accounts become businesses on their own. A few promotional posts would easily pay for the account.
There's some wishful thinking. This isn't going to be a "transition away from the ad model," this is absolutely going to be about adding revenue in addition to the ad model.
Those are the accounts that bring value to Twitter to begin with; you're suggesting people should be charged for the labor they're giving Twitter that drives traffic to the site. They already realized how unbelievably stupid it was to try to demand money from those accounts with the Twitter Blue roll out, they quickly backtracked and gave Twitter Blue for free to accounts with over 1 million followers. Many popular creators are willing to provide content for someone else's site for free, very few are willing to pay for the privilege. Twitter isn't the only game in town; if they start to charge people based on high follower counts they'll leave.
Those people are all (directly or not) making a living off their free accounts. There is some value to them using X instead of ... Y. It's perfectly reasonable to ask them to pay extra.
And athletes get so much endorsement money off of the exposure they get playing for their teams that they should be paying the league for the privilege. And people who go on late night talk shows are pushing their latest projects; they should be paying the networks to be on the show. Professional orchestral musicians would never get to play in front of the crowds they do without the orchestra group, so they should pay to be members rather than collecting a salary. And don't even get me started on those moochers over on Youtube; they should clearly be paying Youtube for drawing millions of views, not the other way around.
Charging the people who create the value you rely upon for your business to survive seems like a great idea that should be rolled out all over the place!
They do by not demanding higher salaries.
Id expect many do. The less famous actors and authors. The ones who aren't really "promotable". Sure.
That's entirely different since they aren't using their time on stage to make any other money.
If YouTube got rid of their ads like I sugested, that would make perfect sense.
You seem to have forgotten this is all predicated on the elimination of platform ads.