nymag | While the sort of value Musk got out of Twitter — monetary, reputational, significant — is rare and has little to do with the most common experience of the platform, his relationship to the platform is aspirationally relatable to the people he interacts with in real life and on the site himself. Musk and his small cadre of sympathetic advisers narrowly but correctly understand Twitter as a tool that can be used by public figures to make money and acquire power. Venture capitalists use it because it helps them build public profiles but also because it helps them with deals. (Some pay good money for ghostwritten tweets!) Politicians use it because it lets them bypass the press — it’s hard to imagine Trump’s term in office without it, and its value to him was immense. Pundits and some journalists owe Twitter for raising their profiles, which has made coverage of this whole situation fraught and occasionally embarrassing. (In fairness, a direct and accurate way to describe this situation is that a very wealthy and powerful person has functionally purchased a tool that is extremely valuable to the function of the free press around the world.)
Among the 400,000 or so verified Twitter users, there are plenty who use Twitter in transactional or profitable ways without paying for advertising: brands, people who think of themselves as brands, people who have to be there for their jobs, people looking for jobs, people looking for dates, people running scams. There’s something to the idea that you can’t understand Twitter’s full value without taking into account its external influence — again, consider Trump, whose campaign paid for Facebook ads but who actually attempted to govern with Twitter — as well as the related observation that YouTube, a social network that creates and distributes immense value within its marketplace, in the form of creator payouts, seems to exert much less direct influence on the broader culture relative to its massive size and revenue. Most Americans don’t use Twitter at all. But they certainly hear about it.
It’s an insight! Is it a business plan? The vast majority of people who are on Twitter don’t derive much or any material value from the platform, which, according to Twitter’s most recent public filings, prices their attention to advertisers at about two dollars a month. The few that do will soon be given a choice to make based on admittedly imperfect information: Is whatever they’re doing there worth it? And will it stay that way? By asking heavily invested users to pay to remain or become verified and to remain or become visible — to maintain their brand, whatever it is — Twitter is treating this group of users almost exactly the way it has treated its other most important customers for years: advertisers. You get what you pay for.
Jessica Lessin, founder and editor of subscription tech site the Information, tweeted, “Watching @elonmusk + Co take over Twitter is like watching a business school case study on how to make money on the internet. Amazing that at some level it is so basic.” Among the obvious lessons, she said, was charging power uses “what they are willing to pay.” And maybe it will really turn out to be so simple! Musk charges, blue checks pay, most everyone else sticks around, and then, uh, some other stuff happens and Twitter is worth its $44 billion price tag and more.
But whatever “@elonmusk + Co” believe they understand about Twitter’s captive upper echelons risks obscuring what makes the platform interesting, or even tolerable, to a much larger base of users. There’s been plenty of indignation from verified users about Musk’s ransom, and, whether Musk ends up calling their bluffs, they do have a point: Their work contributes to Twitter’s bottom line, and thousands — in some cases millions — of other users have explicitly expressed interest in their presence. I expect a lot of those users will still pay; I also expect that their conversion into de facto advertisers will make their relationship with the platform worse, and worth less, to them and their followers.
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