Twitter to start payment model in January [Updated]
I’ve just read about Twitter’s first plans to start charging for content. It will roll out in Japan in January (where the site, to my surprise, runs ads on the homepage). This paragraph from Sitepoint explains more:
From January 2010, Twitter users will be able to charge followers who want to read their tweets. Monthly charges will range from $1.15 to $11.60 (US Dollars); the account holder will receive 70% with the rest going to Twitter itself. Followers can opt to pay their subscription fees by credit card or as an additional payment on their mobile phone bill.
This doesn’t mean the same model will be applied to the rest of the world, but it does satisfy some curiosities about how twitter would eventually implement the part of a business where you actually earn some money.
But doesn’t this seem pricey? The only person who comes to mind who I can place a value on the tweets is @serafinowicz who makes a good effort at making thousands of people laugh every night, but I wouldn’t pay this much - maybe £3 a year and I wouldn’t argue.
It does improve the case for web fiction like the @peep_show twitter series (which I would never charge for, it’s on hiatus anyway). If the real writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain were using it, and putting out great content, of course it would be worth a subscription. If you agree, tweet them and encourage them to take the profiles off me.
Real time web fiction is taking itself to a new level anyway. Fake celebrity profiles were ‘popular’ in 2008 and early 2009, but now all the celebrities have mostly taken their names and users have become wise to it, there is a new breed where an entirely new identity is becoming popular. Twitter is a big enough platform now that an invented character like @sexyexecutive can, if it is funny enough, become popular in it’s own right overnight. I’m working on a post where there is one guy who has taken web fiction to an unprecedented level, though he seems to be using this mostly for marketing means, but if you want to read more about that, then subscribe to my RSS feed so you can catch it in the next couple of days.
Unique fictional identities are becoming a new platform for comedy
Popular tweeters like @shitmydadsays and other comics could make a good career out of a model like this (for a couple of years, that is - what is to say twitter will last forever?) but it could only be 5% of their followers that go with the model. I’d like to think it was more important to people to keep and entertain a large audience.
This is forgetting the intended use for businesses to allow users to subscribe to their news, but on the surface it seems s business should keep their feeds free to promote to and then convert followers into cash.
Update: One of my followers @cizer has pointed me to a TechCrunch article where it seems Twitter Japan have retracted the announcement - judging by the post, it does seem suspiciously like an accidental leak, but it is worth bearing in mind that this kind of model would likely fail in the west. I’ll leave this post up as it’s a worthy point of discussion.
What do you think? Would you pay for content on twitter? Could it become a prevalent platform for fiction and entertainment? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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