This looks like the culmination of way too many bad moves. Twitter is now on the verge of charging subscriptions. Musk has shown no interest in critics, or expert advice. Prior to the takeover, Twitter was making about 4 billion dollars a year in revenue.
Now revenue is a major issue. Advertising revenue is claimed to have fallen by 60%. Subscriptions may be a way of offsetting the loss of revenue, although it’s hard to see how subscriptions are going to make that sort of money.
The user base is in no mood for further executive tantrums from anyone. Especially not on social media. People used to complain about Twitter quite a lot under its former management, but this series of wrong moves is far more objectionable.
Reinstating rightly banned obnoxious users has certainly not helped.
Rebranding to X hasn’t impressed anyone.
Twitter used to be a particularly good real-time newsfeed, but now it’s anything but.
Twitter is now seen as a corporate platform, not a people platform.
The main reason Twitter is still around is because there’s a lack of competition. That won’t last forever.
Paywalls are very unpopular. At a time when the cost of living is going up drastically, there is no reason to believe that a Twitter subscription is going to be a high priority.
Who wants to pay to be attacked by trolls?
Not much has gone right. The overall impression of Twitter in its current form is that the platform is losing credibility. These are self-inflicted problems. The better business option would have been to do nothing and simply rake in the money.
The news on Twitter revenue is suspiciously polarised. That’s not a good sign. Some of this information looks very much like mercenary journalism to me. That’s more likely to be a sign of desperation than a sign of actual revenue growth.
If revenue is going down, it means that user and advertiser engagement is going down. If revenue is going up, you’d think there’d be some verifiable hard numbers to go with that information. Where is it? What are the numbers? Why the need for subscriptions?
One of the reasons for subscriptions is given as paying for fighting bots. This is the most bot-prone platform on Earth, and all of a sudden, it’s a big issue?
There’s far too much verbiage and far too many holes in these arguments. As overall policy goes, “Antagonize users and then charge them for it” leaves rather a lot to be desired.
Elon Musk is not a social media native. He obviously doesn’t know this market. The management also seems to have been bitten by the American post-hypnotic corporate culture motif of Get Everything Wrong All the Time. He’s doing his own reputation serious damage.
He wasn’t like this before he took over Twitter. Erratic, yes, sometimes ill-advised, but not consistently wrong all the time. Maybe the question we should be asking is “Where is Elon Musk?”
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
