Daily Archives: September 27, 2016

Start charging for Twitter.

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Twitter needs to start charging for its service. I don’t like to pay for anything but Twitter is something I’d happily go to the old dusty wallet for. Especially if it keeps out some of the riff raff. Twitter should not sell to another ad-focused company with an intent of getting bigger. It should charge and be more profitable. And stay smaller.  (As if 300 million custies is small.) And with a smaller, paying customer base, the advertising product would likely be better and extract more margin.

So then the next question is “What would people be willing to pay for Twitter?” How about $20 a year? That’s two chicken wraps with cheese per month. Say 40% of users drop out — you’d still be booking $3.6B in fee revenue.

Twitter is part of our media world. It may not be for everybody but it is a world-flattening necessity. Don’t sell it off like some underperforming service company. That would be crazy short-sighted.

Massifying free web services is only for low-value properties. That certainly doesn’t describe Twitter.

Peace.