The CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, has announced that from “next month” users of his social network will be able to access articles from different publishers without subscribing and paying only for the articles they read. Musk says Twitter’s new “one-click” service “will be of great benefit to both the media and the public.” Allowing media outlets to charge a higher per-story price to readers who wouldn’t subscribe to a full subscription.
Twitter, publishers will be able to charge for articles individually
As seems to be the norm by now, the announcement comes with a tweet of the CEO and no extra details. Musk did not specify how much Twitter share he would take or what requirements the media should have met.
As usual, Musk’s timing predictions need to be taken with a grain of salt. The “next month” could be an optimistic hypothesis for the launch of the service Twitter pay-per-view microtransactions. But there’s no doubting his determination.
Twitter is under pressure to increase revenuealso to recover the lesser use of historical users, who are exploring other options – Bluesky, launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Twitter’s pay-per-item announcement comes as Musk tries to attract creators to the struggling platform. In addition to reaching out to podcast creators directly, Musk also invites creators from around the world to monetize their content with Twitter subscriptions (formerly called Super Follows). Promising that “Twitter will not withhold money” for the first 12 months.
Musk is desperate to add new sources of revenue to pay down the debt. Since he himself valued the company at less than half what he bought it. Twitter Blue subscriptions are not performing as expected to make up for the loss. And even the paid APIs seem to have found few programmers willing to pay up to $42,000 a month – mostly for something that was free until last month.