With Twitter Blue, Twitter hopes to find success in a subscription-based model. Featuring the long-awaited power to undo tweets-- where you have 60 seconds to confirm a tweet before posting it. Certainly, it’s a bid to prevent more controversial and dangerous tweets that get posted by high-ranking officials. In addition, they are adding ad-free news for those of us who use Twitter explicitly for news-reading. All for a low price of 3.50USD per month. While this feature is certainly not aimed at most Twitter users, it’s nonetheless an attempt to see if they are able to monetize beyond ads exclusively. The question that can be derived from this is if other of the top social media begin to create subscription services for a subset (or all) of their users.
Subscription-based models continue to become the norm for many services. Seen by many to be the future of primary income for many companies, social media has done more than well for itself making money on ads. Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have all become top-earners simply due to the number of visits and social power they have. But, when the ad revenue starts slowing down and investors start getting upset there has been no major change, they need to find a way to gradually increase revenue. Hence, where subscription models such as Twitter Blue will more than likely start creeping up more and more. What if Facebook added the long-maligned dislike button, but you needed to pay $3 a month to use it? Features such as these are easy to include and could see that jump in revenue social media is always looking for. They are certain additions to every social media that would make a user feel special or awaited features that would have never been added before. Twitter Blue is a smart first step, only aiming at a small number of users to truly test the power of their model. This gives the ability to see if subscriber models can be a right fit for the industry if aimed at the right people. It may take years to see the impact of Twitter blue, but it will nonetheless be an important stepping stone for the future of all social media.