Before answering the question formulated in the title, I think it is necessary to expand the question, since talking about paid Twitter can be interpreted in many ways, ranging from a similar but paid service until the transition to an exclusive model of payment by the favorite toy (and the one that should cause you the most headaches) by Elon Musk. Thus, although with nuances, the first thing is to clarify that I am referring to the second point.
No, Twitter is not going to become an exclusively paid service, at least not for now. Creating an account and using the basic functions of the social network is free, and I doubt very much that Musk decides to reverse that, since one of the most important numbers of the service, the one that quantifies the number of users of it, would plummet, which in turn, it would mean that the already lackluster interest of advertisers in this social network would drop until it went beyond ground level.
Twitter is and will remain free, just like Facebook, Instagram (although precisely these two have launched a payment verification service, like Twitter), TikTok… The nature of social networks means that their usefulness (and therefore their value) have a directly proportional relationship with their volume of users. Any manager of a social network with half a brain should be very clear on this point, otherwise the future may bring very unpleasant things.
Elon Musk has wanted to become a champion of freedom of expression, although he later dedicates himself to expelling journalists (spoiler: in reality, freedom of expression matters rather little to him), but from the first moment in command of the social network he has made it clear that his interest in Twitter is economic and personal image. Of image because it was already known at the time that he had ordered his tweets to obtain more visibility than the algorithm would grant them under normal conditions.
The economic motivation has to do, of course, with the 44,000 million dollars that Musk has had to pay to take over Twitter. Well, the 44,000 million plus the high interest that it is obliged to pay to the financial institutions from which part of the money necessary to complete the purchase came out. Money that, this is understandable, the billionaire would like to be able to recover at some point and in some way.
The problem is that the numbers don’t add up. At the moment, Twitter has fewer than 500,000 paying subscribers, which is less than 0.12% of the total base of Twitter users. To reach Musk’s goal of 50% of the social network’s revenue, 24 million Twitter Blue members would be needed. Thus, it seems that the plan is to give more and more voice and vote to Blue users, thus ostracizing all those who are not willing to checkout.
Get verified, edit tweets already published, vote in surveys about the future of the social network, appear in the “For you” tab of other users, have your answers appear among the first… the list is huge and we can be clear that will continue to grow. No doubt Musk’s approach is that the key is to make Twitter Blue more attractive, but the truth is that the end result may be to make Twitter less attractiveand the consequences of this can be dire for both the social network and Musk’s portfolio.
