Make money. It’s something Elon Musk needs to do on Twitter in order to make his $44 billion purchase not look like one of the epic boondoggles in modern business history.
The $8 dollar blue checkmark doesn’t seem to be working all that well. Not too many people are paying for it, and now, we cannot tell the real from the bot. As for ads, they’re annoying and way more frequent, and oh, if I see one more sponsored thread for ChatGPT hacks, I might cry.
So, that brings us to the subscription model.
Earlier in the spring, Musk touted its potential, and now, we are about to find out whether it’s a viable revenue option on both sides of the ledger. That’s because some major names are about to give it a go, and if it works for them, perhaps, it will work someday for you and for me.
For the company, the premise is quite simple.
Right now, people make more money elsewhere, whether it be YouTube or Instagram, and from the Twitter corporate perspective, If you make money on Twitter, Musk likely will, too. You see, when people are successful in earning legitimate profits on the platform, then one can assume that more people will try, and thus, a positive feedback loop will be created.
That’s the concept, especially considering Twitter eventually will take a small cut of the revenue – but not at the outset.
At first blush, it does seem a bit farfetched to expect positive results on a social media service with a defined history of being a for-free culture. The likes of Tucker Carlson and Tomi Lahren will soon test that, and we may find out that it’s not such a long shot after all, especially for national personalities with millions of followers.
Start with the most recent piece of news that OutKick pundit Lahren has started a subscription just to see certain tweets and replies. She has 2.4 million followers and is now charging a buck for the “extras”.
Twitter doesn’t take any cut up front, but according to Musk, a company like Apple gets about 30 percent if you access through the app store, and if it’s web-based, the content producer keeps roughly 92%. Musk indicated that after a year, Twitter will exact a small fee per subscription.
For the sake of argument, for now, we will just give a gross number for our hypotheticals.
If Lahren only pulled in 5% of her following as subscribers, that would be $120,000 a month.
For her, that’s more than a million a year and would not dilute any of her television earnings.
Not a bad number.
Right now, there are more than 3,500 accounts with more followers than Lahren, so plenty of folks have the potential to make plenty of money.
Of course, we don’t have any data from her in terms of how many have subscribed, but there are two things to point to when trying to analyze the possibility of success here.
For one, online reaction has been muted to negative. For every tweet championing her move to a subscription model (none that I saw), there have been multiple negative comments, ranging from frustration … to laughter.
However, the other piece of information is a hard data point. According to Social Blade analytics, Lahren continues to add followers on a daily basis, and on most days, it’s more than a thousand. It should also be pointed out that she is averaging less than before she moved to a subscription model last week — and well off the 6,000 plus she added on May 11.
Lon Seidman, a content creator mainly on YouTube with some 300,000 subscribers, follows content-producer monetization closely. He’s also a frequent contributor to my morning radio show on WTIC 1080 in Connecticut.
He actually thinks Musk may be onto something.
“I think he deserves credit for finding a way for the platform to benefit creators along with the company,” he told me. “This feature popped up after he took over.”
As for Lahren, he said: “I think she’s smart to do it. This concept is nothing new. Twitch and YouTube have had some form of viewer subscription/tip jar for some time. People earn a good living doing it.”
Then there’s Tucker.
He recently announced that when he comes back, it may well be exclusively on Twitter. Assume he uses the site’s subscription model and charges viewers two dollars a month (it would probably be more). It actually sounds inexpensive if he does, say, 15 shows a month – less than a nickel and dime a show.
With 7.6 million followers, if just 10 percent sign up, we are talking about $1.5 million a month, and with minimal overhead.
Before factoring in the cut for Apple or other providers, we’re talking about a gross revenue number of about $18 million a year if you, ahem, subscribe to this logic.
In terms of what he made at Fox, estimates range wildly from $8 million to $35 million. Forbes says $20 million, and that’s sort of right in the middle so let’s go with that.
So basically, Carlson would make almost the same money doing a Twitter-exclusive show.
“Do I think he can match what Fox paid him? Probably not,” says Seidman. “But if you look at others who went independent like Glenn Beck, there was a lot of upstream effort to get a website set up, hire staff to write for it, push links out, etc…
“On Twitter, you have an audience that can be monetized with very little friction – if that audience feels the content is worth paying for.”
There’s the big “If”, and we should soon get an answer.
If it works, then people will work harder to gain followers — something that does not happen as much as it did in the early days because like all the other social media platforms with working revenue models, the bigger the reach, the more money to be made.
Brian Shactman is a weekly columnist for Barrett News Radio. In addition to writing for BNM, Brian can be heard weekday mornings in Hartford, CT on 1080 WTIC hosting the popular morning program ‘Brian & Company’. During his career, Brian has worked for ESPN, CNBC, MSNBC, and local TV channels in Connecticut and Massachusetts. You can find him on Twitter @bshactman.
