> but there are lots of other parties who would also pay twitter for the privilege of tweeting.
In the short term, yes. But when you make paying the only way to get significant reach, you reduxe the quantity of presented-as-organic content that feels organic rather than like ads, which both directly removes the perception advantage of pay-for-“organic”-reach vs. pay-for-adds and also makes the whole platform less attractive to consumers, costing eyeballs, and making it harder to sell either traditional ads or ads in the form of paid “organic” reach.
Organic content that reachers passive/relatively inactive consumers is where your audience comes from. Make people pay to supply that, and you lose the audience you are selling to them and to traditional advertisers.
This argument feels theoretical. Twitter is not just an ad network. It offers unique values to its users. It is already conveying lots of promotional crap from big users to their followers, which doesn't have to change. Both sides of that transaction choose to take part in it. No normal ad network can deliver that value.
If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that. Twitter should start charging the followed, only a little at first, on a sliding scale. They should try different pricing policies, for different users, and should keep adjusting until they have extracted a great deal of money from those twitter users with the most followers. It could be that some highly-followed users don't themselves see much value from their own tweets, so they won't want to pay. Twitter doesn't need those users; they're wasting resources. You may be worried about chasing away small users who will grow into big users, but small users won't be charged. By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.
A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.
> Twitter is not just an ad network. It offers unique values to its users.
Yes, it does, and that unique value is noncommercial organic content, which charging for organic reach undercuts.
> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.
No, you are suggesting something just as bad: charging people for exactly what gives the followers a reason to be there.
> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.
They are producing and providing Twitter with content which people are coming to Twitter to consume. That’s not “wasting resources”, that’s what enables Twitter to sell space to advertisers.
> By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.
By the time they are even moderate-sized, they’ll be on multiple social platforms, be using each of them (among other things) to inform their followers of the others, and the kind of content they are distributing on them (especially as it changes), and will be, themselves, cobtinuously reevaluating the cost/benefit of each platform for particular content and adjusting their social media strategy.
Facebook uses this strategy, and as they dialed it up, big accounts did direct followers to other platforms to get reliable access to what they were producing.
> A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.
How? Literally everything you’ve said applies to any large social media platform the same way as it applies to Twitter.
If this [0] is "noncommercial organic content", I quit. It feels like you have a commitment to the abusive unprofitable way that twitter has been managed for at least a decade. I can't imagine why.
In the short term, yes. But when you make paying the only way to get significant reach, you reduxe the quantity of presented-as-organic content that feels organic rather than like ads, which both directly removes the perception advantage of pay-for-“organic”-reach vs. pay-for-adds and also makes the whole platform less attractive to consumers, costing eyeballs, and making it harder to sell either traditional ads or ads in the form of paid “organic” reach.
Organic content that reachers passive/relatively inactive consumers is where your audience comes from. Make people pay to supply that, and you lose the audience you are selling to them and to traditional advertisers.