In remaking Twitter, Elon Musk created opening for rivals
Elon Musk has sought to increase Twitter subscription revenue and cut costs, but his changes have alienated some users.
The Twitter that Meta Platforms is now competing with is a much different service than the one Elon Musk took over eight months ago – in ways that many users aren’t happy about.
Among the most significant changes have been Musk’s efforts to increase subscription revenue, including by asking users to pay for verified blue check marks, which were once free and awarded only to accounts that Twitter deemed authentic and notable.
Many users have been frustrated by Musk’s attempts to stabilise the business after major advertisers pulled back from Twitter following his takeover. The changes have up-ended who gets verified and sometimes amplified on the site, while some users also complain about unpredictability under Musk’s ownership.
Last weekend, when Musk announced on Twitter limits on how many tweets users could see, he said verified accounts – those paying a monthly subscription – would be able to see more tweets than unverified users. Although Twitter soon relaxed the restrictions, some users said the incident undermined Twitter’s reputation as a platform for getting critical information. James Spann, chief meteorologist at ABC 33/40, Birmingham, Ala., said he often uses Twitter to inform his followers about severe weather. “The concern is that they’re going to miss these warnings,” he said.
Spann said he also was frustrated because recent changes on Twitter have seemed unpredictable. “They just do these things without any advance notice,” he said.
Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter’s business faced challenges with profitability and scrutiny over its approach to content moderation. Technical problems and hacking incidents sometimes caused disruptions.
Twitter has undergone numerous changes under Musk, from the pivot to paid verification to changing content-moderation policies and cutting thousands of employees, which has raised questions from some industry observers about the platform’s ability to address technical and other challenges. The tumult has created an opening for rivals including Meta’s new microblogging app Threads, which signed up more than 30 million users in less than 24 hours after launching, and by Friday morning had hit 70 million, according to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Twitter has momentum, according to Musk. “This platform hit another all-time high in user-seconds last week,” the billionaire tweeted at the end of June. He said the metric is calculated based on phone-screen time.
Twitter no longer publicly discloses quarterly earnings reports since Musk took it private, limiting the amount of available information about how the company is doing.
The platform says it has roughly 535 million monetizable monthly active users, according to a presentation the company gave to advertisers at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France in June, a person familiar with the matter said. Twitter told advertisers its users’ time spent a day is up just over 13 per cent year-over-year, at an average of 32 minutes, the person said.
An estimate from research firm Insider Intelligence puts Twitter at 363.7 million monthly users. The firm says its estimates are based on an analysis of survey and traffic data, historical trends and other information.
As of June, Twitter had as many as 850,000 subscribers to its Blue service, according to an estimate from Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer who tracks social-media platforms. The subscription features include verification, some prioritised visibility and the ability to edit tweets and post longer ones.
Twitter Blue could appeal to more active Twitter users, but it is still a tough sell for the average user, said Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “It’s not likely to have had a significant impact on the bottom line,” she said.
Derek Guy, a California-based menswear writer and frequent tweeter, said he wouldn’t mind paying for the subscription. But he said Musk’s ownership makes the service controversial. “You’re like financing this guy who is constantly posting these exhausting things,” he said.
Twitter has been a mixed bag since Musk took over, said Guy, whose tweets suddenly gained popularity on Twitter earlier this year. “Obviously, it’s been nice to have grown my audience, I can’t deny that, ” he said.
After Twitter removed check marks from many legacy-verified accounts, some researchers warned it would be harder for users to distinguish genuine accounts within the sea of check-less ones. Twitter’s policies prohibit accounts with paid check marks from engaging in deceptive impersonation or spam, though some have questioned how well the company will be able to enforce those rules. The company has had to contend with impersonator accounts.
Twitter has had a string of technical problems since Musk took over the platform in October, adding to many users’ frustrations. Twitter has experienced 11 significant outages so far in 2023, compared with eight during all of 2022, according to the internet-monitoring group NetBlocks. The group included in its 2023 tally problems with rate limits last weekend.
Musk recently hired a new chief executive at Twitter, Linda Yaccarino, whose agenda includes helping to lure back advertisers after many pulled back from Twitter following Musk’s takeover in part because of concerns about content moderation.
Musk has said most advertisers either have returned or will do so soon. At the end of May, Twitter’s second-quarter ad revenue globally was down about 40 per cent compared with a year earlier, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Enberg, the Insider Intelligence analyst, said Threads might not be a fatal blow, “but it is going to be another severe wound to Twitter.” Meta has the scale and resources to make Threads a serious competitor, she said.
“We’re often imitated – but the Twitter community can never be duplicated,” Yaccarino tweeted Thursday after Meta released its new app. She didn’t name Meta in her tweet.
Meta earlier this year began rolling out its own monthly subscription program called Meta Verified, whose features include verification, increased visibility, and direct access to customer support.
Valerie Phoenix, founder of the non-profit Tech by Choice that encourages diversity in tech, said she has used Twitter to promote the organisation. Recently, she has been trying alternatives, including Threads, Spill and Bluesky.
“I think the final straw for me was the rate limiting,” she said referring to the now-relaxed policy to limit how many tweets users could see. She added later: “Having our focus just be on Twitter is going to put us in a position where we may be stuck.”
By the end of Thursday, Meta’s Threads had surged to the top of app-store download charts and become a trending topic on Twitter, the social network it is hoping to up-end.
The launch also drew a sharply worded letter from a Twitter lawyer, who alleged that Meta hired Twitter employees and assigned them to help build Threads. A Meta spokesman denied the charge.
Dow Jones Newswires
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