(2022-11-02) Owens Twitter Has Never Understood The Creator Economy

Simon Owens: Twitter has never understood the Creator Economy. From the very moment Elon Musk announced he was buying Twitter, we’ve been bombarded with predictions about how he would change the product, but it wasn’t until after the deal closed last week that his plans for the platform began to take shape. And what’s his first priority right out of the gate? Charging power users somewhere between $96 and $240 a year to keep their blue verification check marks.

writer Susan Orlean: “Ummmm shouldn’t Twitter be paying US since we provide ALL THE CONTENT

This points to a problem that plagues not only Twitter, but also most of the other large social media platforms that were founded sometime between the mid-to-late aughts

Instead, the real incentive that keeps creators glued to any particular platform is its ability to help them make money.

And when it comes to content monetization, Twitter has always been woefully terrible. Let’s take a look at some of its biggest stumbles on that front:

Vine

Vine was arguably Twitter’s biggest missed opportunity.

when top Vine stars approached Twitter about paying them directly, its executives ultimately decided not to. Many of those stars then left for YouTube

Revue

One could argue that Substack’s rise is due to Twitter’s inability to service its star users

Twitter’s 2021 acquisition of Revue seemed like an acknowledgement that it needed to provide a native, monetizable platform for writers, and indeed I had high hopes about how Revue would get integrated into the platform in such a way that the newsletters could capitalize on Twitter’s social graph. But other than a few early updates, Revue has remained mostly stagnant, with no new major features launched in the last year. What could have been Twitter’s answer to Substack and Medium instead seems like yet another abandoned product.

Super Follows

Super Follows became a punchline before it even launched. The idea that users would pay for premium tweets is laughable

Of course, if Twitter really wanted to help creators make money, it would simply share a portion of all the revenue it generates with them. YouTube began sharing around 50% of its ad revenue with creators over a decade ago

So why haven’t they? Because they’ve grown so used to capitalizing on the free labor of creators and they don’t want the short-term hit to their profit margins. But with user growth stalling out, I don’t think Twitter or any other platform can afford to ignore their creators’ needs for much longer.