Would you pay to use Twitter?
One of the many ideas that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has been floating since taking over the social network last week is to change the fundamentals of the company’s business model, free use, and instead turn the platform into a paid service.
The company already charges for Twitter Blue, a premium service so far only in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which for around $5 a month offers tweet editing, folders to store tweets, a reading mode, fewer ads and some additional configuration possibilities.
Twitter Blue, launched more than a year and a half ago, turned Twitter into a freemium service, with a free section for most users and a paid section that provides certain privileges to those who want to pay for them. One of the first announcements Musk made after buying the company for $44 billion was to link verification — a discreet blue star with a white tick inside it, assuring the account’s authenticity — to Twitter Blue, at a cost of around $8 a month (he started out talking at $20, but some indignant responses soon brought the price down). And Musk himself has been quoted referring to Twitter Blue as “a piece of shit”.
The question now is… what if, faced with the obvious need to make Twitter profitable, Musk simply opted to make everyone pay to use Twitter? The received wisdom is that the vast majority of users…
