Elon Musk has recently bought Twitter and has now come up with a new way for the company to make additional revenues by charging its commercial users.
Musk shared that giving the service away for free would lead to its downfall.
The service costs a few billion to operate annually and it can be borne by his company easily. However, he believes that for all the good that Twitter can possibly do to promote free speech and become the de-facto Town Square of the world, the bankers would be interested in the returns for their investment.
This is something Musk was very aware of and included in his pitch to the banks. Now, as the deal seems to be going through, Musk is slowly revealing what Twitter users can expect in the days to come, and payments for being on the platform are one of them.
Musk’s suggested plan shouldn’t be a huge surprise for the technology industry as it has been working on this model for years now – where a small base of users pays for the costs of running the services, while the rest enjoy most features for free.
What Musk is suggesting now, however, is to charge a set of users a fee for being on the platform, while ‘casual users’ do not pay for the same. This is more of a targeted freemium model, where being a commercial entity or a government body makes you liable for payment. This is likely to draw some flak from government organizations, which use the platform for information dissemination and do not make money from it.
How Musk and Twitter will implement such a policy remains to be revealed.
