News JVTech Elon Musk wants to charge even more for an ad-free Twitter
Published on 01/23/2023 at 17:55
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This weekend, Elon Musk made a new announcement around Twitter: the arrival of a new, more expensive paid subscription, intended to completely remove advertising from the social network. A statement that seems to explain why the platform decided to block certain third-party applications ten days ago.
On January 13, Twitter was the scene of a new complicated situation : several third-party applications that are particularly popular on the social network, such as Tweetbot et Twitterific, suddenly stopped working. At first, the developers of these services, but also their millions of users, thought it was a bug. Then, gradually, doubt finally set in: what if Twitter itself had decided to block them?
After a few days, the social network confirmed the doubts, stating laconically that he was ultimately only applying the rules of the platform. These rules were updated on January 19, to prohibit third-party developers from “creating or attempting to create any service or product that substitutes for or is similar to Twitter applications.” What to sound the death knell for several popular applicationswho have no choice but to close their doors.
Block third-party services, an action calculated by Twitter
As of January 16, we mentioned a hypothesis: and if Twitter had decided to block third-party applications for a question of money? The fact is that services like Twitterific or Tweetbot offered, among other things, to remove display advertising from Twitter : using these applications, sponsored tweets were not appearing. For the social network, this situation was necessarily synonymous with financial loss without consideration.
But, we know, Twitter is doing poorly financially. The American company is even forced to sell its office furniture at auction to recover some money. An inglorious situation, in which the smallest cash flow counts. And among them are the advertising campaigns broadcast on the platform.
Cleaning up third-party services that allow you to remove advertising for free therefore makes sense. But with the announcement made by Elon Musk this weekend, this theory becomes more plausible than ever.
Elon Musk announces a new Twitter subscription… to remove advertising!
In a tweet posted on Saturday January 21, Elon Musk announces the imminent arrival of a new Twitter subscription formula, one of the main purposes of which will be to remove display advertising. “There will be a more expensive subscription which will allow you to display zero advertising,” he explains, after having declared that “ads are frequent and too big” on Twitter, and that this point would be reviewed soon.
Also, there will be a higher priced subscription that allows zero ads
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2023
Therefore, we understand the maneuver: What’s the point of offering a paid subscription to remove advertising if there are multiple applications that allow you to do the same thing for free? Elon Musk therefore seeks to make Twitter profitable at all costs, by offering its users new subscription formulas, even if it means rule out competition now considered “unfair” from applications some of which had existed for many, many years.
The whole question is to know if Twitterers will probably pay more than $10 a month to have an ad-free Twitter. Remember that the Twitter Blue subscription already costs 8 dollars per month and that this is probably only the beginning.
