2023-04-30 01:10:00
Entrepreneur Elon Musk announced this Saturday a plan for his Twitter platform to allow the media to charge users for reading each article.
“This allows users who would not contract a monthly subscription to pay a higher price per article, when they want to read an occasional article,” the Tesla and SpaceX owner also tweeted.
“It should be a big win for both the media organizations and the public”added Musk, who specified that the plan would begin in May, without providing details on how much the social network would earn with this service.
This announcement comes as part of Musk’s fight, amid frequent controversies, to make Twitter profitable.
Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.
This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2023
At the same time, the media have also struggled for years to come up with subscription plans that allow them to cover their operating costs, especially when the Readers have gotten used to getting free news on the Internet..
Musk’s plan raises questions about how he hopes his form of micropayment will work when others have failed.
In that sense, the British journalist James Ball listed several problems with micropaymentsan idea that “definitely has occurred to major publishers around the planet,” he wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, according to the AFP news agency.
In his opinion, many readers give up as soon as they hit a paywall, while publishers “widely” prefer to have full-time subscribers, which generate much more advertising revenue than the 20 cents or so that a single article sale could bring. .
A single new subscription might be worth, on average, hundreds of dollars of annual revenue to a publication.
At the moment, most users encountering new and tempting content on such a site will just click away when they hit the paywall—but a small fraction will subscribe…— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) April 29, 2023
Some Twitter users reacted positively to the proposal.
“Great idea. As a frequent author at publications like Forbes, Foreign Policy and Ad Astra, I am often frustrated when my work ends up behind a paywall that my followers are unwilling to subscribe to. This is the right solution.” opined the space expert Greg Autry.
An opinion shared by Carlos Gil, author of a book on marketing: “Finally, a pay-per-view for news that won’t make you feel like you’re buying overpriced stadium beer. Get your items a la carte and keep your wallet happy.”
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