The (Happy) Path Forward for Twitter Blue




    If you’ve spent any time on Twitter lately, you may have the impression that the platform is experiencing a rapid demise. It feels like there have been a near infinite number of tweets, blog posts, and op-eds in major publications over the past week declaring the end of the social media platform. Many are criticizing Elon Musk’s rollout of a new version of Twitter Blue, a subscription offering that gives users the ability to pay $8 per month to be verified, which Musk claims will have the second-order effect of eliminating spam and bots. I won’t re-cap the rollout here, but you can find many other blogs and Twitter threads on the topic with a quick search.

While it seems that the internet has unanimously declared Elon’s Twitter Blue strategy (and rollout) as failed, I have a slightly more nuanced take. In fact, it feels like I may be one of the few people on the planet who think that it was (and still may be) a very good strategy, albeit with very poor — yet recoverable — execution thus far. But how can it be recovered? Before I get into that, some quick additional context.Musk has stated that the strategic purposes of the new Twitter Blue are to drive meaningful non-ads based revenue for the business and also eliminate spam and bots. The thinking for the latter is that by getting users to pay for a subscription service with a credit card, they can be considered verified as humans, which should earn them both a visual status confirming them as such, plus increased distribution for their tweets.