The New “Twitter” — NFT profiles and more
After Jack Dorsey stepped down as the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal took over as the new CEO of Twitter. It was a sudden call by Jack Dorsey to be stepping down. When Jack Dorsey was stepping his foot out of Twitter there were critics stating that he failed to monetize twitter well through its huge userbase.
Twitter Spaces
Twitter first launched Spaces in November 2020 as an attempt to eclipse Clubhouse’s success with its own version of audio-centric chatrooms. This is the first step toward Twitter changing its path from its founding ideology to being a microblogging platform. Twitter is a place where people put their effort into threads, replies, and retweets thus Twitter “spaces” is a comfortable feature for people to argue on topics that are being a trend on Twitter.
Twitter had a hard push monetizing twitter spaces as well, Twitter enabled users over 18 to vend tickets for their rooms. This monetization hasn’t been such a big success and Twitter officials declined to specify how many people are able to monetize their conversations. Users with three Spaces within the last month and who had at least 1,000 followers can vend tickets for their spaces and the ticketing starts from $1 and can go up to $999. Just after Parag Agrawal was appointed as CEO Twitter has been on another hunt to monetize and bring the company to profitability again
Quick fix!
Twitter being a tech giant couldn’t have many value-added updates for very long. A quick move towards this is making the user experience great again with their complementary features like “New Tweet Composer Bar and Topics Tag Bar” which are minor yet gives its users a rich user experience. After these mini-updates Twitter had just made its platform look a bit new to its users and those attractive updates made the engagement last longer. It’s a quirky move as per reports and more engagement gives them more ways to monetize? Well, that’s not what exactly happening!
Twitter Blue
Twitter’s main stream of revenue from its initial stage is through ads like any other social media app, though Twitter wants to hook its users and make it a premium product. Twitter believes that its user values its services and have a potential market that gives them a premium status. Twitter's largest demographics are aged between 25 to 34 years, who are millennials and can spend on their own
Twitter launched its “Twitter Blue” in India in June of 2021. Through “Twitter Blue” subscription it lets its users “undo Tweets”, “add their favorite tweets to their collection”, “No-ads”, and “can post long videos” and more. One more interesting thing is just recently Twitter added NFTs to their “Twitter Blue” which let its user choose their NFTs in their profile pictures. The NFT profiles are shown in a hexagonal shape to make a difference. Twitter’s web 3 plans are yet to be announced but this is the first step toward its web 3 universe.
Twitter Blue had negative user feedback saying it’s not worth it. First things first it couldn’t convince its premium users to pay $2.99 a month to undo tweets and ad-free articles etc…, because these are not major customization and gives a premium value to its users. Most widely used apps provide these mini-updates based on their R&D on user experience and give them for free. Yes, that’s somewhat true, though its variety of small customization options and the promise of more to come, users are skeptical. Let’s see where it goes in the future.
New CEO, New Board Mate!
On April 5th just a day after Telsa and SpaceX boss Elon Musk bought nearly $2.9 billion worth of Twitter shares and became the company’s single largest stakeholder with a 9.2% stake, CEO Parag Agarwal tweeted that Twitter welcome Elon Musk to its board.
Elon Musk being a star on Twitter debates about free speech and a few minor feature additions like the “edit button” on Twitter giving people a little hope that this can be a new being of Twitter Musk being a board member and his part can bring in user voice onto the table is what people are credulous.
Now the real question is that will Parag Agrawal let Musk’s opinion bring a change to their platform or will they stay on the same path on which they’ve been traveling under Jack Dorsey’s leadership?
