Elon Musk announced a per-article charging feature for publishers, allowing them to make money from their shared articles on Twitter. The feature will be available this month.
The most convenient way for publishers to make money is to sell subscriptions to readers. This method has been around for quite a long time. But Twitter is thinking of an out-of-the-box monetization method for publishers. According to Musk’s latest tweet, the platform “will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.”
This method can benefit both users and publishers. Users no longer need to buy a subscription and should only pay for the occasional article they want to read. As for the publishers, they can sell articles to individual users at a higher price. The per-article charging feature could also benefit independent journalists that have interesting stories to tell.
“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,” Musk added.
Twitter’s per-article charging feature goes live this month
Neither Twitter nor Elon Musk has yet explained how the feature would work. It also remains to be seen what accounts could access the feature and how much Twitter takes as its commission. Twitter is now taking a 10% cut on Subscriptions, and it might apply the same rule to per-article charging fees. The feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks, and we can learn more about it.
One possibility is that Twitter might limit the feature to the publishers that pay $8 a month for a Blue subscription. Adding premium features to the Blue tier will entice more users to pay for it, and Twitter could finally make more money.
Elon Musk is employing every possible tool to keep Twitter profitable. The platform has recently dropped verification badges from legacy accounts to force them to pay $8 for Twitter Blue. Musk also cut off free access to Twitter API and charged enterprise customers $50,000 monthly to access it.