Hey, what's up I'm Kim BHD here. so I really like Twitter Okay, this comes from a place of love, but when you really like something, you want to see it succeed. So I've been on Twitter for 13 plus years. I've tweeted over 50 000 times. don't judge me but I use several different Twitter apps I have third party apps on my phone I've already made a dear Twitter video. this was five years ago and actually some of the suggestions that I made in that video including the ability to edit tweets now has actually made it to the product which is kind of amazing. but I don't know if you guys have heard, but Twitter they're kind of going through a lot right now. So Elon Musk has actually bought Twitter and taken over leadership very quickly and a lot of pretty drastic changes are being made very quickly, reorganizing the whole company, firing people, unfiring people. Tons of new feature suggestions are on the table. Honestly, it feels like anything is on the table, so from the outside looking in, it just looks like complete chaos. even if you're on. Twitter it's chaos. but I just I want it to work like I want Twitter to be good I I don't know I'm one of those sickos that actually enjoys spending time on Twitter sometimes and maybe it's kind of hard to explain why, but Twitter feels like it's a pretty unique social media platform. It's an it's a unique experience because it actually makes everyone feel reachable. like it actually has a pretty small user base as far as daily active users. Facebook has literally 10 times the amount of active users Twitter literally has less daily active users than Snapchat right now, but it does feel like it has an outsized impact relative to that number of people. Like there are a ton of interesting people, personalities, athletes, politicians, celebrities, musicians, artists all over Twitter And it's just like it feels like if you could just reach out to any one of them, they might see it and reply back. It just happens all the time. So anyway, I'm rooting for Twitter to do well, but with all the chaos going on right now, there's most people do not have that level of confidence in them at all. Now a few days ago I tweeted that YouTube is in fact still the only true S-tier social media platform to which Elon immediately replied for now, so you know what? I'm just going to take you at face value here. I'm going to assume and believe that you actually want Twitter to be an A plus amazing great social media platform. So I'm just gonna tell you what I think Twitter should do to actually achieve that and this is just coming from my years of experience on social media. Elon currently follows me on Twitter Maybe he'll see this. Maybe I can actually make this a useful video. Now to be clear, I Don't think Twitter becomes an S-tier social media platform by just aping YouTube or by you know, becoming a direct YouTube competitor. It should still be its own thing. But as imperfect as it is, there's a lot of things that YouTube does really well. And there's a reason I put it as s tier and there's a reason. The same reason that a lot of people who blow up on a different social media platform from Vine to tick tock to Instagram to Twitter nine times out of ten. their next move is to try to convert as much of that as possible to a YouTube channel. So here's a little diagram I made. This is what I'll call The Virtuous cycle of the YouTube Creator ecosystem. It's oversimplified, but obviously many creators on YouTube use outside tools. But the basic premise is there's a lot of creators on YouTube and those creators are making content contributing to the world's largest online video library. YouTube builds monetization Tools around those videos, which in turn gets creators paid and happy, which gets them making more content, etc. etc. It just keeps flowing in a circle now. I don't know exactly how much Elon knows about YouTube monetization Specific typically are the tools that they've built. I'm again, just going to go by face value here, but it's also a legitimately hard business question. If You're trying to build something like that cycle? Where do you jump in like Twitter doesn't necessarily have YouTube style massive library of content, but what it does have is a lot of really interesting, high profile creative users. So dear: Twitter a suite of evolving Creator tools would make a massive difference to the entire website. So over the years, YouTube has added things from all over the place. There's the YouTube Partner program, so our advertisers pay for spots alongside YouTube videos and YouTube shares 55 of that ad Revenue with the uploader of the video. They also recently announced monetized shorts even more Revenue sharing in the shorts feed starting next year. They also have Super Thanks which puts a donation button under a video that makes your comment distinct and colorful and creators receive 70 of that donated money. They also have super chats and super stickers during live streams, so viewers can pay to have their chats Highlighted creators also keep 70 of that money. And there's Channel memberships where you can offer exclusive content to a smaller group of paid subscribers or members and the Creator again, get 70 percent of that money. Now Twitter actually has some of this stuff already. I Think basically super follows are like the equivalent of Channel memberships and Twitter actually beats the percentage by a mile. Twitter will give 97 of the revenue of a paid follower to that Creator on Twitter up to 50 Grand and then it's 80 after that. that's still really good, but they really could use more of these things. Like just how YouTube has copied a lot of these features from other platforms. Twitter should also feel free to adapt a lot of these things for its own platform like I Keep thinking back to remembering like Periscope and live streaming when that was happening a lot more often. That was really solid and that should have been more easily monetized. And while you can upload videos to Twitter, ads and revenue sharing aren't really a thing for the masses, but they totally could be. I Think they should be imagine you're just a random user who's making videos putting them on Twitter and by chance one of them just pops off and just gets a ton of exposure or gets retweeted by a bunch of people and suddenly that's an nice chunk of change in your pocket. That would be pretty incredible, and that also incentivizes more uploads of high quality videos to Twitter. also. I Saw Elon respond to our boy Quinn on Twitter who mentioned that the YouTube Partner program pays creators 55 and Elon said they can beat that percentage and that sounds great I Believe you, you've already beat some other percentages from them, but if nobody really advertises on your platform, then the percentage doesn't really matter, does it? So that's where we should just get right into talking about it relying on advertisers versus subscriptions. So as you've probably noticed by now, uh, the Internet runs on ads. It just does. Like social media platforms, revenues generated by advertisers, major websites and blogs and things that you read they run on ads. Like all these big websites and major content places, they get their revenue from advertising and as whatever you think about ads like, obviously they're annoying sometimes. but it just it's what makes the world turn in online media. It's just true. Now, these companies are also smart. These these social media companies especially are smart because they're trying to introduce more subscription services so that they can reduce their Reliance on ads. If you have more subscription services that people actually pay for, that's recurring Revenue that's guaranteed every month instead of having to rely on the finicky ad buyer market. So Snapchat made Snapchat Plus which is a four dollar a month subscription for some extra custom stories and post settings and notification features. Meta launched Instagram subscriptions where creators can charge up to 100 bucks a month for exclusive content including stories. We even have an MKBHD Discord Channel which is mostly free, but now also has premium memberships with extra channels. And the thing that all of these successful subscription Services have in common is adding value or at least adding perceived value for the person paying. But here's the thing. ads still run the internet. like. As successful as some of these subscription models have been, ads are still where the revenue is at here. Uh, here's an example: YouTube has 2.6 billion monthly active users. It's gigantic, right? How many of them do you think pay for YouTube premium? Go ahead. Yes. 2.6 billion total. So you get it's 12 bucks a month. You get background play, you get no ads. You get the ability to download stuff for offline. How many people you think about 20 million people pay for YouTube premium? So that's good money, sure. but that's you know, about 10 of the 28 billion dollars they made in that calendar year. So yeah, YouTube still runs on ads even Netflix the like grandfather of subscription models for Content They also just recently added in ads here like it's just. it feels like 10 is like the magic number of how much revenue you can make with subscriptions if it's a great subscription service, but you just make the rest of your money with ads. But Twitter You know they really, really want to reduce the Reliance on advertisers if they want to completely avoid any potential adpocalypse, if they want Twitter to be this free speech. Haven That is every advertiser's worst nightmare. If they really want to turn the corner on Subscription Service Revenue then they have to make a really good Subscription Service They have to make it full of features that people actually want to pay for. You know what? I Always think back to people: pay 30 a month for LinkedIn premium. Thirty dollars a month. That's that's a lot of money. but that's because they offer real features that people actually get value from. So fun fact: Many years ago I tweeted uh, just off the top of my head a random subscription idea that I had for YouTube. This isn't like 2016 and the brilliant name I came up with was YouTube Blue and I basically just wanted it to offer faster priority processing for extremely large uploaded files like I would I would totally pay every month as an uploader for priority processing because that's a value to me, someone who creates content for YouTube. But now, many years later, we have this thing called Twitter Blue. Great! Oh, it's a subscription service. What a coincidence! Beautiful. We should fill it with things that people actually want to pay for. So my main request Twitter is putting actual time and effort into thinking of and developing features for Twitter Blue that are actually good and worth extra dollars. And I think that focusing on the Creator class and power users of Twitter can probably be a really good guidance point for those things. So unfortunately, the first year of Twitter Blue kind of sucked because most of the features weren't really compelling for very many people. Like you could undo tweets, which was kind of stupid, but you could also upload longer videos that were up to 1080p. Now you can actually edit tweets for real, which is really cool and it's getting better. But think back to all of those Creator tools that we just mentioned earlier and those types of things would be worth way more than eight bucks a month to many people, especially people just like me who create a lot of content and things that can just go on. Twitter because it unlocks monetization for all types of content and I would pay for itself very quickly. I Guess what I'm trying to say is having a little verified human check mark next to your name doesn't feel like something that will be worth eight dollars to most people, especially because the benefit is to everyone else on the platform and not the person paying So strikes me as something that should probably just be free, but this has been really interesting to watch right now. There are 400 000 verified users on Twitter So judging from Elon's tweets, because that's kind of all we have to go by. Being verified will be one of the features looped into Twitter Blue. So let's say a hundred percent of them pay eight bucks a month to keep their badge. That would be 77 million dollars per year, which sounds like a lot, but again, just to refresh your memory. Twitter made about five billion dollars of Revenue last year. 92 percent of it was from advertising and so this would just be a drop in the bucket. But it sounds like Elon's plan is to have everyone pay. you know every every real human on Twitter connect a credit card, pay eight bucks a month that's their ID and then just keep using Twitter like normal which kind of violates my rule number one of the internet which is you probably can't charge money for something that was previously free I Don't think most people are going to want to do that I Really think that new value added to Twitter that people would choose to pay for like better features, higher quality media I think that's the way there's a whole thread I'll link below of like random ideas someone just came up with and did mock-ups for and some of them are actually really interesting and I could see Twitter power users loving some of that stuff. but like the eight bucks a month for a verified human profile, it was like guaranteed a negative reaction just because it's new money for something that's not new. So in summary: I think Twitter Blue right now is a pretty weak attempt at getting like as many people as possible to pay for Twitter and I don't think there is any amount of cool features you could add to get most normal people to pay for. Twitter What I do think they should focus on is a smaller, higher conversion group of power users and creators and then you will need Advertiser Revenue to get into that virtuous cycle. So I'll just leave you with this chart again. This is what I think success can look like for Twitter Like Twitter Twitter is what it is because of the people on. Twitter As with any other social media platform like, that's just a fact. So I think that's where you jump into this cycle by making things, features and tools that those people genuinely want and then crafting the rest of the rules and features around. The behavior that you want works every time. Like if posting this 10 minute video on Twitter would cost me eight bucks a month where posting this video on YouTube would actually make me money, then it's kind of a no-brainer I'm posting it on YouTube and then I'll put a link on Twitter because that's what the rules and the features incentivize. So yeah, that's just my two cents. And hey, maybe maybe Elon's serious about not really caring about the economics of Twitter at all, In which case, that would actually be totally cool. But the 44 billion dollars aren't going to pay itself. So there you have it. Thanks for watching I'm rooting for your Twitter catch you in the next one. Peace.