Twitter has announced a rebrand of its monetization feature, Super Follows, to Subscriptions. This move was announced by Elon Musk and aims to provide creators with a way to earn money on the platform. Subscriptions will include long-form content and “hours-long videos” in addition to the exclusive tweets that Super Follows initially offered.
Creators will be able to charge subscribers $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99 a month, with subscriber-only chats in Twitter Spaces and special badges for paid subscribers. A help page indicates that Twitter may add newsletters and other features as bonus content. This is significant considering Musk’s recent criticism of newsletter platform Substack and the fact that he shut down Revue, a newsletter platform Twitter acquired in 2021, after taking over as CEO.
Super Follows failed to gain much traction, and Twitter hopes to attract more creators with more favorable terms under the Subscriptions program. For the first 12 months, Twitter will not take an additional cut of creators’ earnings from Subscriptions. Creators can expect 70 percent of their earnings from mobile and about 92 percent from web-based subscriptions, which will account for all revenue after app store and payment processing fees.
Musk added that Twitter would promote creators’ work, but he did not elaborate on how. It’s unclear how Google’s recent announcement that the Play Store would only take 15 percent from in-app subscriptions will affect Twitter’s creators. However, Twitter responded to press queries with a poop emoji, indicating that they have yet to clarify the matter.
