AD-VERSE. #104. Short of ideas.

Musk and Meta need more money. (Ohhhh Snap!)

Let’s not talk about censorship on Twitter

It’s hard to know where to start when it comes to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. A lot has been said about the ramifications for free-speech and politics, but surprisingly little about how the heck he’s going to service the massive debt he has taken onboard to acquire it. (It’ll cost a cool billi a year by most accounts.)

Reuters are reporting that Musk told banks he will rein in Twitter pay, make money from tweets. I’m fairly sure “pay people less” isn’t the strategy that made a man who chooses to manufacture in the USA, not China, a billionaire so we can ignore that one.

But “make money from tweets” is either a high-level description of Twitter’s basic monetisation strategy, or maybe it’s a whole bunch of things like this:

Ideas he brought up included charging a fee when a third-party website wants to quote or embed a tweet from verified individuals or organizations.

There is a chance that Elon has been so busy “revolutionising the electric vehicle industry” and “creating a safe haven for humanity on another planet” (his words, not mine, probably) that he’s failed to notice the decline of the publishing industry since the internet first took away their classifieds revenue (Craigslist etc), then pretty much all other revenue (Facebook etc¹) over the course of the last two decades.

If so, maybe the idea of charging news websites money to embed tweets doesn’t somehow seem like the utterly ludicrous idea it actually is to him? Online news publishers are barely profitable at best, loss making more often than not - there’s no slush of profits to pay for embedding tweets. And if it came to it - they’d simply quote the tweet the old fashioned way, or screenshot it - because they’re news organisation and its news and they’re damn well allowed to Elon.