Musk has taken hulking loans from banks offering as collateral his Tesla shares. Some of these loans have interest rates as high as $1 billion per year. So world’s richest man or not he’ll need the social network to print money.
Marketers are somewhat skeptical that Twitter ads could make more money. And while Musk has plans to cut costs at the social bird. It’s somewhat unclear how much talent he could retain. Twitter has a diverse set of monetization options already, with a subscription service, donations, and user-to-user subscription services, along with ads and various forms of data partnerships.
While Musk floated various new ideas reportedly including paying ‘influencers’ to create content much like TikTok and Instagram. However, it’s unclear where the money to pay these creators comes from if not advertising, as ads are the bulk of Twitter’s revenue,
Twitter seems no more or less stable as a company with musk as the owner than it was when publicly traded. For creators, it will probably serve much the same function it always has. Sure, that is variable, but it’s unlikely to change for any individual.
As people have noted, Musk hasn’t taken over yet, but lots of new (or returning) conservative users are flocking to the site, because of his free speech chatter. However, content moderation is unlikely to really change in a meaningful way. Once upon a time, Tumblr killed off porn and that drove a lot of people to join other sites with a more adult focus. Users of Reddit, and sites like Fetlife still complain about the influx of Tumblr’s from more than 3 years ago. But that is a single dramatic change, it’s unlikely that anything Musk could do will have the same level of singular impact.
“Webtreats 53 Twitter Icons Promo Pack” by webtreats is marked with CC BY 2.0.
I’m Daniel Payne. I’ve been a freelance writer, video, and web guy since 1988. My passion is technology, from the latest cameras to cutting edge ways the internet is used to improve medicine. I write for Internet News Flash and am helping with the online resurrection of Digital Content Creators Magazine