Well, he could try to actually make it a usable platform and offer features people might be willing to pay for?
Think about it, this blue checkmark subscription would have absolutely worked two years ago. You have to prove who you are, pay 10 bucks a month and then you’ll get the checkmark. A lot of people and institutions would have done that.
Offering advanced, paid features for professionals might also help. Like user management or thread based user mappings, so that large accounts can get management by a team efficiently. Companies are definitely willing to pay substantial amounts of money for things like that.
Could he though? I don’t think he is that smart. He has smart people running his other companies, but he is running the show at twitter. I think this is us seeing him fail when left on his own.
The first thing he did at Twitter (as it was called back then) was to fire most developers. There’s no way he can introduce significant new features.
Companies are only willing to pay for enterprise features if you have users (and the features are meaningfully above and beyond what they can do on a free account).
Users aren’t willing to pay jack shit for social media and there’s no path to forcing people to pay for it that can possibly work.
If you’re paying several thousands a month for social media managers, paying an extra 500 a month is not that big of a deal.
That’s only massive companies. There aren’t that many of them. $500/month from a couple hundred big enterprise clients won’t pay the bills.
You need medium sized businesses to pay to use it.
And even massive companies won’t pay $500/month when you completely remove the userbase by making it impossible to use without paying. $5/year would remove 99% of the userbase overnight.
