PARIS, FRANCE - JUNE 16: Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, Elon Musk ... [+]
Nickel and dime us to death.
That seems to be the strategy with Elon Musk lately, instead of trying to convince us that Twitter has enough value to actually pay for some of the services.
A recent change involves putting TweetDeck behind a paywall. You have to sign-up for Twitter Blue (which is basically a vanity service) and pay a monthly fee in order to use it after about 30 days. The company is also retiring the classic version.
View caps also went into effect recently, obviously meant as a way to deal with server problems. There again, the famous billionaire is nickel and diming because he doesn’t want to pay exorbitant fees to keep Twitter running for everyone without restrictions.
Sadly, we’ve seen this before with companies that seem to be going under.
One example that comes to mind, ironically, has to do with electric car chargers. In my area, a charger in a downtown area always used to be free to use while you shop. You would think the city would have started charging for the plug-in because it became widely popular. The opposite is true. No one ever uses it (except me), so the city has started charging a fee for electric power-ups.
The same is true for Twitter. You would think the company would make brand new features and draw in new users, but instead they’re flocking to other apps and, as the numbers dwindle, the only way to keep the lights on is to start charging for features that were normally free.
In my car analogy, this is called gouging. For years, a charger was always free because it was meant to encourage people to stick around and shop. Yet, since no one uses it, the business model switched to fee-based. If anyone bothers to use it, at least the city can somehow make a little of the money back since it must have cost a healthy sum to install it.
Gouging is when you exploit your current users, the ones who have always stuck around, and start charging them extra fees because they are loyal. I’m one of those suckers. I paid for Twitter Blue again because I wanted to do some longer posts about my book on productivity, but now I am considering the fee all over again.
The problem with gouging and other ‘gotchas’ in business is that customers eventually figure it out. Oh, I’m just a Guinea pig for a failing company that is squeezing out a little revenue while they can since no new customers are signing up for the service. Why would they? Like someone considering an electric car, the business model that suggests you have to pay even more money to use a new product doesn’t exactly motivate you to join everyone else.
What do users really want? New features. Novel ideas. New momentum, the sense that this is going somewhere other social media apps have never gone before. Doing something new and innovative. Giving us a reason to pay for innovation.
It’s time for Musk to start acting like an entrepreneur again. Give users what they want — something for free that’s useful. Eventually, if there’s enough value and benefit in the long run, we’ll gladly start paying for it.
Otherwise we’ll just feel like we’re being…used.
