Last year Elon Musk purchased Twitter for a reported $44 billion dollars, and ever since users of the service couldn’t be more thrilled with the new direction.
Jokes aside, several months in it’s clear that one of Musk’s main ongoing problems is that he’s having a hard time monetizing his new purchase.
More than half of Twitter’s (TWTR) top advertisers have abandoned the platform in the months since the deal closed, as companies typically don’t want their ads for shampoo and luxury cars next to hate speech and weird conspiracy theories, which critics say is a result of Musk loosening the restrictions for who gets banned from the platform.
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As CNN reported, “monthly revenue from Twitter's top 1,000 advertisers plummeted by more than 60% from October through Jan. 25, from around $127 million to just over $48 million, according to the data. The data demonstrate the sharp decline of what was once a $4.5 billion advertising business for Twitter.”
Musk’s Latest Attempt To Monetize Twitter
Twitter’s advertising revenue is down, forcing Musk to turn to alternative routes to monetize the company, including trying to get people to pay $7.99 for Twitter Blue (a move he rescinded not long after, and then reinstated).
Now, his latest attempt to wring money from Twitter is sure to raise eyeballs, as Wired reports that the company will begin charging users for a service that used to be free.
Twitter’s API, or application programming interface, has long been used by academic researchers to access data on the conversations happening on the platform, in order to get a sense of the topics people are interested in talking about at any given moment.
But now, the academics who study Twitter’s API could find themselves priced out of the service. “According to a document sent by a Twitter rep to would-be academic customers in early March and passed on to Wired,” the service will begin three levels of Enterprise Packages to its developer platform.
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Academics Will Likely Get Priced Out Of A Key Platform
The three platforms are as follows:
- The first package gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month, or $504,000 a year.
- The second package gives access to 100 million tweets for $125,000 a month, or $1.5 million.
- The last package gives access to 200 million tweets for $210,000 a month, or $2.52 million.
Wired confirmed that several API users received emails noting that the new pricing plans will take effect within months.
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