Things have changed extremely quickly at Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover. Back in February, Twitter’s 280-character limit for tweet were raised for all Twitter Blue customers – they were now able to compile tweets up to 4,000 characters. Twitter has expanded its character limit to 10,000 and introduced support for bold and italics text formatting to allow content creators to break up long blocks of text.
Read: Elon Musk’s new AI company is called X.AI
CEO Elon Musk announced this change in March, a month after the initial 4,000-character increase. The extended character limit may seem excessive for most casual users, but it offers new opportunities for creators to monetize their posts. By enabling Blue users to post “hours-long videos” and rebranding Super Follows as Subscriptions, Twitter gives creators more ways to engage their subscribers.
Twitter’s decision to keep users engaged for longer periods opens up more opportunities to serve them with ads, thereby increasing the company’s revenue. However, it remains to be seen if this iteration of the subscription service will fare better than Super Follows, which never quite took off.
The new Subscriptions service allows creators to charge $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99 per month for exclusive content such as subscriber-only chats in Twitter Spaces and special badges. While Super Follows had a lukewarm reception, Musk is trying to entice creators with more favourable terms. Twitter will not take an additional cut of earnings from subscriptions for the next 12 months, and creators can expect to receive 70 percent of their mobile earnings and 92 percent of their web-based earnings after app store and payment processing fees. Musk also stated that Twitter would help promote creators’ work, although he did not provide specifics.
The expanded character limit is likely aimed at people looking to make money off their posts. It may seem excessive for casual users, as it is around 2,000 words or a lengthy essay. Nevertheless, it offers creators new ways to engage their subscribers, making Twitter more attractive to them. The decision to rebrand Super Follows as Subscriptions and offer more favourable terms suggests Twitter is committed to building a profitable creator economy.
