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Steve Faktor Profile picture
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Oct 30 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
It's $4.99/month to keep your verified badge...and $499.99/month to bludgeon your enemies with it.
$20/month for verification isn't a terrible idea.

There are 360K verified accounts. If ~80% pay, that's $70M/year.

But if verification opens to all, it could easily be 10x or $700M.

But degrading exclusivity will hurt demand.

Interesting times ahead.
msn.com/en-us/finance/…
The best way to monetize Twitter verification is to turn it into a reality series, where the verified have to defend their badges - to the death - against nearly identical wannabes - live on TV, er, streamed on Twitter.
This is exactly like emergency row seats on planes. Originally, they were supposed to be for those qualified to help in emergency, now it's whatever sloppy monster has an extra $54. And those rows are always full.

#verified

At the end of the day, nobody *needs* Twitter. Twitter is a vanity project. And the egos will pay.
It's also very likely that the $20 a month verification *announcement* is a trial balloon.

First, they leaked "$4.99", then $20.

I think Elon is trying to gauge the right price, based on reaction (to calculate likely attrition/adoption).
Twitter can easily create a tiered verification pricing system, based on size of following.

Brokerages charge 1-2% based on assets managed. Substack charges 10%. As revenues go up, so do fees.

Followers is less direct, but marketing reach is valuable & quantifiable.
The advantage of a tiered verification system is there's a built-in disincentive to have fake or inactive followers, depending on how it's priced and who's paying.

At least LinkedIn might get you a job. Twitter will lose you one.

Elon isn't stupid. There will be additional perks to verification, besides ego-stroking, that will drive up the blue check value proposition. Though it will be a challenge to balance pay-to-play and perception of exclusivity.

Everyone knows the best way to monetize Twitter is to have just one verified account and sell it to the Saudis for $45 billion.
price-finding

Stephen King will be all over this Groupon.
Wrath of Twitter's NIMBYs, #TwiNBYs☑️
#TwiNBYS = (Twi)tter (N)ot (B)uying (Y)our (S)ervice*

*status or stature also acceptable.

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More from @ideafaktory

Steve Faktor Profile picture
Oct 31
There are 4 big reasons for this:

1) Our stage of development
2) Exponential technologies
3) Globalization
4) Market incentives

But there's one big caveat on the horizon...

Short thread...
1) Our stage of development

Most big infrastructure-level tech needs have been met & settled (electricity, phones, mobile, internet, etc). Ditto survival needs (food, housing, transport). Watch Shark Tank to see the flimsiness of what's left.

2) Exponential technologies

Data & digital communication is frictionless. You can acquire millions of users/customers faster than anything tethered to the physical world. This meant certain industries were immediately vulnerable, esp media/ads.

See: stevefaktor.com/inequality Image
Read 7 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Oct 29
I don't think the future is federated social networks. Complexity exceeds benefit for most.

Disrupters won't tweak the existing paradigm (posting X to Y publicly/privately) but innovate:
—mode of exchange
—content generation
—discovery
—reach
—context
—user experience
Hey Jeremiah, while there is no single use case, I'm seeing elements popping up everywhere. Some examples:

1) mode of exchange:

Clubhouse was an interesting experiment in audio-only networking.

TikTok's video reply is interesting but likely not prophetic.

In-game Discords.
2) content generation

All the new AI-generated art.

Facebook experimenting with AI-generated video.

An network of memes generated with the help of AI, alone, could bea huge hit. Memester?
Read 7 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Sep 6
Great piece by @ChristineEmba on "effective altruism" & its sister philosophy "longtermism" that absolves adherents from the messiness of helping those on earth today, liberating them to work on existential threats to theoretical citizens of tomorrow.

1/
 washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…
@ChristineEmba To be fair, there are valid counter-arguments.

1) If you created massive value & wealth, why shouldn't you be able to work on whatever projects you choose?

2) Who's to say Musk/Bezos & others aren't right? Maybe we do need some forward thinkers working on future problems?

2/
@ChristineEmba 3) Even if you don't think billionaires should exist, it would be hard to argue that political leaders of today have allocated/managed resources effectively & are better qualified to solve big problems, if they seized additional resources from effective altruists.

3/
Read 5 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Jul 6
Minimum Viable Info

The tweet below got me thinking about an interesting concept: #MVI.

Like MVP (a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers), MVI is the minimum amount of information/data/research/analysis needed to make a viable business decision.
All business decisions live on a spectrum.

At the luxury end, giant corporations can hire consultants to boil the ocean for months—for dubious certainty—before deciding or investing.

At the low end, small businesses must sink or swim w/daily, minimally researched gut decisions.
Each decision is circumstantial.

A giant duopoly, for example, may not feel threatened or has unique assets that buy it time. Others miscalculate how long they have to screw around.

MVI should gauge what level of certainty is possible, at what risk, before having to decide.
Read 5 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Jun 26
"A half-century..power play..by corporations, Wall Street, govts & central banks, has gone badly wrong...the West..now face[s] an impossible choice: Push conglomerates &..states into..bankruptcies or allow inflation to go unchecked"—@yanisvaroufakis
project-syndicate.org/commentary/inf…

1/7
"Meanwhile, governments were cutting public expenditure, jobs & services. It was..lavish socialism for capital & harsh austerity for labor."

Always interesting to read Yanis's perspective. I agree there's been a hijacking of capital & resulting concentration of power.

2/7
Where Yanis & I part ways is he believes good (& bigger) govt can counterbalance private power. Ideally, yes. But our govt is a captive/accomplice/perpetrator/enforcer of that power.

Example: he supports a govt cryptocurrency to issue money directly.

3/7
Read 7 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Jun 14
Good immigration policy isn't that hard.
1—Let in entrepreneurs, top students & educated professionals w/citizenship intent+market need
2—Laborers, market need
3—Asylum seekers, caseXcase
4—Improve nations of migrants we don't need via trade
5—Path for illegals
6—Boot bad actors
Except, nobody here seems to want a viable immigration policy.

Despite the evidence that immigration is overwhelmingly positive.
Read 4 tweets

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