Speaker 3
I mean, looking at all their stuff, they seem all in the communication realm of some sort, like calendar chat, you know, whiteboard. So, but it's hard. I'm struggling to see what else is like left on this list. Like, what are they going to do? Like, I want to, what's app, iMessage competitor or something like that would be crazy. That would be crazy. Maybe the other thing is they do more of the vertical strategy like what they did with ZooMyQ for sales. And there's like specific verticals around these things. I'm not saying any of these are a good idea. And then I guess thinking like, you know, look, if they really do see them, Microsoft as like, as the biggest threat they're going after that, what do they get into the collaboration doc space? Like another possible notion thing? I don't think so, but I don't know. I guess just I'm interested to see it once again, like huge props to this gear of velocity of these things. Yeah, it measures it to see just what what's next. All right. Let's move on. Buried. What do you got for us?
Speaker 1
All right. So the thing I wanted to talk about because we have Adam Fishman, who was at Patreon for a long time and knows a lot about creator economies and those kinds of things here. I just want to have a discussion about what I've seen a whole bunch of tweets. Let me see if I can figure out screen sharing here. If you were on Microsoft Teams, you would not be able to figure this out, but we could do it. So I've seen a lot of tweets like this recently from relatively large, famous, unknown Twitter accounts, which are people posting about the earnings that they're getting as like rev shares or payouts from X Twitter, whatever you want to call it. It's still Twitter to me in that they are paying back out. And I'll be honest, I don't get why Twitter would do this and who they are trying to attract or get on the platform or what problem they are trying to solve by doing this. And the reason I don't understand is I think that like Twitter has fundamentally been like in the context of, you know, Eugene Way's article status as a service or the way we talk about it is reforge as like, what are the types of value you can get from a product? Their social value, monetary, financial value, or personal value like it brings back Twitter has been built on social and personal value, meaning like I build my personal brand on this, you know, platform that allows me to do other things. And there's really a lot of value to me in that social proof. And so I don't know, like, are people really gonna tweet more X more or whatever the heck they call it? See, because they're getting paid a few thousand dollars. So Austin there has 250,000 followers. It's relatively large Twitter following. He tweets a lot. And the rev share he's getting, my understanding is it's a share of the revenue of the ads being shown in your threads, right? So and I don't know what the percentages are. It's all opaque. We can dig into it. If you know more. But I don't see how that change. And he's like, hey, I'm gonna give this away to somebody, right? Like it's just like a bonus. So my question is, is like, let's try to dig in a little on like, if you were Elon or we should none of us should try to be Elon. It's like, that's a, I don't think we can, we can, we can be that awesome of, you know, met to strategist. But like, what's he thinking? Like, what is the plan here? Like, what kinds of, what does this create for Twitter? And how does it connect to the other things that it's doing? Like, let's try to reverse engineer strategy here. Because personally, I just don't see why I would care. Like, for me personally, like this payout would probably be like six bucks. Like, just doesn't matter or move the needle. I don't even think I'm eligible. But I'm trying to figure out like what it is, like, why would one of the benefits of a subscription I pay for be to pay me back, you know, in some way, like, I'm trying to figure that out.
Speaker 2
Yeah. So we can unpack like how this model works in the first place, which is, let's do have to be a Twitter blue subscriber. Cool. You have to have, I think, something like 15 million impressions over a period of time. So it's impressive. Which most of us do not have. Sure. Um, and you cannot be making, you cannot be labeled as certain types of content. So I do not believe that people who are not safe for work or adult can monetize their impressions. Okay. So I'm sure there's more and someone will probably like at me on Twitter. And I'll never see it because I don't log in very often. But those are kind of the criteria. So I think why would you, so first of all, every social platform has some way of rewarding the creators on that platform. It is mostly rev share on ads. And it is mostly peanuts, right? And you have to have an insane amount of views in order to do that. So that's why things like Patreon exist because you get paid way more for a thousand, you know, Patriot patrons than you do for a thousand views of your thing. The second thing is what I don't see. So I see a lot of people that we follow tweeting about this Austin. I saw Salhill Bloom saying, Hey, I made 9,000 bucks. I'm not sure over what time period,
Speaker 1
but also I had 600 million impressions.
Speaker 2
So $9,000 for 600 million impressions is not very much money. CBM. Yeah. Glow like
Speaker 3
zero. Yeah. So it's like, at best, you're
Speaker 1
going to make $120,000 a year as one of the most viral like niche creators on the web. Alex Cohen, who is
Speaker 2
an internet, you know, shit poster and has like 125,000. And as a ton of engagement, Elon is commenting on his stuff. I think he made like two grand. And he said he's on Twitter, like eight hours a day. I mean, I don't know how he does his other job, but he I think he was a little joking there. But like, so the payout is not very much. The reason to do it is because Twitter has struggled to figure out what the incentive is for creators on their platform. The problem is the people we see that are sharing this are not creators that we think like Mr. Beast is not to my knowledge, screenshotting and sharing his earnings. One, it's probably a lot higher than Salhill Bloom. And two, like, you know, he's busy monetizing in hundreds of different ways. And he just doesn't care, right? It's probably a rounding error for him. But the reason to do it is to drive more in Twitter's case monetizable impressions on their platform from people. And they think that the way to do that is to incentivize them.
Speaker 1
So is the idea to bring to try to get creators who are building on other platforms, TikTok, Instagram, etc, to come to Twitter because the payouts are like more substantive? Well,
Speaker 2
here's the thing.
Speaker 1
It's really friggin hard to
Speaker 2
build following on Twitter now. Like it is really hard to grow. One, you have to pay for sure. And two, so I think it actually may be more of a stop people from leaving or keep them keep existing creators with large followings engaged than it is net new creators. Like they're not going to win the TikTok world because honestly, like TikTok's a different audience video. It's more of an entertainment platform. It's less about discussion. So they
Speaker 1
are leaning into video like one of the benefits of blue is like two hours of videos or whatever. You know, like, it seems like there's a piece of the puzzle. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think so. And I think that they're they're
Speaker 2
going to try to do a little entertainment, but that seems far far off. I mean, I think the other thing is there's a weird kind of perverse incentive here, which is if you only get paid based on the ads that you that are shown in your replies, you are going to post things that try to generate as much reply activity as possible. Yeah. And what is that trend towards? It unfortunately trends towards batshit crazy reply bait, controversial types of things, anger,
Speaker 2
know, vitriol and stuff like that. And it actually may accelerate the platforms like circling the drain sort of downward spiral. Now, I don't know, I could be totally wrong, but it just doesn't it the other the third part of this that doesn't make sense to me is creators have no idea how they're being compensated. And if you are a creator first platform, the number one thing you want creators to know is how do I actually make money and how much? Because I want that to be predictable and reliable. And I want like to be able to treat it like a
Speaker 1
paycheck. And every one of this effort in equals dollars, like how do I get to that equation? And every one of those shares is like,
Speaker 2
I made two grand. I don't know how, but here it is. I don't know what time period it's over. I don't know. So there's a lot of confusion that this was a problem with medium and how they paid creators. This is a problem. It's not a problem with YouTube because YouTube is clear. It just is a crappy rev share. But this is why things like Patreon exist because they're like, if you get a pledge, you will make, you know, 90% of this pledge every single month until someone cancels end of story. And that goes right to you. Doesn't matter how often you post. Doesn't matter. We've used you get like you get it. So it's confusing and we'll see where it goes. But right now, I'm like, not, I just, I'm not bullish on this being a attractive retention strategy. And I think Twitter's doing it because they need more volume. They need to drive ad revenue higher, because we know that that's been crippled. And they're trying to do things that are going to drive more engagement on the platform. But I think it's going to be the wrong kind of engagement. End
Speaker 1
of rate. I'm just surprised that, you know, it seems like most of Twitter's moves around monetization. Right. Subscribe the blue subscription. The, uh, some of the, I think they're doing some stuff around newsletter type stuff and those kinds of, they've registered as a
Speaker 2
money transmitter, I think, for like, paint direct payments and things like that. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1
So a bunch of those kinds of things. And obviously, like, it was an expensive purchase. There's a bunch of debt hanging over it, revenue drop. So it's just seemed odd to me to take the one thing that like is continues to monetize. There's ads and they're declining. And the God, the ad quality is got so bits. So bad on Twitter. And then being like, Hey, you know, we should do versus giveaway. Yeah. 10%, 20% who knows whatever the percentage is. Yeah. Of that ad revenue for a second order effect that may or may not show up. So I'm just trying to like figure out like if I were the person designing, like who decided this. So let's just assume it's the only like what's in his head for like the A brings B and B brings C and C makes the business significantly more successful. And like as I connect the dots, the best I can come up with is yeah, you said retention of creators. My thought was attracting Mr. Beast and stuff to do more on Twitter than they did elsewhere. But man, you got to connect a lot of dots for that to turn into more dollars. Yeah. For Twitter. So I'm just just, I don't see it yet. Yeah. I may just not be smart enough.
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I think they also only allocated something like a $5 million pool to this out the door, which is like, they're only right now giving away up to $5 million bucks. And maybe that changes over time. But like $5 million is not when you distribute that amongst all the people getting 15 million or more impressions, like it's just not it's rounding errors for a lot of these creators. So it's not going to, I don't see it incentivizing them to do more. I see maybe they'll just keep doing the same thing. But then that's not not actually serving the goal. I know which I think is keep people on the platform, keep them engaged, get more people on the platform. And yeah, it just doesn't, doesn't strike me as a as a good productive strategy for them. I do think your point, what do you think, Brian?
Speaker 3
I think your point earlier about it potentially incentivizing the wrong kind of engagement is an interesting one, which is whenever it comes to these products, the amount of second and third order effect thinking that needs to go into product decisions is just way higher than if you're a PM working on, I don't know, some B2B SaaS product. And so these ecosystems can be so complex that thinking through that second and third step ahead, it ends up being like the core part of the job. And because one, one tweak of these incentives, right? And it, you know, loop, supply wheels can work both in a positive and negative direction. They're powerful in both ways for the good and for the bad.
Speaker 1
But to Twitter's immense credit in the Elon era, I think that Twitter has notoriously allowed these second and third order effects to completely stall their ability to ship anything for a decade plus. Too worried about it. Think about the hand ringing over an edit tweet thing, you know, that just like for, who knows how long the history of Twitter has been like the number one requested thing. And it's like, well, what if this? What if that? What if this? What if that? And it turns out like, okay, just like do the superhuman style, like our Gmail style, I don't send the email for a little bit, and you can edit it. Plus, like for the first 60 minutes, you can edit it. It says it was edited and shows you the history. It turns out I was like, not that hard. You know, it is fascinating. I think you're right. It's sort of like both extremes are sketchy. So I think I prefer the one where you just go for it.
Speaker 2
But who knows where it's going to end up. Yeah. I mean, they've swung the pendulum very far in the other direction. And I think it's actually probably what was needed. If you talk about like culture shift and things like that, like, I don't necessarily agree with 100% of the stuff that's happening there. In fact, probably a lot less than 100%. But they definitely broke out of some inertia at some sluggishness that they had. They were in like molasses as a product organization. So it's fast now for sure, even if not, we're very well thought out.
Speaker 3
Yeah. I thought Nick Soman in our Slack group this morning, I thought made a really good point that the best beneficiary of a lot of this Twitter drama does not look like it's threads. It actually looks like it's LinkedIn. And I thought that was a very extreme observation because I agree with it in the sense that all of these things that you're pointing out on Twitter that are hard to do now, which is grow a following base, get eyeballs, get a distribution, like all these things are happening on LinkedIn for sure at a much greater degree. And the amount of traffic like we every forge get from LinkedIn versus Twitter is just like an order of magnitude difference at this point. Yeah. And it's just, it's interesting that observation that that all of the focus has been on this whole Twitter versus meta and threads thing. But actually, like a huge chunk of Twitter's creator base and all these different niches were very professional focused professional discussions. And a lot of that's actually moving on to LinkedIn.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I will say I feel extorted into a blue checkmark because I don't know if this is true or not, but my feeling is the same exact stuff on Twitter is getting a lot less juice, like just like, oh, to the level where like I can't even get like one reply to things that like normally, even though they were relatively niche would have stuff. Now, there's a lot of reasons that could be happening. My following could have left the platform. I don't know if that's true or not. It's maybe true. I'm not being surfaced at the level that I used to. And the claim has been that if you pay, you get surface better. So I feel extorted into buying it. That does not make me feel good. As a person who's invested a lot of time and effort and like hard work in a building of following and caring about my presence on Twitter. That said, the beauty of a network affects businesses. You can kind of suck for a long time and still be successful. Yeah, like we have no idea. It's sort of like, how much does your effort matter? Who knows? Like, maybe a little bit. It's hard to know it might take five years, but like we've seen this with Twitter is just like, I'm still there. You know, I'm using it every day. There's still interesting stuff happening there. I'm still getting some value back from it. It would take a lot for them to break it. But like the number one thing that would drive me personally to leave is if it felt like I was screaming into an empty void. And I'll just say it's starting to feel more and more like that. And I hate LinkedIn as a channel. I hate it. It's not for me. Yeah, really. I never felt my life. There's no goal. There's no goal for you. It's not my whole set. Like the beauty of Twitter is like Twitter is like a lot of weird limited places. Yeah, right. Yeah, I have like, I have like golf. I've got music. I've got professional. I can be like a whole person there in an interesting way. And LinkedIn is just like saccharin and like professional. And maybe that will change. But it means like, Oh, I gotta like think about like what this version of it is on this place. And also like my follow graph is kind of messed up. I haven't put in the effort to like build the following be a part that kind of thing. Yeah, it's just not where I've invested my time and energy. And so and what goes viral or what succeeds on that platform like gross grosses me out even more than what goes on Twitter. But like I can show up to Twitter and laugh. Like I've never laughed on LinkedIn. Like there's nothing funny about the place there are we might there might change that with the rap
Speaker 3
clip. If we post it like the we might change it. That's a good T shirts. The Rob Club is like the most LinkedIn optimized content ever. I think that's perfect. I
Speaker 2
mean, I will I will say I agree with you for read even though Twitter is not where my audience is it's it's more LinkedIn. But most of my stuff that I write is more for a professional audience. But if I want to be entertained, like I don't really use TikTok threads. I tried it. It's kind of boring. I think I just moved it into a folder on my phone. So that's the death knoll for that one. But Twitter, I like I use the four U tab and it's enjoyable. And I get exposed to interesting stuff. And I don't see a lot of the hate and the vitriol. I think because I don't follow that many people. So it's not doing too bad of a job of of keeping me entertained and engaged. But I just don't think the answer is going to be paying peanuts to creators to try to get them to post, I guess more and stuff that incentivizes people to like dunk on them or comment like I don't want to see that. Yeah.
Speaker 3
Yeah. So kind of bringing it by. So you mentioned earlier, you're right, YouTube's a rev share payment. It kind of sucks. Right. And yeah, Twitter is too. Right. So essentially we've got like two in Ben Thompson terms, we have the platforms like the patreons, for example, or the substats. And there's the aggregators like Twitter and YouTube. Is there a viable strategy for an aggregator to pay out something that is much more meaningful to creators and create a platform? Or is it just like by laws of nature of those two strategies, they have to live on the ends of the spectrum?
Speaker 2
It's a really tough one because by its nature, advertising rev shares are just not very good for creators because I don't think you have a viable business to support the amount of volume and activity and like the upload volume on YouTube and all the cost associated with that and trusted safety and like everything else, it's, it's really hard to support that on just advertising, which is why you've seen more monetization things come out of YouTube is actually probably one of the best at this right now. Even if ad rev share is not great and the algorithm makes a bunch of creators ticked off, they've launched a bunch of other stuff. They have direct payments. They have super chat. They have YouTube TV. They like, they have a lot of other ways that they're layering in monetization and they're
Speaker 1
throwing off. And creators have their own ways to monetize. Exactly. Maradish, they've probably
Speaker 2
been most successful at doing both things, but it's not because they used advertising, I think, to fuel finding other things that got creators paid better. Advertising's just not it on it by itself. So almost any one of these creators who end up reaching a certain size will introduce multiple modalities of of payment because they have teams to pay for like it takes a lot for Mr. Beast to have billions of views. He's got an army of people working for him and he's got to pay them and like he's running a business and unpredictable advertising revenues and not the way to run that business. So yeah, so that's my take. It is possible. Few have done it and done it successfully. That's what four and a half years of Patreon gets you. Lots of thought on the creator economy. Yeah. All
Speaker 3
right, everybody, that was an awesome discussion. Thank you for Reed, Adam. Thank you for everybody for listening to unsolicited feedback. We know nobody really wanted this feedback, but we gave it anyways and it was a pretty good discussion. We really hope you enjoyed it.