Sorry, Elon: The Masses Probably Won’t Pay for Social Media—But I Will

If the self-proclaimed Chief Twit sticks to his plan, the company’s not-super-popular Twitter Blue premium subscription will soon cost $8 a month, up from $5. Mr. Musk also indicated that user verification, now provided gratis for accounts of public interest, would be rolled into the subscription program. Don’t pay within 90 days? It could mean bye-bye, blue check mark.

Mr. Musk is just the latest social-media chief looking to ramp up monthly income.

Snap Inc.

SNAP -3.98%

and

Meta Platforms Inc.,

META -1.80%

parent of Facebook and Instagram, recently added subscription offerings in their apps.

Microsoft Corp.’s

MSFT -2.66%

LinkedIn has long had one.

In addition to generating more money with changes to Twitter Blue, Mr. Musk is also planning to cut costs at his new company. Twitter told employees it would notify them about head-count reductions on Friday.

Now, remember: Social media has never been free. We pay for these services with our time and data. The more time we spend, the more data companies get, the better the targeted ads we see, the more money the platforms and their advertisers make. None of these companies is looking to ditch that ad-centric business model—they’re just itching to be less reliant on it. 

Meta and Snap, specifically, have been hit hard by the decline in the online-ad business, which has been dinged by a weakening economy and

Apple’s

ad-tracking changes, which make it more difficult to gauge an advertiser’s return on investment.

But most of us don’t care about the company’s bottom line, we care about our own. I’ll pay for social-media tools for the same reason I just paid $4 more for higher-quality dog-poop bags: I get value from it. But that’s a hard sell for people who don’t spend every waking moment on a platform (i.e., nearly everyone else).

“You can’t just take current free products and, say, hey, now we’re going to start charging you,”

Tom Dibble,

chief executive of Aria Systems, a company that provides a cloud-billing platform and expertise to subscription businesses. “It’s got to be a premium version of what people were getting.”

Social-media companies need to offer a better product, either with access to more stuff or less of the annoying stuff, like ads. My review of the current social-media subscription options shows it will take a lot to get the Average Joe—and not just Power User Paul—to pay up.

More tools

Before you say, “I’d rather spend my money on a pet tarantula than social media,” just look at LinkedIn.

If you’re hiring or looking for a job, few things can be more useful than LinkedIn’s Premium tier, which costs $39.99 a month. It lets you message those outside your network, see who viewed your profile, access thousands of learning courses and more. Not everyone pays full price, mind you. Many expense the cost, and there are various discounts and free offers.

Snapchat+, Snap’s $3.99-a-month plan that launched in June, also offers a lot of extras. You can set custom expiration times on your story posts, and custom notification tones for different users. And the company keeps adding new features.

In an interview last month at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference, Snap Chief Executive Evan Spiegel told me he was pleased the company had already gained 1.5 million subscribers, but realistic about the fact that this was a niche product for people who are “really passionate about Snapchat.”

That’s me, except on Twitter. I check it…always. I’ve built a following there, and I use it to connect with readers and others in tech. Which is why I’ve been paying the $2.99 launch price for Twitter Blue since November 2021.

I’ve enjoyed having special access to the edit button to tweak tweets after I’ve posted, and I use the bookmark tool to save tweets. Now, with the price hike, Mr. Musk says Twitter Blue will include the ability to post longer videos and half as many ads. And while I side with Stephen King in the belief that verification should not be a paid feature, I do like my blue check mark.

I’ll likely keep paying for Twitter Blue, even at $8, but no higher. There’s a club of people who will pay—even many now complaining to the “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator.” (Yes, that’s Mr. Musk’s current Twitter bio.) But can a handful of Twitter addicts really move the revenue needle? Probably not.

More content

If you’ll pay for

Netflix,

HBO Max and

Disney

+, will you also pay for your favorite fitness-advice videos on Instagram?

Earlier this year Meta launched Instagram Subscriptions, where creators on the platform can charge anywhere from $1 to $100 a month for exclusive content, including stories. The company launched Facebook Subscriptions in 2020, which works similarly. For now, Meta doesn’t take a cut. Mark Zuckerberg said any revenue sharing that does come would be less than the 30% made standard by Apple and others.

TikTok rolled out a similar subscription feature and YouTube, too, offers channel subscriptions.

The Washington Post reported that Twitter is also working on a paywalled-video feature that would let creators charge users to view content. Twitter hasn’t responded to my repeated requests for comment on this and other issues discussed in this column.

More privacy

For many, the dream is paying a monthly subscription to stop all the data hoovering and tracking by social-media apps. And it shall remain a dream. 

When I asked Mr. Spiegel about the possibility people could pay for a less data-hungry version of Snapchat, he said no, because Snapchat needs the data to personalize its service. “I think platforms will continue to find ways to collect data in a privacy safe way and use that data to make great recommendations,” he said.

Bottom line: Your data is worth more than your dollars—but now these companies want both. And that’s why saying “Nope” to a social-media subscription will likely be the easiest financial decision you’ll make in the coming years.

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Write to Joanna Stern at [email protected]