Elon Musk's Twitter May Fast Track Paywall For Videos

As the world was debating about Musk's plan to charge $8 per month for a Twitter Blue subscription that is also tied to the verified account status, the billionaire dropped a few words about "rewarding creators" using that money. "Absolutely essential. Creators need to make a living!" Musk responded to a tweet talking about creator payments. But the biggest questions are how exactly to reward creators, what to reward them for, and where they are monetizing their work.

Twitter already has a tipping feature in place, and then there is the Super Follow feature that lets Twitter creators post content that is paywalled behind a monthly subscription fee. Well, it appears that Musk has an entirely different plan for monetizing content — or, to put it more clearly, paid videos.

According to internal communication material seen by The Washington Post, Musk has tasked a team with urgently shipping a feature that will let users post videos that can only be unlocked after paying a fee. A creator can post up to four media files per tweet and can charge a fee to view only some of them or the entire bundle. The paywalled video plans have reportedly been given a window of one to two weeks for rolling out to users. On a related note, Musk is also overhauling the paywall and ad-free article reading model for publishers that participate in the Twitter Blue program. Ad-free stories are gone, and not every newsroom is willing to pay for reporters' blue checkmarks.

As per the latest Twitter revelations covering the light-speed product development pace under Musk, creators may be able to put a fee of $1, $2, $5, or $10 on the media they share on Twitter. It is unclear if Super Followers will get any fee relaxation for these paywalled videos because they have already paid to follow and see a content creator's exclusive tweets. For folks unwilling to pay, they will still be able to retweet or like the Twitter post. 

Twitter's team is reportedly concerned that the feature might be exploited to steal and post copyright content, which could very well land Twitter in a legal puddle for potentially facilitating the illegal posting of copyright-protected content. It is unclear how moderation will be handled for paid videos internally, but the feature could very well be abused to spread child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the platform. Twitter already stands out among its social media peers for allowing sexually explicit content, and it appears that with Musk's paywalled video plans, Twitter is going right after OnlyFans to fix its coffers. 

According to an Axios report, OnlyFans is anticipating $2.5 billion in revenue for 2022, which may be around 2.5 times the interest Musk needs to pay bankers (via Bloomberg), not to mention more than double Twitter's quarterly ad revenue figures. Plus, creators might find it easier to hawk their content on Twitter where they already have a presence, instead of making their way to a new platform like OnlyFans.