Will 2023 bring some relief to Twitter?
Is the new year a good year for Twitter? Will 2023 bring some relief to Twitter? Twitter has more questions than answers today.
The acquisition of the social media platform by Elon Musk, has so far witnessed layoffs, content moderation plans along with a verification fee. Now the question is – will the year 2023 be different?
Twitter is constantly making news for the last year along with Elon Musk and his tweets being the epi-center of all the drama is showing a dismal future. Now in the year 2023 is not sure whether Musk is going to acquire the platform to the huge changes he brought about father the acquisition.
Calling himself the ‘Chief Twit’, Elon Musk wasted no time in making his first big move which came as the mass layoffs. Dissolving the board including the chair, Bret Taylor, Musk became the sole ‘dictator’ director.
With the firing of the top executives, including Parag Agrawal, chief executive and Ned Segal, chief financial officer along with Vijaya Gadde, head of legal, policy and trust, Musk got rid of almost fifty percent of the total workforce.
Many other changes are reportedly in the works, include setting up a content moderation council, charging for Twitter verification, and exploring an option that could permit the users to post videos behind a paywall and also one possible Vine reboot.
Pressing on monetization through many features, Musk has been pressing on monetization as per his tweet, “Twitter is losing over $4M per day”.
Musk wants to diversify Twitter’s revenue beyond advertising through a subscription-based model. Ex-Twitter Head, India, Maish Maheshwari says “More than ninety percent of the revenue today comes via advertisements, but Musk appears to look for a thriving subscription revenue line too. ”
On one hand, Musk tweets saying he wanted Twitter to be “the most respected platform of adverts”, and on the other hand global brands such as Mondelez and General Motors have hit the pause on Twitter advertising. Are the predictions of Musk not going in the right direction?
But to prove the people wrong, Musk during a recent Twitter Spaces chat, clarified that the platform’s largest advertiser, Apple, has “fully resumed” its adverts on the network. That was where Musk had tweeted one month ago in December: “Just a note to thank the advertisers for returning back to Twitter”.
Along with the sounds of turmoil, the users expect new announcements and features to be rolled out on Twitter. Refering to an internal report, Musk claims that the platform’s usage is at an all-time high. Twitter’s monetizable daily active usage (mDAU) growth is also witnessing acceleration to more than 20 percent. However, in the biggest Twitter market, India does not sho bright signs of the future of the platform.
The reports say India accounts only for a small percentage of the platform’s revenue. In the FY21 the registered entity of Twitter in India recorded Rs 86.39 crore in revenue. Nevertheless, this is merely 0.23 percent of the global revenue. Talk about the FY22, Twitter’s revenue jumped by about 82 percent which is Rs 156.75 crore, but at the same time the India entity faced a net loss of Rs 31.84 crore. Still, India remains a critical market from a user growth perspective.”
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As far as the subscriptions are concerned, it might prove to be a hard nut to crack in India. There also may be a drop seen in the number of users, since very few Indians would like to pay. But here in the Indian context, if they will be asked to pay, they would also expect the right content, otherwise, they will move away, say the experts. There are many options for the users such as ShareChat, Koo and Mastodon.
Now with new changes being announced almost daily by Musk shows hope and Twitter’s new blue certainly is going to be a space to watch out for in the year 2023.
