If Elon Musk was angry that people were leaving Twitter to write Notes on Substack, today’s announcement is looking to get Substack creators to write newsletters on Twitter. And YouTubers to create videos. And TikTokers. And the ‘Grammers.
Twitter revealed today that it is rebranding Super Follows as Subscriptions. Super Follows, which launched back in 2021, allowed Twitter followers to subscribe to someone in order to get access to exclusive content from that creator. Mostly, it was a way to get access to exclusive tweets from a creator.
With Subscriptions, creators can charge followers $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99 per month in order to get access to exclusive content like tweets, long-form writing, and videos up to an hour long. In order to be eligible to offer subscriptions to followers, users must meet the following criteria:
- Be 18 years or older
- Have at least 10K followers
- Have Tweeted at least 25 times in the past 30 days
Elon Musk announced that Twitter will not be collecting any of the money made on Subscriptions for the first year. He noted that creators will need to factor in the money that Apple and Google take if users subscribe on mobile:
Even Elon Musk is now offering Subscriptions for his profile, however, he says that there’s “not much to see here” and that he will be posting “this and that.” I should also mention that, while I attempted to see if I could subscribe to Musk, the button to subscribe was broken. Maybe this is the plan to make up for the lack of Twitter Blue adoption.
The launch of Subscriptions comes on the same day that PBS, following NPR, announced that it was leaving Twitter. Both organizations said that they were leaving the platform due to the “government-funded” label being applied to their accounts.
