Twitter has introduced a new feature that will let Blue subscribers post 10,000-character-long posts — as if the social network is trying to compete with a rival newsletter platform. Twitter has also added support for bold and italic text formatting.
In February, the social network introduced 4,000-character-long tweets for Blue subscribers to encourage people to publish longer posts instead of threads.
This company’s push for long-form writing comes at a time when Elon Musk is introducing creator monetization tools. On Thursday, he announced that creators can apply for monetization and offer subscriptions to users. For the next 12 months, Twitter will give all money to creators after paying Apple or Google their 30% cut. Post that, the Apple/Google tax will reduce to 15% and the social media company will take a smaller fee from creators.
However, Google’s terms indicate that it charges only 15% of fees on subscriptions. So it’s not clear why Musk said the search giant’s charge was 30%.
Currently, creators can offer subscriptions at per-month prices of $2.99, $4.99 and $9.99. Twitter’s rules indicate that creators need to be at least 18 years old, they need to have 10,000 active followers, and they need to have tweeted at least 25 times in the last 30 days to be eligible for monetization.
At the moment, Twitter’s monetization program is only available for users in the U.S. But Musk said the company is working to expand the program to other countries.
This monetization relaunch is essentially a rebranding of the company’s Super Follows program, which was first introduced in 2021. Musk has just added a few features like text formatting and longer videos to make it look like a new tool.
Long-form writing is also not entirely new. Last June, the company introduced a program called Twitter Notes for select writers. However, that program was shut down under Musk. After taking over the company he also killed newsletter tool Revue, a startup Twitter had acquired in 2021.
Twitter is also in a fierce battle with newsletter platform Substack, which introduced a Twitter-like feed called Notes earlier this week. In the past few days, the social network started blocking links to Substack and even disallowed replies, retweets, or bookmarks on tweets with links to the newsletter service.
When Matt Taibbi, who wrote on Twitter Files multiple times, said that he was going to move to Substack Notes, Musk charged him of being an employee of Substack (Spoiler: he’s not).
Musk also accused Substack of “trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone.” This claim was dismissed by Substack CEO Chris Best.
In February, the Tesla CEO had promised ad revenue sharing with Blue subscribers, but the feature hasn’t appeared anywhere yet.