Is It Doomed Idea To Charge Twitter Users Per Tweet to Stop Bots?

How much would you be willing to pay to be able to tweet? The chief strategy officer of Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world that contributed $500 million to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media network, implicitly posed that question.

It emerged from the nascent but mostly unproven concept of Web micropayments and the bot issue Musk has dubbed endemic on Twitter.

Since it became clear that the internet was replacing their ad sales, media companies have been pitching the idea of charging users a small fee to access content — pennies or even fractions of a penny — and musicians, authors, and other content creators have dreamed of it as a means of escaping the producers and publishers who take a large cut of the revenue their works generate. Numerous attempts at it have generally failed.

In an interview with CoinDesk TV on Tuesday night (Nov. 1), Binance CSO Patrick Hillmann brought up the idea of using “probably the most prestigious” Web2 platform as a “sandbox to start to be able to be able to take apart some of the challenges that we’ve seen… in the Web2 space, and maybe start to address these issues with Web3 solutions.”

Such as, Hillman said, “using a payments system in order to create a very small microtransaction that the average user would have no problem bearing the cost but would make it extraordinarily expensive for the bot community to be able to sustain.”

The Price:

Let’s dissect it.

By 2028, Musk hopes to retain and increase Twitter’s current worldwide user base of about 400 million users by a factor of five.

Musk’s desire for Twitter to develop into a payments network has also been rather obvious. This is based on a lot of things, including his past as a co-founder of PayPal, where the world’s wealthiest man gained his first significant fortune, as well as some of the primary objectives he has outlined.

Among other things, WeChat is a major participant in China’s highly developed digital payments business, where it shares the market with AliPay by more than 90%. Musk has said that he wants to make Twitter into a Western equivalent of WeChat. For example, Musk has said that by 2028, he wants advertising to contribute less than half of Twitter’s earnings, down from virtually all of it now. What other income source than payments might do that is unclear.

To start, it entails encouraging all Twitter users, both new and old, to set up some form of digital wallet.

Pennies may be divided into fractions in digital wallets and online accounts without the hassle of setting up a cryptocurrency wallet, despite Musk’s support of cryptocurrencies like dogecoin and bitcoin for payments.

However, it does include persuading as many Twitter users as possible to give the social media site access to some of their financial information, including their spending habits. Additionally, requiring them to use a portion of those monies, even if it just amounts to a few cents, to create each tweet, won’t help.

According to Musk, bot management and eradication is more of a technological and content moderation concern than a justification for making money, even if it’s a little amount.

Digital Wallets Face Challenges:

The fact that Musk’s Twitter wants users to utilise their accounts as virtual wallets is another problem.

According to PYMNTS’ August report, “Mobile Wallet Adoption: Apple Pay @8: Still The Big Fish In A Small Mobile Wallets Pond,” both Apple Pay and Google Pay have had a difficult time succeeding in the United States, with leader Apple Pay’s actual market share of in-store payments under 3% despite having nearly half of all mobile wallet payments.

Despite indicators of increased acceptability and a higher-than-expected participation rate of 23% of Americans in the crypto market, in-store cryptocurrency payments still account for a very small portion of sales.

Offering such payment options may potentially attract more users, but charging for them is unlikely to have the same impact.

Not that that is even likely to occur, mind you. Musk is familiar with the payments sector, for starters.

Additionally, according to Hillman, Musk’s staff has made it quite clear that Twitter will “be his baby.”

For Binance, the investment is “all about getting crypto at the table, getting Web3 in the right meetings, in the right discussions to see what’s potentially viable,” he said.

It’s a very safe bet that Twitter’s primary issue won’t be solved by charging users even a little amount of money.