How Twitter and the Internet Broke the News

What was most interesting to me, though, was Dorsey’s comment about helping people manage paywalls. One of the biggest challenges to the subscription economy is the tension between leveraging social media to acquire new customers — which like social media itself, requires content that is free to access — and the fact that running a business means a... See more

Given that impact, I can see why Elliott Management would look at Twitter and wonder why it is that the company can’t manage to make more money, but the fact that Twitter is the nexus of online information flow reflects the reality of information on the Internet: massively impactful and economically worthless, particularly when ads — which themselv... See more

Twitter is taking its user base, which no one publication could realistically reach or monetize on its own, and re-distributing their subscription fee across publications that no one user could ever support individually.

The problem is that there are a lot of publications in the world that would like to be supported by subscriptions, and a lot of readers in the world that would prefer to pay for ad-free content, but nobody is making a market. This is where Twitter is making its play.