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Archives for May 2023

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Linda Yaccarino has resigned from NBCUniversal, clearing the way to take over Twitter soon.

On Thursday night Elon Musk said he’s hiring a new CEO for Twitter who will start in about six weeks, but didn’t name them. That’s apparently because the reported selection, Linda Yaccarino, was preparing a presentation for advertisers at her existing job with NBCUniversal.

Now NBCUniversal announced Yaccarino has resigned, so we may not have to wait six weeks to get the news officially confirmed.

Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, is also an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.

Elon Musk has found his replacement as CEO of TwitterElon Musk has found his replacement as CEO of Twitter
Emma Roth, Mitchell Clark and 1 more
Thomas Ricker
Thomas Ricker
“Try it but don’t trust it,” is good advice for all of Twitter.

DMs are untrustworthy and flawed, like the service itself in 2023.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
“Starting today.”

In March, we wondered why no one could find any mention of the Twitter ad revenue split Elon Musk had advertised a month earlier as a reason to buy Twitter Blue.

Now, while saying that Tucker Carlson hasn’t signed a deal with Twitter for his new show, Musk acknowledged Twitter is “still working on the software” to make the split happen. He didn’t mention whether any subscribers will get their $8 per month fees refunded.

Elon Musk on Twitter, “I also want to be clear that we have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever. Tucker is subject to the same rules & rewards of all content creators. Rewards means subscriptions and advertising revenue share (still working on software needed for latter), which is a function of how many people subscribe and the advertising views associated with his content.”
Top message, Elon in February, bottom message, Elon Musk today.
Image: Twitter
Jacob Kastrenakes
Jacob Kastrenakes
Twitter plans to wipe out inactive accounts.

According to Elon Musk, at least, who has a habit of declaring Twitter policies that he does not follow through on.

This one could have big repercussions, though, and Musk didn’t provide clarity on what qualifies as being inactive. Does that mean no logins? No tweets? What happens to now-inactive icons like @Horse_Ebooks?

It’s probably a good time to fire off a tweet on your burner, just in case.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Not all of the Twitter Blue subscribers are sticking around.

Citing data scraped by independent researcher Travis Brown (you can have a look at his setup on Github), Mashable reports, “Out of about 150,000 early subscribers to Twitter Blue, just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30.”

Brown says his process gets data for about 90 percent of Blue subscribers. We’ll see if Elon ever releases any official numbers regarding the subscription to confirm or refute what’s accessible and estimated via scraping.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
If nothing else works, try threats.

Just as Twitter extended an olive branch to the MTA with free API access, Elon Musk emailed an NPR reporter threatening to reassign the outlet’s account.

The NPR stopped posting last month after Twitter tried adding account labels indicating it was controlled by the government.

Twitter’s own rules indicate an account is active as long as someone’s logging in, not whether they’re posting. But, those rules also used to use NPR as an example of an account that didn’t fit the criteria of a “state-owned” media organization. Things change.

Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
The best takedown of Elon’s plan to let publishers charge per-story you’ll read.

Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab, summing up Elon barging in to two decades of conversation about media micropayments. (emphasis mine):

Nearly all news sites will let a random web user read a story (or two, or five) for free. It’s only after a given number of clicks that the wall goes up.

If you want to think of that as “news sites already offer micropayments for those first five articles — they’ve just set the price at $0,” be my guest. And for those times when someone really wants to read just one article, that free allotment allows all the paywall workarounds that the savvy digital news consumer knows about. (We’re all adults here; we can talk about incognito windows.) If most paywalls aren’t that hard, there’s little pressure for a paid product to get around them on a single story.