John Coogan

𝕏 is offering $1 million for the top article posted on the platform in the next two weeks. Nikita says, “It’s time to write,” but also “Please bear with Article Armageddon.” What’s the strategy here, and what will the outcome be? It’s sort of crazy that Twitter (launched in 2006) lasted so long before making any real changes to its posting format. The expansion to 280 characters happened a full decade later in 2017. Even though it’s always been an important watering hole for tech power players, Twitter never captured all the value it created. Tons of businesses grew by exporting audiences from Twitter to other platforms (although this also happened on LinkedIn and elsewhere). The Elon acquisition feels like the biggest turning point in product strategy, but there were a bunch of projects in the works before Twitter became 𝕏 that launched post-acquisition (Community Notes was the big one). The previous management team had acquired the Dutch newsletter startup Revue, but the product was shut down within 2 years. 2023 was a big year for expanding character limits. February took it from 280 to 4,000, April expanded it to 10,000, and finally in June they maxed it out at 25,000. That’s longer than most blog posts, and you can still thread them together. So the launch of “Articles” in March 2024 didn’t really hit for me. It was sort of nice to have more formatting options, but it didn’t feel super necessary. Last year, I started writing daily op-eds for the TBPN newsletter and cross-posting them to 𝕏. These pieces are usually closer to 5,000 characters, so they fit fine in a long post. I stuck to long posts until earlier this year when Lulu dropped “Standing Out in 2026” as an 𝕏 article. The piece is short, 443 words, 2,762 characters. It easily could have been a long post or a thread, but it did really well from a distribution standpoint, so I thought it might be worth revisiting posting pieces as articles. Based on the first two weeks of the year, I think my writing does equally well as an article rather than a long post. The title and thumbnail are way more important for posting Articles, so there’s something to optimize there, but I’m generally happy with the experience. Strategically, the big article push reads as another shot at Chris Best’s company, but owning your email list directly and being able to monetize with a variety of subscription tiers is too important to really get anyone to focus purely on 𝕏 as a writing outlet without building another platform up. Maybe that’s coming later this year. 𝕏 has subscriptions already, but without a real direct line between subscribers and publications, it feels hard to imagine any serious writers going all-in on 𝕏. At the same time, does 𝕏 even need writers to go all-in? 𝕏 just needs good content, so if it incentivizes more people to bring content from other platforms to the timeline, 𝕏 could benefit from that alone. People always seem grumpy with 𝕏 generally, or Nikita specifically, but I’ve always felt that any sloppy algorithm changes sort themselves out pretty quickly. If you ever really get sick of the For You page, you can always use 𝕏 in the browser and use an extension like Social Focus to hide everything but the Following tab. The revealed preference is that everyone still loves the Internet’s Dive Bar, and even if the timeline gets a little sloppy during the Article Apocalypse, it’s no worse than an annoying chart-topper getting overplayed at your local spot. You might step out for a smoke break, but you’ll be back.

𝕏 is the Internet’s dive bar. The drinks have always been cheap, the bathroom faucet perpetually broken, and the whole place has changed ownership multiple times at this point. Ultimately, it’s where groups of friends go to hang out regularly, and that aspect compensates for its rough edges. But you can’t act surprised when a fight breaks out. The 𝕏 timeline is in turmoil over unexpected changes to creator payouts. But I don’t think it’s as bad as it seems. Twitter launched in July 2006, and for 17 straight years, we all posted for free. Sure, people made money by promoting their companies, building newsletters, or pumping their bags, but no one was directly getting paid to post. That changed in July 2023, when the first creator revenue sharing program rolled out. YouTube has shared ad revenue since 2007. It’s crazy Twitter made it to 2023 without following suit. The YouTube Partner Program has been a huge success — you basically make no money when you’re small, but once you figure out how to make interesting videos, you pretty much always get paid, which becomes the budget to level up your content. There are certainly YouTube channels that exist solely to game the algo, but for most serious creators, the Partner Program hasn’t distorted the platform in a negative way. Posting tweets is very different from making YouTube videos. There’s no production value. A tweet that takes five seconds to think of and post can get hundreds of millions of views. That just doesn’t happen on YouTube. The bar for quality is so high over there that getting that many views on an unscripted selfie video with no budget basically never happens. The ability to have no budget and still become popular on Twitter has always made it feel like a local dive bar. There are different little tables where people huddle and feel safe to talk about whatever they want. People like that it doesn’t feel corporate, even though basically all of tech sees it as the most important social network for their business. So how should monetization work on 𝕏, the everything app? I actually think it’s extremely on-brand for payouts to be highly subjective and variable (basically the opposite of YouTube). I’ve always enjoyed that Elon responds to random posts with the laugh-cry emoji. It feels like the chef making the rounds to chat with diners. It’s electric when it happens. YouTube drives enough watch time and ad revenue that it actually maths out to have tons of niche channels making a few thousand a month. But 𝕏 hasn’t yet figured out how to show the same level of unskippable video ads on a viral post to justify stable payouts. So why even try? Keep it random. Keep it chaotic. Keep it fun. Put the slot machine in the corner of the dive bar. Patrons will throw a quarter in every couple weeks just to feel something.

Podcasting has little to do with profit. Podcasting is about domination of the spirit. TBPN is hiring a social media manager. - You must love tech and business. - You must join us in Hollywood. - You must dominate every platform. Email [email protected]