The Verge’s Nilay Patel does his podcast interviews really well, always addressing important issues head-on with the people who have the power to solve them. So it’s no surprise that his chat with Twitter’s product chief Kayvon Beykpour had plenty of highlights. Among them, he discussed plans to allow for
recording Spaces conversations, and he mentioned “a pretty big overhaul from the ground up of
TweetDeck.”
But most surprising was the revelation that Twitter doesn’t want to make money from Super Follows. Beykpour told Patel:
For Super Follows, our goal is not for Twitter to make money. Our goal is for creators to make money. I think Twitter may incidentally participate in the transaction in some way to sort of cover our cost, but our goal isn’t to maximize revenue.
This work, just going back into the management organizational stuff, ladders up into our conversations work. And the goal of the conversations work is to incentivize conversations, to incentivize people to create conversations. So it’s just an important, subtle — but very meaningful for us — aspect of our positioning that we’d love to put as much money into the creator’s pocket as possible.
This is good news for creators, and maybe — in the face of Apple and Google already taking a 30% platform fee from many of these Super Follow transactions — Twitter felt it just wouldn’t be appealing enough for creators if Twitter took another, say, 20% on top.
But Twitter’s shareholders may have questions. After all, isn’t moving to monetising through creators supposed to be a good way for the company to grow its business and reduce a reliance on advertising?
