The reality is that as a private company, Twitter still needs to make a profit and be financially viable at the end of the day. Up till now, that has been accomplished via ads, which IMO is a poor fit. Twitter, by its very nature, has never really been suitable for direct-response ads. It's intense and combative, and often tied to something that is happening in the real world, and these people are far less likely to click on an ad, much less interact with it, because that would only yank them out of engagement with their tweets.
This is the reason why its cultural impact vastly outstrips its financial results. Not to mention that people like myself who use Tweetbot have never seen a single twitter ad in my entire lifetime.
As such, I am more convinced than ever that the best alternative for Twitter is to simply charge for access. Whether Elon Musk is doing this because he too believes it's the best step forward, or because he is desperate for a secondary source of revenue because he just alienated all his advertisers, is immaterial. Sometimes, one ends up doing the right thing for the wrong reason and as long as the outcome is the same, that's all that matters.
I feel it can work because there really is no other service like Twitter, so I believe its most fervent and ardent users will stay, and retain its followers in the process. What Musk needs to figure out next is how to convert more users to subscribe. Perhaps some soft of tiered system?
For myself, I likely won't pay because I use twitter primarily as a news feed, and rarely ever comment, and I don't really care that nobody reads them (I have basically no social media accounts, and I am admittedly a cheapskate in such areas). But if you really use Twitter enough, and have such a huge online social media presence that your tweets do move the needle, then $8 is probably fair value for the benefits you would get.
