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Twitter has increased tweet length to 10,000 characters and added support for bold and italic text formatting for Twitter Blue subscribers. The move further pushes the 4,000 character limit that the platform rolled out in February to encourage people to put longer posts instead of creating threads.
However, the real reason for Tweets getting significantly longer might just be something else. Elon Musk is also pushing for creator monetisation on the platform. He also announced on Thursday that creators can now offer their followers subscriptions of any material from “long-form text to hours-long video”.Â
Additionally, for the next 12 months, Twitter will keep none of this money. This means that after paying Google or Apple their 30% app store cut, creators will get everything that’s left. After that, as app store cuts drop down to 15%, Twitter will also take a small fee from creators. That said, Google already charges 15% fees on subscriptions, so it’s not quite clear why Musk stuck with the 30% fee.
Regardless, creators can offer subscriptions in three tiers — $2.99, $4.99 and $9.99 and have to be at least 18 years old, have 10,000 active users and need to have tweeted at least 25 times in the last 30 days to be eligible for monetisation.
It’s worth pointing out that all these changes aren’t exactly new to the platform. The creator monetisation is also just a rebranding of the social media network’s Super Follows program, launched back in 2021. Musk has since just extended the capability of the program by adding the ability to tweet longer (including longer videos) and text formatting.
Twitter’s also fighting Substack, a newsletter platform that introduced a Twitter-like feed called Notes earlier this week. Musk reportedly went as far as blocking Substack links on Twitter and even blocking replies, retweets and bookmarks on any tweets with links to Substack.
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