In what appears to be another effort to help Twitter generate revenue at the start of its Elon Musk era, the social media platform is reportedly working on paid Direct Messaging (DM), with a particular emphasis on those paid messages being sent to celebrities.
On Thursday, The New York Times published a report in which it mentioned that — according to internal documents it saw and “two people with knowledge of the work” — that Twitter was working on a paid DM feature that would allow users to send messages to celebrities for a fee. The fee structure for this feature apparently hasn’t been officially finalized yet, but The Times did note that it could be “as little as a few dollars per direct message.”
A few more details regarding the in-progress feature were also shared in the report:
- Twitter would likely receive a portion of the fees.
- It’s possible that these paid messages would “appear in a special area of the direct message inbox.” Celebrities would have to elect to receive such messages.
And as with other in-progress features, the report also noted that “there is no guarantee that the product will launch.” Whether it launches or not, the attempt to create a paid DMs feature is a clear bid to quickly generate revenue after Musk’s costly deal to buy the platform.
And it’s not the only feature geared toward creating new revenue streams: The Musk era of Twitter, which began just last week, has already seen a number of proposed/in-progress changes to the popular microblogging platform, including a revamped Twitter Blue with a new (higher) subscription price, paid verification badges, and even paywalled videos. None of these changes are live yet, but Twitter is working on them.
