Twitter Blue subscribers now have a most tweet size of 10,000 characters and assist for daring and italic textual content formatting. The announcement comes simply weeks after the character restrict for Twitter Blue was first bumped up from 280 characters to 4,000 again in February, with the newest enhance and extra formatting options seemingly designed to assist Twitter compete with publication platforms like Substack — which has just lately discovered itself in Elon Musk’s crosshairs.
This isn’t the primary time Twitter has launched long-form writing options. The corporate — beneath earlier management — was testing a brand new Notes function for writers and had beforehand bought the Revue publication agency in 2021, which served as a rival to Substack. Each of these packages have been later scrapped by Musk.
Twitter isn’t being refined about its intentions to rival providers like Substack. The corporate just lately rebranded its “Tremendous Follows” function — which permits customers to subscribe to particular person accounts to entry unique content material — to “Subscriptions,” promoting it alongside the brand new character restrict and formatting choices as a way for creators to earn revenue straight by way of Twitter. Musk additionally promised that Twitter wouldn’t be taking any money creators make by way of subscriptions for the following twelve months. Monetization by way of Subscriptions is presently solely obtainable to customers within the US.
Trying to entice creators with shiny new instruments and engaging monetization phrases is much less hostile than Twitter’s latest makes an attempt to undermine rival platforms. Final week, Twitter began to dam Substack customers from embedding tweets into their tales, later blocking nearly all engagement on tweets containing hyperlinks to Substack and flagging them as “doubtlessly spammy or unsafe.” A number of days later, Twitter walked again its throttling whereas Substack launched a brand new Notes function that added Twitter-like components to the service.
Twitter has an uphill battle to battle if it desires to shirk its legacy as a short-form running a blog platform. Whereas some creators have expressed an curiosity within the new long-form options, many on a regular basis Twitter customers seem reluctant to learn past the platform’s textual content snippets. Knowledge reported by The Data additionally signifies that Twitter Blue is struggling to draw subscribers, with the service estimated to have round 290,000 international subscribers: simply 0.1 p.c of the roughly 250 million each day lively customers reported by Twitter final yr.