The logo and trading symbol for Twitter is displayed on a screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, July 11, 2022.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Twitter recently launched a new feature that lets its Blue subscribers tweet up to 10,000 characters in messages that will also support bold and italic formatting.
The new features allow for much longer-form writing that’s more similar to an essay than the short snippets of text that defined Twitter for years. Twitter had a 140-character limit for years, before doubling it in 2017 to 280 characters.
Twitter Blue is the company’s subscription product that offers more features than the free version, including a blue checkmark. It costs $8 per month if you sign up through Twitter.
“We’re making improvements to the writing and reading experience on Twitter! Starting today, Twitter now supports Tweets up to 10,000 characters in length, with bold and italic text formatting,” the Thursday announcement read. “Sign up for Twitter Blue to access these new features, and apply to enable Subscriptions on your account to earn income directly on Twitter.
Twitter is also expanding its monetization options, allowing users to subscribe to their favorite content creators in exchange for subscriber-only content. The subscriber-only model is similar to offerings from services like Substack.
Musk said that creators would receive the lion’s share of subscription income.
“You will receive whatever money we receive, so that’s 70% for subscriptions on iOS & Android (they charge 30%) and ~92% on web (could be better, depending on payment processor),” the Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX CEO tweeted. “After first year, iOS & Android fees drop to 15% and we will add a small amount on top of that, depending on volume. We will also help promote your work. Our goal is to maximize creator prosperity.”
Musk also launched a subscription product for his own account, charging users $4 a month to view his private subscription-only Tweets.