In the past many years, moving the ideas and trends of Silicon Valley to the domestic market, that is, "Copy to China", is undoubtedly one of the classic models of entrepreneurship for many domestic Internet people, such as Taobao for eBay, QQ for ICQ, Baidu for Google, and Weibo for Twitter. However, time has passed, and with the gradual maturity of the domestic Internet industry, the past "Copy to China" has evolved into today's "Copy from China".
After Musk joined Twitter, it seems that he has been worried about making money, and after successively launching paid blue V authentication, considering selling usernames, introducing payment functions and other ways to create new revenue streams, he is now ready to follow Weibo's example to crack down on third-party clients.
A few days ago, Twitter announced through its developer account that it will no longer provide free access to the Twitter API from February 9, 2023, and both v1.1 and v2 versions of the Twitter API will all be converted from free to paid use, and the specific charging method will be shared in more details in the future.
Twitter said that the platform adds hundreds of millions of tweets every week, Twitter's data is also one of the most powerful data sets in the world, and it will continue to work to achieve fast and comprehensive access, and allow partners to build more interesting content with the help of Twitter platform's users and data. The implication is that Twitter still welcomes everyone to become a partner, but not everyone can become a partner, but you need to pay for access to the relevant interface.
Combined with the fact that in early January this year, Twitter clients of multiple third parties such as Twitterific, Tweetbot, and Talon suddenly did not work, and requests sent to the Twitter API through them were not processed, resulting in users of these apps being unable to refresh tweets. Twitter then updated the terms of the developer agreement and added a new rule that developers may not use Twitter-related materials or access licenses to create alternative to Twitter applications or provide similar services.
Considering that Twitter has once blown the idea of charging by the number of requests, according to the current speculation of third-party developers, it will most likely charge according to the number of requests that third-party applications use the Twitter API interface in the future, and charging per number is almost equivalent to closing the door for individual developers and even small and medium-sized teams developing third-party clients. Now it seems that Twitter is finally "trying to see the dagger", following Weibo's example and starting to "kill the hand" on third-party clients.
In fact, even in the days when Twitter's founders mastered the platform, Twitter did something similar. Back in 2010, Twitter launched its first API terms of use after acquiring the acclaimed third-party client Tweetie and using the latter directly as an official app, and immediately shut down non-compliant third-party services without warning.
However, unlike Weibo, Twitter's third-party client can be said to have played an inestimable role in its development process. Although Twitter was founded in 2006, when the mobile Internet was booming, in the first few years, it was not a website or a software, but Twitter, known as the "Internet short message service", was originally a user service that displayed the user's timeline, a graph service that tracked the user's relationship network, and a publishing service that published tweets, which was the sum of this series of microservices.
Such a top-level design determines that before 2010, the architecture of Twitter's microblog network is very distributed, in which the official operation of the Twitter service and the Twitter website, while the third party develops desktop and even mobile applications. However, the core problem brought about by Twitter's reliance on third-party clients is that advertising-based commercial monetization will not be carried out smoothly, after all, the basis of commercialization is to control the user interface, and only in this way can it have the power to push ads to users.
Whether or not third-party developers hinder the commercialization of Twitter in the future, it is responsible to say that in the early stages of Twitter, the contributions of third-party developers are the key to making the Twitter community stand out. However, the biggest problem of third-party clients is that they block Twitter's profitability, and these users can neither see the official Twitter advertisements, nor pay for value-added services such as Blue V, so if a large number of users turn to third-party clients, it will inevitably have an impact on Twitter's revenue.
Today, under Musk's leadership, Twitter has only one core goal, that is, to turn a profit. In order to erase the average daily loss of $4 million, Musk even carried out "Thanos-style" layoffs, but could not resist the "retreat" of various advertisers, it is reported that half of its largest 100 advertisers have stopped advertising, which has brought hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue losses. To this end, Twitter had to launch the "largest advertiser incentive program ever", giving away additional impressions on top of the purchased impressions.
In other words, in order to regain the favor of advertisers, Twitter will inevitably give advertisers a brighter number in the main indicators of advertising investment such as exposure, and higher exposure in addition to more accurate recommendations and better content, the simplest and most crude way is to expand the user base and let more users see ads. So it's no wonder that there is a view that Musk has almost learned the "routines" of Weibo.
In addition to making money, this time Twitter raised the API fee threshold, which may also satisfy Musk's "selfishness" to a certain extent. Previously, in May last year, Musk believed that Twitter's "junk account" accounted for more than 20%, and said that he would reconsider the acquisition for this reason. For a long time since then, Musk has conducted several rounds of negotiations with Twitter on the issue of "fake accounts", which also provided it with data such as daily active accounts, tweets, APIs and so on.
Since automated posting bots have a close relationship with third-party APIs, after all, various intelligent Twitter bot accounts need to use official APIs to achieve relevant functions, so Twitter is now tightening API licensing, which means that this problem may be solved to a certain extent. Reducing the proliferation of false information may also strengthen advertisers' confidence in Twitter.
Therefore, under the principle that "Ma's Twitter" looks at money all the time, Twitter's unloading and killing of donkeys this time is obviously not surprising.
[The picture in this article comes from the Internet]