As Elon persists with his mission to persuade Twitter that $96 per annum is a good deal, research suggests he's lucky to be getting $0...
How much is Twitter worth? I don't mean to its owners. I mean to us, the general public who feed it. Why do I ask? Well, because in the wake of Elon Musk's $8 saga, we're seeing committed subscribers calling for their hero to roll out a charge across the entire platform. That is, to directly monetise the unverified users, as well as the verified.
Or, to put it another way, Musk's righteous and not-at-all potato-brained supporters are suggesting that he attempts to charge the people who detest him... No, no - hear this out... The detesters get a reduced rate... Because, ya know, they hate his guts, and they ain't getting a badge, and they know they're THE PRODUCT, and their Tweets will get shadowbanned, and they already said they ain't givin' him eight local dollar, and even a delusional Muskolyte's optimism has to have SOME limit.
Okay, so I realise you probably need a little time here to recover from your laughing fit, so while you re-compose yourself, let's humour them. Let's imagine Elon is as simple as his worshipping acolytes, Let's imagine he wants to investigate precisely how much an uncelebrated presence on a privacy-abusing Silicon Valley silo is worth to someone who sees its owner as a total helmet. Let's help the guy out. Let's do some research. How much should Elon Musk attempt to charge people who hate him, for a cramped and breathless standing space on his treadmill of surveillance?
SMALL EXPERIMENT, BIG RESULT
Before answering the question, let's fly off on what looks like a wild tangent. This is gonna be fun... Without looking at the following Twitter accounts, see if you can guess what they have in common...
@BennySmith, @BennyJones, @BennyWilliams, @BennyPatel, @BennyPeters, @BennyDaniels, @BennyGrant, @BennyEvans, @BennyRichards, @BennyShaw, @Benny1, @Benny2, @Benny3, @Benny4, @Benny5, @Benny6, @Benny7, @Benny8, @Benny9, @Benny10, @Benny81, @Benny81, @Benny83, @Benny84, @Benny85...
Clue #1: The answer is not that their handles contain the name "Benny".
Clue #2: This relates to the value of Twitter, to us, the general public.
Clue #3: I selected all of those usernames at random. I started with the name "Benny", then added likely suffixes and took a quick look at each account. The 25 accounts listed above were not distilled from a larger list. They were literally the first 25 I investigated. And when I viewed these 25 accounts, selected at random and without prior knowledge, they all had one thing in common.
Clue #4: Nearly every account you see during regular use of Twitter does not share this trait.
What do the 25 accounts have in common?...
Did you guess?...
Every single one of them is inactive.
Think about that for a moment. I selected 25 Twitter usernames off the top of my head, and when I viewed the accounts, none of them had Tweeted in the past year. Extrapolating some statistics based on that, we can expect that the number of inactive accounts on Twitter roundly dwarfs the number of active accounts.
And it's not a freak result. Try the same experiment with other random, likely-to-exist usernames, and you'll see a similar picture. The vast majority of Twitter accounts are inactive. When we view the platform from the usual perspective, it appears that active accounts form the majority. But this is just an illusion caused by the discovery mechanism. By nature, Twitter feeds us with active accounts, so we don't have to go round knocking doors to see if anyone's home. Only when we escape Twitter's active account bias, do we see that nearly all of its homes are empty.
I'm calling this the Benny Test, after the first name that came into my head when I devised the experiment.
CONCLUSION
Despite Elon Musk's desperate bid to squeeze $96 a year out of a bunch of mugs he considers to be the product, the market rate for an account on a surveillance-driven Silicon Valley silo remains at $0. And given that Twitter's inactive users dramatically outnumber its actives, we can safely conclude that FREE is too expensive for the overwhelming majority.
I leave you to ponder what might have been if the great Elon Musk had hired Yours Truly to do the Benny Test for him back in early spring. Ah, the money and stress you could save by hiring a sulky-faced and ever-dissatisfied researcher at the right moment...