Why Twitter Can’t Make Money Charging a Subscription Fee

Twitter comes in a respectable second place amongst social media firms with a very respectable 336 million worldwide active users (67 million in the United States) falling behind only Facebook, which tops the charts at 2.27 billion (242 million in the United States). However, despite being about one-seventh the size of Facebook, Twitter pales in comparison financially. Twitter’s market cap sits at $24.55 billion, compared to Facebook’s $426.8 billion. Facebook’s revenue for the 12 months prior to September 2018 was $50.1 billion compared to Twitter’s paltry (relative to massive Silicon Valley tech companies at least) $2.87 billion.  While Facebook’s ownership of Instagram (and its 1 billion users) certainly helps, the close…...