Twitter will Launch Podcasting Soon for Creator Economy
Twitter's relationship with audio is confusing.
Twitter has been historically very bad at releasing new features. I don’t know how badly Twitter Spaces bombed. Twitter Spaces is where live audio conversations happen. Are you sure about that Twitter?
As Podcasting has taken Spotify to new heights, a lot of other platforms are trying it. Even Substack. That’s cute.
As Twitter continues to develop its live audio product Spaces, the platform may soon take things a step further by launching a dedicated podcasts tab on its mobile apps. Linkedin is also late to the party on all things audio.
So why should we even care? Earlier last week, both serial leaker Jane Manchun Wong and fellow reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi posted screenshots showing dedicated menu items for podcasts in Twitter’s mobile apps, suggesting that the company may be getting ready to expand into serialized audio in the coming months.
We sort of knew this without the hackers though. I’m not even sure if this can help Substack grow:
“After only a few months on Substack, we have multiple times more subscribers than we ever had during our time on Patreon, and we can see there's still lots of room for growth.”
– Berny Belvedere, Arc Digital
Twitter which was never even able to scale its global members, has done a fair job monetizing them with Ads. It’s still decent for breaking news and has a lot of journalists and some academics left. As Google search declines in favor of Reddit and TikTok by eyeballs, you have to wonder at the legacy platforms of the internet.
But can Twitter even do Podcasts? It bought Revue to do Newsletters, and I’ve barely seen anything from that avenue.
Realistically Apple and Spotify have such a lead in Podcasting, who else can compete? Twitter Spaces currently lets you record audio that followers can listen to for 30 days. That’s super well, irrelevant.
As for the Creator Economy of Twitter, well Twitter did acquire the team behind the social podcast app Breaker last year, with Breaker CEO Erik Berlin writing that the team was “continuing to build ways for people to communicate better and looking forward to the future of audio.”
Twitter is Failing the Creator Economy Mostly
In September, 2021 Twitter announced Super Follows, a feature that allows select users to charge others for access to subscriber-only content. This new feature will allow the company’s most followed users to finally generate revenue from their followers, but access to Super Follows is limited. Only users with at least 10,000 followers will be eligible for the Super Follows feature. Users must also be 18, in the U.S. and have tweeted more than 25 times in the past 30 days.
Super Follows can help people on Twitter earn monthly income from the conversations they create. You may earn a share of revenue from paid subscriptions offering your most engaged followers an extra level of access and bonus content.
I’m not sure Twitter’s headline reading crowd will be that into Podcasts. It’s relatively easy now to find Podcasts of a high quality elsewhere.
Twitter has worked on a number of podcast-like features to expand the capabilities of its live audio Spaces. Like Clubhouse, Twitter now allows users to listen to Spaces after the live recording, helping hosts earn greater engagement from a new audience of asynchronous listeners.
Many big substack writers have actually done well by monetizing their Twitter following, that list is too many to name. But there’s a noticeable relationship between Twitter and Substack. This could even make Substack an acquisition target one day for Twitter, Microsoft or somebody else.
A podcasts tab might function like a home for users to browse recorded Spaces and generate more engagement in this content; Twitter already shows live Spaces in their own tab. I don’t know enough about Twitter to imagine how this could be a winning combination.
Jane Manchun has since hidden her reveal on Twitter’s Podcasting plans. Twitter at times in 2022 feels like a ghost garden. Twitter lists used to be useful to listen in on things you were interested about, but less so today.
Twitter has yet to release any metrics for Spaces, but The New York Times reported in December that the live audio service had reached 2 million monthly active users — not bad for a service that is primarily based on live tune-in. Perhaps the NYT can one day acquire Twitter and save it from being lost as the Metaverse swallows the old internet.
The Protocol points out that turning those recordings into proper podcasts, and allowing people to subscribe to future episodes, could be a logical next step. The podcast snobs among us might note that there is a difference between a live, recorded conversation and a properly edited, sound-designed podcast, so it just sounds all a bit off to me. Audio is great when managed correctly.
The Part that I Find Most Confusing
Twitter has been wooing podcasters for some time, teaching them how to use tweets to speak to their audience, and also asking them to use Spaces as a kind of live version of their podcasts. I don’t even remotely find this appealing.
So far, the code leaks have only unveiled the presence of the tab itself, with a generic mic as the logo. Twitter and LinkedIn joining the podcasting plethora of sites isn’t going to move the needle for the Creator Economy, I don’t think. But crazier things have happend. TikTok (ByteDance) getting into podcasting would at least make sense.
While it is claimed Spaces become a staple of Twitter in 2021, even occupying the center tab on its mobile app, the growth of the live audio feature hasn’t come without setbacks. It’s certainly not a feature of Twitter I’ve been able to get into.
I don’t see how Podcasts would make things any different. For subscribers I present tips on Substack and how to monetize better at a writer, blogger and more insights about the Creator Economy.