Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and co-founder & CEO of Square, speaks during the crypto-currency conference Bitcoin 2021 Convention at the Mana Convention Center in Miami, Florida, on June 4, 2021.
Marco Bello | AFP | Getty Images
Twitter on Wednesday launched Super Follows, a feature that allows select users to charge others for access to subscriber-only content.
This new feature will finally allow the company’s most popular users to generate revenue from their followers, but access to Super Follows is limited.
Here’s how you can qualify and apply for access to set up your account for Super Follows.
How to qualify for Super Follows
Not everyone will be able to set up Super Follows for accounts. It’s only open to users who:
Have at least 10,000 followers. If you haven’t hit that milestone yet, you’re going to have to keep tweeting for free.
Have tweeted at least 25 times within the last 30 days. If you aren’t creating regular content, step aside.
Are based in the U.S.
Are least 18 years old.
How to apply
If you meet the qualifications, applying will be easy.
Open up the Twitter app and swipe the screen to the right to pull up a menu. Toward the bottom of that menu you will see “Monetization.”
Because I have more than 10,000 followers, I am allowed to set up a subscription Super Followers account.
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Tap on that, and then tap on “Super Follows.”
This will take you to a screen that explains how Super Follows works and how much you could earn by monetizing your Twitter account.
For example, I could earn nearly $900 a month from Twitter if I priced my Super Follows at $4.99 per month and 2% of my nearly 13,000 followers subscribed, according to Twitter. (This is purely hypothetical, as CNBC doesn’t allow reporters to earn money this way.)
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Tap on “Check eligibility” at the bottom of the screen, and you’ll be taken to a screen that shows if you qualify. If so, you can tap on the “Apply” button.
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Twitter will ask you to verify you are 18 or older, and it will ask you to complete your profile and turn on two-factor authentication for your account.
After that, Twitter will ask you what category of content you’ll be making, such as art, comedy or gaming. It will also ask you what other platforms you are on, including Twitch, Facebook and OnlyFans.
Finally, the application asks you to describe how you plan to use Super Follows. Applicants can also fill out an “About you” description of themselves and list their gender and ethnicity, although these are not required. Once filled out, users hit “Submit application.”
After the application
It’s unclear how long users have to wait to be accepted after they submit their application, but in its announcement, Twitter said that users who apply for Super Follows will join the waitlist.
Users whose applications are accepted will be able to set their subscription price as either $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99.
Once you have a Super Follows account, you’ll be able to designate every tweet as either for regular followers or for paying followers only:
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Your followers will be able to sign up by clicking a purple icon with a human and a star next to the follow button on your profile.
That’s it! Now you can finally earn some money from your Twitter habit.
Bluesky has surged in popularity since the presidential election earlier this month, suddenly becoming a competitor to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads. But CEO Jay Graber has some cautionary words for potential acquirers: Bluesky is “billionaire proof.”
In an interview on Thursday with CNBC’s “Money Movers,” Graber said Bluesky’s open design is intended to give users the option of leaving the service with all of their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.
“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.”
Graber was referring to the way millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Musk purchased the company in 2022. Bluesky now has over 21 million users, still dwarfed by X and Threads, which Facebook’s parent debuted in July 2023.
X and Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Threads has roughly 275 million monthly users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates 318 million monthly users as of October.
Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second stint as CEO, and became an independent public benefit corporation in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he is no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.
“In 2019, Jack had a vision for something better for social media, and so that’s why he chose me to build this, and we’re really thankful for him for setting this up, and we’ve continued to carry this out,” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”
Part of Bluesky’s business plan involves offering subscriptions that would let users access special features, Graber noted. She also said that Bluesky will add more services for third-party coders as part of the startup’s “developer ecosystem.”
Graber said Bluesky has ruled out the possibility of letting advertisers send algorithmically recommended ads to users.
“There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you, locking users in. That’s not our model.”
Bluesky has previously experienced major growth spurts. In September, it added 2 million users following X’s suspension in Brazil over content moderation policy violations in the country and related legal matters.
In October, Bluesky announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company has raised a total of $36 million, according to Pitchbook.
Alphabet shares slid 6% Thursday, following news that the Department of Justice is calling for Google to divest its Chrome browser to put an end to its search monopoly.
The proposed break-up would, according to the DOJ in its Wednesday filing, “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”
This development is the latest in a years-long, bipartisan antitrust case that found in an August ruling that the search giant held an illegal monopoly in both search and text advertising, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
The potential break-up would include preventing Google from entering into exclusionary agreements with competitors like Apple and Samsung, part of a set of remedies that would last 10 years.
POLAND – 2024/11/13: In this photo illustration, the NVIDIA company logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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Nvidia shares dropped in U.S. premarket trading Thursday after the tech giant’s third-quarter earnings failed to impress investors.
Shares of the chipmaker slumped 3.21% at around 5:03 a.m. ET, following the Wednesday release of Nvidia’s quarterly results, which beat on both the top and bottom lines.
Revenue came in at $35.08 billion, up 94% year-on-year and exceeding the $33.16 billion forecast by LSEG analysts. Earnings per share was 81 cents adjusted, also above analyst expectations.
Other chipmakers fell on the back of the market reaction to Nvidia’s third-quarter results. Shares of Intel, Qualcomm and Micron Technology all lost 1% or more in value, while AMD declined 0.6%.
The slump in Nvidia also had a knock-on effect on European semiconductor firms. ASML, a key chip equipment supplier, dropped 0.9%, while compatriot Dutch chip firm ASMI fell 0.5%. Chipmakers BE Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics and Infineon slipped 0.8%, 0.7 and 0.6%, respectively.
Several notable chip names were also in negative territory in Asia. TSMC, which makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units, eased as much as 1.5%. Contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn dropped 1.9%.
Why are Nvidia shares falling?
Nvidia has largely cornered the market for the high-powered chips powering the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Despite nearly doubling sales year-on-year, Nvidia’s third-quarter results showed a slowdown from previous quarters. Nvidia previously reported growth of 122% in the second quarter, 262% in the first quarter, and 265% in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said in emailed comments Wednesday that the dip in Nvidia’s share price “suggests even outstanding isn’t enough for some investors,” adding that he expects the stock to bounce back once markets open.
“NVIDIA’s generated stellar gains for shareholders over many years now, and right now it’s pretty hard to see any major holes in the investment case,” Nathan added.
Analysts are looking ahead to the much-anticipated launch of Nvidia’s next-generation chip called Blackwell. On the firm’s earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang said that demand for the chip is exceeding supply.
