Twitter Should Acquire Patreon Next

Let us talk about this relationship in comparison to the platform’s newest acquisitions.

Twitter is by far my favorite social media platform, with not-so-good business models. They had a live stream platform called Periscope which ended up being an epic fail. It is the only tech giant that is yet to monopolize anything. They have been around for like 15 years and yet to become a conglomerate like what other platforms like Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are doing.

Sometime last year, I came across a tweet that suggested that Twitter should rather acquire Patreon, and it was only after they introduced a Newsletter Revue, that can also be paywalled. However, what would be acquiring Patreon look like for the company?

Acquiring Patreon Would Be Game-Changing

This is a membership platform that makes it easy for creators to get paid. The service is used by YouTube videographers, webcomic artists, writers, podcasters, musicians, even adult content creators, and other numerous categories of creators who post regularly online.

Patron allows artists to receive funding directly from their fans or directly from patrons, as they call them. Acquiring this platform will allow them to diversify their revenue stream. They already have a large community that follows and supports various content creators, and taking a standard base cut from creators’ cut, would be an ideal way to increase the revenue stream.

Twitter has never had a more accessible, innovative pure-play advertising model, and this platform can give them exactly that power to level the playing field. They must also acquire ‘Memberful’ when buying it.

The difference between the two is that Patreon is an all-in-one solution for managing your membership business. While Memberful is a membership solution, you add to your website and integrate several tools like WordPress, for example.

Memberful only work if creators drive traffic to their website and creators already use it to try to drive traffic to their sites. For example, OnlyFans creators are making use of Twitter to build an audience and drive that following to their accounts. This move can be pulled off super easy.

At the moment, it looks like most ideas that Twitter seems to be introducing are somehow, mired by mediocrity. They cannot seem to crack business innovation models that will give them a chance of growing on a bigger scale like other tech giants.

The business models in the discussion are the latest acquisition by the company, Twitter Spaces and Revue:

The Introduction Of Twitter Spaces

Twitter made four acquisitions this year alone. One notable acquisition is Breaker, a social podcasting platform. This is after people made assumptions of the platforms taking a bite out of the podcasting pie. The main aim was to use the team to build ‘twitter spaces’ to compete with Clubhouse.

This was some ‘acquire-hire’ type of a situation. They got everything, the company, the team and assets. My chat about it, is why they didn’t just buy Clubhouse? The platform is in BETA, already has the audience and the technology.

Buying the app, keeping it there and consolidating it some way onto Twitter would have been an idea. Then add massive security and report features, which is one of the main things that Clubhouse lacks — reporting a house that is fuelling hate crime discussions. Twitter is already a platform used to drive conversations, form opinions, and set the agenda. The relationship here was going to be gold.

The feature has since been delayed from launching because of changes that developers want to make. The feature to me seems to be operating fine. It was super easy to listen while I’ve switched up accounts and tweeting from a personal to a professional account. It only lacked minor things like classing Spaces in different topics, adding a mobile, app and desktop feature. Then roll it to all users and may be slightly tweaked some of the things on the interface since it seems to be blocking Reels.

Revue For Their Business Innovation Model

Twitter is yet to crack the business innovation model because everything it has done is not growing them the way. Lately, they acquired Revue, a small company like Substack and can be used the same way for newsletters. I am currently trialling this new platform, but I do, think that maybe purchasing Substack would have been a far better business move.

A relationship that probably would have been rocky since Substack would probably not want to be under twitter’s control given the company’s strict content moderation. Something that Substack is totally against. Which makes sense why they bought Revue and now set on making it work in the best way possible.

They would have built onto other business properties, which would raise their status in attempting to play on the same field as the other high tech giants. I won’t comment more on the company’s growth and why their models are not achieving results that they should be performing and how this has affected their engagement growth and revenue.

Final Take Home Points

Building a social podcasting platform from scratch is hectic, and Clubhouse has an existing balance sheet. Finding ways to profit off it was not going to be hard at all. Now the social media platform has to compete with Substack since they bought Revue for Newsletters. And they will be competing with Clubhouse with Spaces.

Directions are good, they have that, but the execution hasn’t been that good. They have a fantastic team, you can tell by the ideas that they stay tabling, and they need to use that more when making these decisions. Purchase the bigger guy that already exists and use your ideas to better him and develop him in your image.