Tip Jar: Twitter incorporates a 'boat' to tip our favorite users

Options to send your own through Tip Jar in the profile of a user of the social network.OFFICIAL TWITTER / Europa Press

On Twitter, it is common that after launching a viral tweet its author includes a PayPal account or other payment services to try to obtain some financial help from his followers. Another way to get paid for work is to add a link to Patreon, a crowdfunding website for creative projects. Now, the company has decided to make it easier for content creators to finance their projects through the social network and since this Friday it has launched Tip Jar (literally,

tip jar

), which is available to some users on a trial basis.

Twitter has been studying ways to integrate monetization options within its services for some time, although, for now, it will not obtain direct benefits, since it will not charge a commission with each operation. This new option aims to make the platform more attractive for those who try to earn a living through the social network. Payments can be sent from personal profiles and, in the case of Android users, also from Spaces, live voice chat rooms created in the image and likeness of Clubhouse. The payment services available will be those of the Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo platforms.

The operation is still somewhat complicated.

For now, the only way to access Tip Jar is to enter a user's profile biography and, if the service is activated, contribute the tip by clicking on an icon next to the direct message icon.

In this way, contributing money to an outstanding tweet is going to require more effort than simply

liking

or

retweeting

.

And not only from an economic point of view.

Today we're introducing Tip Jar, a new way for people to send and receive tips.

🧵 https://t.co/UcPV27oHR1

- Esther Crawford (@esthercrawford) May 6, 2021

Until now, the social network has been completely free, supported by advertising. Recently, it emerged that the company is working on a new business model that involves subscription. However, they are also known to be exploring the possibility of including a subscription to a

premium

service

with extra features and without advertising, which would include customizing profiles or a payment model to access Tweetdeck, the company's account management console. .

Another of the company's ideas is the SuperFollow, announced at the end of February, which offers users for five dollars a month the ability to charge their followers to access additional content such as exclusive tweets, private groups, paid newsletters, badges that reflect that the user is financially supporting others.

Presumably Twitter is going to take a commission of that rate, in what is a line of business similar to that of Patreon with exclusive content.

More information

• The reinvention of Twitter

Until a few months ago Twitter has been a rather conservative platform, to which a certain immobility has been attributed. A bubble of "relevant people such as politicians, authorities, journalists and technologists linked to the present," in the words of the specialist in networks Ana Aldea. However, in recent months it has launched several projects to grow, conquer the younger audience and gain profitability. This change of course has led him to bet on audio, newsletters and scheduled content.

The first of these recent bets was Spaces, born in December 2020, and which works exactly like Clubhouse, the application that turned to audio to create a kind of controlled sound chat without text, or photos and videos. A month later, Twitter announced the acquisition of Revue, a tool that allows you to generate and send newsletters (

newsletters

, in English) to subscription lists, and earn money through a payment service incorporated into the platform. A third movement was announced by the aforementioned SuperFollow.

Now comes the tips to help fund those who create content on the social network.

And also to help Twitter compete with its gigantic rivals.

Its 192 million daily and 330 monthly active users are barely close to 1 billion on Instagram or 2,000 on Facebook.

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