New move from Twitter: They will put their usernames on sale
Twitter plans to put popular usernames up for auction.
Elon Musk is looking for ways to make more money for the platform to pull out the $44 billion he has "buried" on Twitter. This seems to be a must for Twitter, whose revenue has decreased with the decrease in advertisements recently. For this purpose, the company is working on a tactic such as monetizing user names.
In December, Twitter employees announced that they had heard rumors that their usernames would go up for sale. Employees could not say how clear this was at the time.
Twitter's terms of use prohibit generating usernames without a profile or for sale purposes. However, Elon Musk is considering “release” 1.5 billion usernames that have been deleted and have not been used for years. And among these, those that are deemed valuable can be put up for sale by auction.
If that happens, Twitter won't be the first social media company to sell usernames for money. Instant messaging app Telegram also started selling popular usernames for money last October and started to make money from sales made through the auction system.
Musk and his team may be just beginning to make changes to the platform. Alongside the changes to Twitter Blue, the company has added features that allow users to see stock and crypto prices within the app, in partnership with stock trading app Robinhood. On Wednesday, iOS users noticed that Twitter had removed the "Recent" tab and replaced it with the "For You" timeline. The "For You" tab is now enabled by default and appears when users open the app.
Since Musk finalized the Twitter acquisition, Twitter has been laying off employees. The number of dismissed Twitter employees reached 7,500 people. Last week, Musk reportedly laid off 40 more people from its data science and engineering teams.
