Elon Musk has spent five months looking for all kinds of ways for Twitter to generate much-needed revenue. Let’s remember that he took control of Twitter at the end of October in an operation valued at 44,000 million dollars. For whatever, he now has to get them back.
After cutting the workforce and raising the subscription price to the premium Twitter Blue level, the social network could be about to auction off the usernames of inactive accounts, according to what has been leaked in the American press. Instagram is rubbing its hands with these decisions.
Two people with knowledge of the matter told the Times that the idea of online auctions was first discussed among employees of the social network last month, but it is not yet clear if Twitter has decided to act accordingly.
For those of you who don’t know, a Twitter username appears after the @ and, unlike a profile name, cannot be changed. Twitter contains a large number of inactive accounts for yearswhose usernames cannot be occupied by anyone else.
Doing business with those who are no longer there, Elon Musk’s idea with Twitter
Last month, Elon Musk said that the platform “would soon start freeing up the namespace of 1.5 billion accounts“, although he did not mention any plans to sell them to the highest bidder. It also did not reveal what Twitter is based on to consider an account inactive.
You would also have to decide whether to put up for auction all inactive accounts or only those that the company deems to have significant monetary value.
Even though Twitter’s current terms of service prohibit trading accounts and their usernamesthese types of transactions have been carried out on the black market practically since the launch of the service in 2006.
Following Elon Musk’s tweet last month suggesting that the social network would soon get to work on making inactive account names available to users, we should know soon if he will go ahead with his idea of allowing people bid on the most popular ones. Or the The New York Times so believe it.
