Is Visualizing Tweets To Screens Worth $42K A Month To Digital Signage Companies?

April 24, 2023 by Dave Haynes

A reader passed along a link to discussions on Reddit focused on the seemingly endless changes to Twitter since it was acquired by Elon Musk – with the chatter focused on revisions to how third-party companies can use the Twitter feed … such as visualizing curated tweets on digital signage and DOOH screens.

Poke around the websites of digital signage CMS software companies and you will likely find a reference on most of them to a “widget” or service of some kind that can tale social media feeds like Twitter and Instagram and make them part of on-screen programming

Showing tweets used to be low or no cost, but under Musk’s management, very steep fees have been introduced – so steep Wired magazine suggests it prices nearly every user out of the market.

From Reddit:

Curious if you have run into any issues with Twitter with hiked fees for AI use. A friend passed this post from Reddit:

So I just got my Twitter API access notification today. We have a simple twitter feed widget on our digital signageAt the top of the Enterprise sign up form (which is a Google Form for fuck sake) there is this statement:

DISCLAIMER: This is an Enterprise API tier application, which enables continued access to v1.1, v2 and additional Enterprise APIs. Pricing starts at $42,000 / Month based on usage and needs.The digital signage widget only supports the v1.1 API and the basic tier only gives access to v2 as far as I can tell.

We also got notification from our web host that they are removing the twitter feed widget from their CMS. Apparently the quote they got from twitter to cover all of their customers would have required them to charge EACH CUSTOMER $10K PER MONTH. To display the last 10 tweets on our website.

Either Elon is actively trying to destroy twitter or he’s so out of touch that he thinks companies are going to pay what amounts to extortion.I thought the whole purpose of charging for API access was to weed out the bots. Why is he charging for low volume pull requests too?

I don’t know if visualizing social media feeds on screens is a big deal anymore, but doubt that kind of content is worth half a million bucks to a software company. I can certainly understand efforts to charge a fee of some kind to third-party companies that are using Twitter’s platform and infrastructure for its own fee-based services, but fees at that scale would very likely have few buyers. And the $42K is the starter rate, with limited data.

I asked one industry contact, whose content services include visualizing curated tweets, and he said he was on a paid subscription with Twitter now, but not at that $42K rate.

Have you been affected by this? Let me know.