Twitter’s Super Follows, Communities, and Spaces Explained
There haven’t been many new features coming from Twitter in the past few years. That all changed the other week when they announced a wave of new updates coming throughout 2021.
The one that took most of the attention was Super Follows – a way for people to pay creators to receive exclusive content or access. But there were a handful of other equally exciting standalone products that take on other areas of interest for content creators and business owners.
Here’s the breakdown:
⚡️ Super Follows takes on Patreon and OnlyFans. This is a way for people to pay a small monthly fee ($5-$10) to creators they like and receive exclusive content and access, like tweets, articles, images, DMs, etc.
No word if Twitter will allow the same NSFW content mostly found on OnlyFans, but OnlyFans has been trying to shift to a broader category platform. Vice launched a subscription site on OnlyFans for their food based Munchies brand.
And the subscriber space is huge – check out this list from Product Hunt on every company trying to help creators monetize their content.
📧 Revue, a newsletter company Twitter recently acquired, is a direct competitor to Substack. The integration is already live – if you try to write a thread on Twitter a little box suggests turning it into a newsletter.
I haven’t used Revue but messing around with their interface it had excellent collection tools to pull in saved articles from Pocket, Instapaper, and more sites.
Super easy to curate. I think high quality curators of interesting content is another area that’ll grow with monetization. I just discovered and paid for The Browser which sends a daily email with obscure articles, videos, and podcasts.
🎙 Spaces, the audio chat space in beta, is a direct competitor to Clubhouse, which has blown up over the past year.
I think audio spaces are going to be a new thing – every major social network will probably add something like it, just as they did with Stories.
Clubhouse is interesting and I’ve caught a few interesting conversations on it, but I’m rarely on it because I’ve had more misses than hits in signing on during an interesting live chat. Check out Shaan Puri’s tweet story on this dilemma.
By the way, I just got access to Spaces. Not sure what I’ll do with it but follow me at C47.
🏘 And lastly, Communities. There wasn’t much info on this but it seems like it could take on Facebook Groups.
I’m pretty excited about this because right now if you want to start an online community you can either create one on Facebook Groups, but a lot of people are tired of Facebook. You could start a Slack but it really wasn’t built for online communities and it can be hard to navigate. Or you could use a third party platform like Circle but you’re basically asking people to join another social network and that can be a hard sell.
So a new community option is very exciting to see.
Now a lot of these are stand a lone products, but where it gets really interesting is the potential to bundle them all under the Super Follow model.
One monthly subscription with the ability to paywall tweets, photos, videos, newsletters, audio rooms, and exclusive communities.
This is a broad overview. I go into more detail in the video. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Weekly Video Signals
CodeMiko is the Future of Streaming
Fascinating article on CodeMiko, a fully computer animated character that live streams on Twitch to over 500,000 viewers and is controlled and voiced by Miko (real female) in a motion capture suit.
This is an interesting trend in the world of faceless influencers, creators, and channels in general. If your brand is built around a virtual character, it could be managed by anyone and not dependent on one person.
Some interesting highlights:
Fascinating article on CodeMiko, a fully computer animated character that live streams on Twitch to over 500,000 viewers and is controlled and voiced by Miko (real female) in a motion capture suit.
This is an interesting trend in the world of faceless influencers, creators, and channels in general. If your brand is built around a virtual character, it could be managed by anyone and not dependent on one person.
Some interesting highlights:
The concept that drives Miko’s stream is simple: She’s a glitchy video game character who interviews real people—specifically, famous Twitch personalities. The great strength of her act is that Miko, the character, does not know who any of these people are…this dynamic drew comparisons to ‘90s Cartoon Network classic Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
…
Streaming for hours and hours a day multiple times per week is not easy on anybody, but it’s doubly taxing for Miko, who has to remain in-character. Also, there’s the suit. The suit is a big issue. It requires recalibrations every few hours. If Miko crosses her real legs for too long, her digital legs will start to do weird things. Oh, and she can’t pee.
“I can’t drink water during my whole stream,” Miko said during our second interview. “If I drink water, then I have to go pee. And when you go pee, you have to take off everything. And then that whole process takes me, like, 10 minutes, right? And during that whole 10 minutes, you lose like, like, thousands of viewers. And those are your regulars, right?”
YouTube Shorts and Analytics
YouTube is rolling out their new Shorts feature (basically a version of stories or shorter in-app videos). Interestingly the views will count just like any other video upload view and be counted in your channel’s total view count analytics.
Turn Your Broadcast Monitor into a Live Streaming Device
If you own a Blackmagic Video Assist Monitor (or were in the market for an external video monitor and recorder), BMD just added a firmware update that lets you connect your monitor to your computer via USB and turn the video input into a webcam. While this is a pricier setup than most HDMI to USB devices, it’s a nice feature to have if you wanted a confidence monitor or have other uses for a high end recording device.
Green Screen Mouse Pad
An accessory for the streaming age. Elgato just released a green screen mousepad. Not just for the VFX enthusiast – this is intended for gamers to showcase their keyboard and mouse controls while gaming (would also be handy for tutorial videos)
