Hello.
I am writing this in the spirit of being transparent about running Whats Up Tucson. I feel that we’re in this together since you follow, contribute info and interact with the tweets, and support this effort financially through donations and buying promotional advertising.
2021 has been a challenging financial year for me. Some of you have been amazing with your donations and I’m very grateful. Thank you.
My goal is to hit $1,500 total each month and that has only happened once this year. A huge thank you for everyone that helped me with my broken car issue and medical tests and keeping this thing going.
Here’s why I am writing this:
Twitter is rolling out “Super Follows”. It is a subscription service that allows for charging a monthly fee to see additional content on Twitter. What that additional content is up to each Twitter account holder (in this case, me).
It’s new and it is currently offered by invitation. I received an invitation and applied on Friday 12/17 and am waiting for approval.
My initial plan is to give you the same tweets and content you have always have gotten for free: Car crashes, crime incidents, lost dogs, naked alerts, weather, power outages, helping you with visibility for your stolen car tweets and stuff for sale, etc. Your following experience would be the same as it’s always been if you follow for free.
Super Followers would get extra content. Things like follow ups or more detailed info about incidents that I originally tweeted about, more local event related content, maybe even video updates (you’d probably pay to not see my ugly face but it’s the only one I got), stuff like that. I’d be open to suggestions for what might be valuable to you if you have any.
The initial pricing that Twitter is offering that I have to choose from is $2.99 a month, $4.99 a month, or $9.99 a month. You could opt in or opt out at any time you want. (What price point would you be willing to pay? I’m currently leaning toward $4.99 a month but the cheapest one is fine if I can find 500 people who are willing to pay it a month to reach my $1,500 a month goal).
The Super Follows would replace donations if this works the way I am thinking it could. This is a pretty big gamble for me because if it doesn’t work or only a few people subscribe to Super Follows, I’m going to be eating bread and ketchup sandwiches.
The amount of work that goes into Whats Up Tucson is over 300 hours a month. I try to provide the best service I am capable of whether you contribute financially or not. It’s always been a labor of love and I’ve never expected to get rich from running this. I’m just not in a financial position to spend all this time and resources doing it for free.
I’m looking for feedback from you. Is this the right idea (Super Follows)? Should I proceed or am I making a mistake? Is this the best idea ever? So far, what I’ve read is that the creators who are trying Super Follows are not doing well with it but they’re mostly YouTube creators, makeup folks, photographers, artists, and crypto financial people. They don’t provide what is essentially a short form real time news service like I do so I’d be different (oh boy, am I different LOL).
What do you think? Reply to the tweet this was attached to.
Thank you.
—Ken
