The days of freely sending 140-character messages to the world are now officially over.
Twitter, the worldwide online social networking service, has announced that users must now sit through a video advertisement if they want to send a standard tweet of up to 140 characters.
Beginning April 1, the San Francisco-based company will also offer a new luxury subscription service for users who prefer to avoid the news ads.
The new monthly service, Twitter Gilded, will allow unlimited tweets of up to 560 characters for a monthly fee of $74.99.
The character count of 560 is exactly four times the current maximum character count of 140.
Twitter users who cannot afford to pay $900 or so a year and don’t want to view video ads each time they send a tweet will be able to sign up for a new free service, Twitter Steerage.
“We’re frankly sick and tired of providing everyone with a free platform to send texts to the entire world while having to rely on promoted tweets and miniscule ads to pay ourselves and our employees,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said at a press conference.
“If you want to text 140 characters for free without ads, text your friends,” the CEO suggested. “Text your coworkers. Otherwise, you’re just going to have to sit patiently and learn about Chevrolet of Netflix for maybe 20 seconds. Is that too much to ask?”
From 2006 until now, Twitter has allowed users to publish 140-character text messages for free, without video ads. The service is currently available in 35 languages. A large majority of users reside in countries other than the United States.
“Is this going to be a problem in some parts of the world? Sure,” Costolo admitted.
“Take a country like Burundi where the median household income is $673. Twitter Gilded isn’t going to attract a lot of subscribers there,” the millionaire CEO said.
He noted that users who cannot afford Twitter Gilded will have the option of paying “just $4.99 per tweet” any time they wish to exceed the hard 140-character limit.
“Look. We have a market monopoly,” Costolo added. “We’d be foolish not to take full advantage of this position.”
Twitter Steerage, the new discount Twitter option, will be completely ad free and will allow a maximum character count of 35.
“If people want to say something like ‘Have a nice day’ or ‘H. Clinton: secretive, out of touch,'” without enjoying a Firestone ad, they can,” Costolo explained.
The CEO refused to elaborate on his company’s bias for multiples of seven.
“I can only refer you to Pythagoras and our determination to avoid the evil eye at all costs,” he said.
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