Twitter has considered running online auctions where people can bid for user names to generate new revenue as Elon Musk tries to resuscitate the company’s business.
Matthew Rosenberg, a politics reporter, holds up his phone with the app Twitter displayed on his screen in New York Times Bureau in Washington, on Aug. 29, 2019.
Twitter employees have held conversations about selling some user names for the service since at least December, the people said. Engineers have discussed running online auctions where people can bid for the user names, which are the words, numbers or string of characters that follow the @ sign by which accounts are identified on the platform. Musk’s user name, for example, is @elonmusk.
Musk has since slashed expenses at Twitter, ordering layoffs, cutting other costs and stopping vendor payments. At the same time, he has tried finding new avenues to make money as Twitter experiences a sharp downturn in ad revenue. He has come up with a revamped subscription plan so users pay for verification badges, and the company has filed paperwork with the Treasury Department to process payments.
Unique user names — also known as handles — can be lucrative. They are often claimed by early adopters of social media platforms and some people and brands are willing to pay thousands of dollars for them. Black markets have sprung up where people can buy “original gangster,” or OG, user names that are desired because they feature a short word or a number and may have been abandoned by their owners.Twitter’s rules forbid the buying and selling of handles.
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