The Threat Of ‘Twitter+Tucker’ Terrifies The Progressive Media Oligopoly

Authored by Thomas Lifson via AmericanThinker.com,

It’s becoming a lot of fun to watch the propaganda organs react to the recently announced plan of Tucker Carlson to use the recently liberated Twitter as his future platform, post-Fox.

The combination of Elon Musk, who has become a free speech disciple, and is not-so-incidentally one of the world’s richest people and widely admired by the public for his pioneering entrepreneurship, with Tucker Carlson, who already was the most important political commentator in America, has got them scared.

NBC News dug up Brian Stelter, the recently-fired CNN commentator, to help its own Tom Costello bemoan the fact that nobody s going to provide censorship. It’s going to be a “free for all” — which is the last thing that propaganda media want to see. They actually said that free is bad (transcript, screengrab, and video via Grabien):

COSTELLO: “OK. Well listen, Twitter was already under fire from misinformation, disinformation, all out lies —“

STELTER: “Right.”

COSTELLO: “— anti-Semitism, racism, before Elon Musk took over and now it’s gotten kind of crazy, right, seemingly unmoored, if you will. Will anybody be able to police what Carlson says or is this the point? It’s just a free for all.”

STELTER: “I think this is the point. It is a free for all. That’s what Elon Musk wants to provide. This move by Tucker may cement the idea of Twitter as a right-wing website.”

The characteristic response of the tech oligopolists (minus Musk’s Twitter), all-in with the propaganda media for control to the public’s information flow, has been to starve conservative outlets of revenue. They do this with advertiser boycotts and sheer monopolization of online advertising revenues by Google and Facebook parent Meta. But will this work with Tucker on Twitter? Teri Christoph, writing at Red State, is optimistic, and runs some numbers about how well Tucker may be able to generate revenue there:

He’ll make much, much more by taking his show to Twitter, which opens up multiple revenue streams for him. It’s a model that could easily be replicated by others, with top cover being provided by Elon Musk himself. And it’s a model that would be a reckoning for the establishment media, with all-important ad dollars leaving cable and broadcast news (does that even still exist?) and migrating to independent platforms and creators.

First, there are sponsorships. If we use the CPM (cost per one thousand) model, Tucker could easily command a best-in-class rate of $40 from advertisers (and there are plenty looking to support free speech!). That’s $40 for every one thousand listens, views, or downloads. We know that his two recent Twitter videos garnered millions of views and his show averaged around three million viewers, so we can safely estimate a Twitter viewership of at least two million (and that’s probably low). That means Tucker could charge $80,000 for each ad he reads during the show. And he would likely do at least three ads per show, and possibly more, bringing the daily total to $240,000. You can see how he could quickly and easily surpass his Fox News earnings just on sponsorships. (snip)

Then there are paid Twitter subscriptions. In a tweet on Tuesday evening, Elon Musk revealed what the path forward looks like for creators like Tucker:

I also want to be clear that we have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever. Tucker is subject to the same rules & rewards of all content creators.

Rewards means subscriptions and advertising revenue share (coming soon), which is a function of how many people subscribe and the advertising views associated with the content. I hope that many others, particularly from the left, also choose to be content creators on this platform.

It has been estimated that Tucker could make around $36 million per year if he’s able to convert one-quarter of his Fox audience into paying members. Cha-ching.

I have no way of knowing if the $40 CPM figure is realistic, since American Thinker does not monetize videos, but even if these estimates are off by 50%, the total of $76 million cut in half — $38 million a year — is still a lot of money for Tucker, almost double what he was earning at Fox News.

If Tucker successfully moves to Twitter, there is every reason for other popular figures to consider doing so, too.

Especially if Twitter finds a way to make its platform easily accessible on home televisions, not just computer screens. Streaming video content via Roku boxes and the like doesn’t sound like a difficult transition.

Don’t forget that just about everyone in the industry realizes that streaming is replacing cable and satellite distribution of video content. That’s why Fox News invested so heavily in the Fox Nation streaming service, endlessly promoting it. Unfortunately for these plans, Tucker Carlson was the dominant showcase provider of content to Fox Nation. They thought that he was the key to getting people to subscribe. And now he has the opportunity to make that assumption work for himself – at their expense. The irony is delightful.