Twitter now lets its paid subscribers tweet 10,000 characters

Twitter recently launched a new feature that allows its Blue subscribers to tweet up to 10,000 characters in messages, which will also support bold and italic formatting.

The new features allow for much longer-form writing that’s more essay-like than the short snippets of text that defined Twitter for years. Twitter had a 140 character limit for years before doubling it in 2017 to 280 characters.

Twitter Blue is the company’s subscription product that offers more features than the free version, including a blue tick. It costs $8 per month if you sign up through Twitter.

“We’re making improvements to the writing and reading experience on Twitter! As of today, Twitter now supports Tweets up to 10,000 characters long, with bold and italics text formatting,” reads Thursday’s announcement. “Sign up for Twitter Blue to access these new features and apply to activate subscriptions on your account to earn revenue directly on Twitter.

Twitter is also expanding its monetization options, allowing users to subscribe to their favorite content creators in exchange for subscriber-only content. The subscriber-only model is similar to offerings from services like Substack.

Musk said creators will get the lion’s share of subscription revenue.

“You’ll get the money we get, so it’s 70% for iOS and Android subscriptions (they charge 30%) and ~92% for web (could be better, depending on the payment processor),” Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted. “After the first year, iOS and Android fees drop to 15% and we’ll add a small amount on top of that, depending on volume.” We will also help promote your work. Our goal is to maximize the prosperity of creators.”

Musk also launched a subscription product for his own account, charging users $4 per month to view his personal tweets for a subscription only.