Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen goodfull for the clue delivery! Beijing, January 12 (Xinhua) Twitter has considered selling user names to generate new revenue, according to people familiar with the matter. For now, Elon Musk, Twitter's boss, is trying to revive the company's business.

▲ Twitter is considering selling user names, according to people familiar with the matter. Twitter employees have discussed the sale of some user names since at least December. Engineers have discussed holding online auctions to get people to bid for Twitter usernames. A user name is a word, number, or string of characters after the @ symbol that is used to identify the account on Twitter. For example, Musk's user name is @ elonmusk.

It is not clear whether the project will move forward, or whether the plan will affect all user names or only some of them. Musk said last month that he wanted to start eliminating inactive accounts on Twitter and release 1.5 billion user names. However, only certain user names may be valuable, such as celebrities, brands, and popular names.

▲ Musk said it might be profitable to release 1.5 billion unique usernames. These usernames are often occupied by early adopters of social media platforms, and some people and brands are willing to pay thousands of dollars for them. Such transactions have sprung up on the black market, where people can buy "OG" usernames. Such usernames are popular because they have only a short word or number and may have been abandoned by their owners.

Twitter currently forbids buying and selling user names. Such deals have attracted hackers before. In 2020, a 17-year-old Florida man was arrested after hacking into Twitter to obtain a user name and sell it, when he hacked into the accounts of Musk and other celebrities.

The company has been in turmoil since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October. Given the high price of the deal, Mr Musk is under pressure to turn the deal into a successful acquisition. Since then, Musk cut Twitter spending, slashed staff and stopped paying suppliers. At the same time, he is also trying to find new ways to make money at a time when Twitter's advertising revenue has plummeted. He has proposed a revised subscription plan that allows users to pay for authentication, and the company has submitted documents to the Ministry of Finance to process the payment.

Four days after buying Twitter, Musk said on Twitter that he was "sure" to clean up accounts that had been inactive for a year, some of which had coveted user names. In December, he said again that Twitter would release the names of accounts that had not tweeted or logged in for years and were clearly abandoned.

Twitter declined to comment.

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