Twitter is reportedly set to announce new pricing plans for its API (application programming interface) access, which is used by researchers and academics to analyze social media conversations on the platform.
Twitter’s developer platform reportedly offered three levels of Enterprise Packages. The cheapest plan, Small Package, costs $42,000 per month and gives you access to 50 million tweets. Higher tiers, which cost $125,000 and $210,000 per month, give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets, 100 million and 200 million tweets, respectively.
Hence, most organizations, researchers, and academics have been priced out of using Twitter’s API due to the pricing plans. According to the researchers, the pricing is too high for too little data and will delay any long-term analysis of user sentiment.
Twitter’s API is widely used by researchers and academics, with over 17,500 academic papers based on the platform’s data published since 2020. It is a set of rules and protocols that allow developers to access Twitter’s data, features, and services in order to create third-party applications or integrate Twitter into their own platforms.
It allows developers to interact with Twitter’s platform programmatically, such as retrieving and posting tweets, accessing user profiles and timelines, and retrieving real-time data about trends and events on the platform. Researchers, businesses, and developers have widely used Twitter’s API to create tools and applications that leverage the platform’s data and functionality.
The sources for this piece include an article in Wired.