Article Updates No Longer on Twitter

A bit of Site News for readers who follow USCoinNews on Twitter. As of this morning, article updates are no longer automatically crossposted to the social site, and the functionality is not expected to return. Like many sites, USCoinNews is built on WordPress and leverages several plug-ins to allow for a wide range of functionality. One of these plug-ins allows for articles to be crossposted on other social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr (yes, it is still a thing), etcetera.

Earlier this year, Twitter announced that is was significantly raising the pricing model of accessing the API which allowed for this crossposting. Previously, access to this API was around $42,000 a month for companies like WordPress. That price has now gone up to around $210,000 a month. Understandably, WordPress tried to go to Twitter to negotiate this price and access to the API, knowning that tens of thousands of sites like USCoinNews would be impacted.

I was informed in an email from WordPress yesterday, those negotiations had failed and access was cut-off yesterday.

Since our initial communication, Twitter decided, on short notice, to dramatically change the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. We have attempted to work with Twitter in good faith to negotiate new terms, but we have not been able to reach an agreement. As a result, we will need to remove the functionality.

When Twitter removes access on April 30, 2023, your Twitter connection on Jetpack Social will cease to work, and your blog posts will no longer be auto-shared to Twitter.

WordPress Email

This is a disappointment. As I shared with readers back in January, I’d brought the site back to Twitter after multiple readers requested it comes back to the social platform. While I will still post on Twitter occasionally, article links will not automatically appear thereafter they are published on the site. They will, however, continue to be available on Facebook.