Elon left on the curb again

Tucker Carlson is starting up a group video blog:

Tucker Carlson launched his own subscription streaming service, the former Fox News host’s official foray into paid content after months of posting videos on X.

The service, Tucker Carlson Network, went live on Monday. It will be home to multiple shows, including interviews, short-form videos and monologues.

Tucker Carlson Network, whose logo resembles a red pill, costs $9 a month—or $72 for a year—and will initially be solely available through Carlson’s website. Some of the content is available without a subscription and will be ad-supported, while some interviews and monologues will be available exclusively to subscribers, who will have access to that content without ads.

If Tucker’s goal is to extract profits from rubes, this should work well enough. If the goal is to get the same level of political and cultural relevance he had when he was on Fox, when was the last time you thought about Glenn Beck?

I am, however, amused that he left Twitter because they lacked the chops to monetize his vlogs:

Carlson launched a show on X—then known as Twitter—in the spring, shortly after his acrimonious exit from Fox News. All his shows were posted as videos on the platform and were available without a subscription, including an interview with a former president and current presidential candidate, Donald Trump, that was released at the same time as the first Republican primary debate, which Trump had skipped. All of that content will also be available on the service.

Carlson and his team explored launching TCN through X, but the company wasn’t able to move quickly enough to build out the technology they needed to run a subscription service, people familiar with the matter said.

As a business proposition, Twitter is fast becoming the Cybertruck of Friendsters.