Twitter will soon offer its users the ability to buy individual newspaper articles, Elon Musk said today, a business model that has been tried and tested by other platforms in the past without success.

“Starting next month, this platform (including Twitter) will allow media publishers to charge readers per article, with a simple click,” the Twitter owner wrote.

Since the founder of the companies Tesla and SpaceX bought at the end of last October this social networking medium has been constantly launching new forms of using Twitter, proposing, often out of the blue, new ideas and changes to the platform, sometimes causing confusion.

Talking about his latest idea, Musk said: “This will allow users who don’t pay a monthly subscription to pay a higher price per article when they want to read an article occasionally,” he elaborated, adding: “So everyone wins, including the media. and the readers”.

However, he did not give more details about prices, or the operation of this new model.

The idea of ​​a platform that allows the purchase of individual newspaper articles, in an alternative model, somewhere between free online access to ad-funded print media and subscriptions, is not new, and has not been successful in the past.

Danish startup Blendle has failed with its own model of creating an iTunes-type of journalistic content.

The new Musk “temptation”, like previous similar efforts, requires the participation of press publishers, who will have to agree to link their content to the platform, which does not seem to be practically easy. Given the failed similar attempts of this model, but also the reputation of Twitter, which, since it passed into Musk’s hands, has been tarnished.