According to Twitter, the traditional Twitter checkmark will be retired on April 1, and in the future the only way users can get the coveted blue badge is by paying for a Twitter Blue subscription. This points to a big problem for Twitter and its owner, Elon Musk. Will this nail ultimately drive more usage of the social network’s premium tier?
So far, utilization has been pretty low. His mobile subscriptions have only earned him $11 million since Twitter Blue relaunched as a big boost to his non-ad-based revenue three months ago, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. not.
The $11 million figure is noteworthy. That’s because Twitter is relying on Twitter Blue at a time when advertising, which has traditionally accounted for most of Twitter’s revenue, continues to decline rapidly.
Part of this decline is due to the economy as a whole pushing down marketing spending. But now that Elon Musk has withdrawn his previous protections, advertisers are hesitant to recommit to Twitter amid rapid change, chaotic blunders and general threats to brand safety. Twitter has since tried to repair those relationships, for example through partnerships with ad tech companies DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS), but it’s not yet clear how much revenue has improved as a result.
$11 million is a small number, but keep in mind that this estimate doesn’t include web-based subscriptions. The company also cannot identify who pays Blue’s annual or monthly membership fees. This figure covers the 20 markets where Blue launched earlier this week. It was only yesterday that Twitter made the service available globally.
In an insight shared with TechCrunch, Sensor Tower estimates that Blue has over 385,000 mobile subscribers worldwide on both iOS and Android. The United States is the largest market, with 246,000 subscribers spending approximately $8 million through mobile devices.
Abe Yousef, Senior Insights Analyst at Sensor Tower, said:
We don’t currently know how many users Twitter has overall, but as of the second quarter of last year, we had close to 238 million monetizable active users per day (proprietary metric) .
According to multiple reports, the company has been bleeding advertisers since Musk bought Twitter and took over as CEO. According to a Wall Street Journal report earlier this month, his December 2022 earnings Twitter shared with investors showed earnings were down 40% from his. As such, Twitter has adjusted its earnings. Putting the $11 million Twitter Blue mobile subscribers into the context of revenue, as a point of comparison, in the second quarter of 2022, the last quarterly earnings report Twitter released (when it was still a public company), advertising accounted for all but $100,000. About $1.2 billion in revenue for Twitter.
There are also questions about how the $11 million will repeat over the next few months. Yousef said Sensor Tower believes the annual subscription will be a “minimum” percentage of his $11 million.
“Social media users typically don’t tend to spend more than $100 at a time, but rather than spending $11 for a month or two to try out a service and see if they like it.
some already not so impressive…
Twitter Blue was originally launched in 2021 as a service for power users in select markets. There were perks that seemed important only to that group, like bookmarks, the opportunity to “redo” tweets, read news articles ad-free, and early access. Experiment with it via Twitter Labs.
Beneath the mask, however, Blue has a different emphasis. It’s part of his strategy to reshape the company’s revenue model. So it feels like both live and Twitter-promised features are at the center of his Twitter experience in the mainstream.
In addition to badges, Blue users can edit tweets, upload large videos, have a “reader” view for long threads, and more. We also promise (but haven’t started yet) to reduce the number of ads and increase the visibility of Blue users in our replies.
Subscriptions sell for $11/month (or local equivalent) on iOS and Android, and $8 on the web. (The higher mobile prices are due to app store price cuts.)
U.S. Twitter users on mobile devices spent about $1.8 million on Twitter Blue subscriptions in the first month after its reopening in December, according to new data. According to Yousef, this suggests that in the first month the service was restarted, it had more than 160,000 mobile subscribers in the country.
But there is work to be done to drive business forward in the strongest markets. In India, which has the second largest number of users after the United States, Twitter launched Blue in February. Since then, only $301,000 has been spent on Blue, according to Sensor Tower, equivalent to about 17,000 mobile his subscriptions.
According to Yousef, India has become Twitter’s sixth largest mobile market in terms of in-app purchases after the local launch of Twitter Blue. The country accounted for Twitter’s eighth-largest mobile market for in-app purchases, according to analysts, almost 10 months before the company’s acquisition and subsequent launch and relaunch of Twitter Blue. was
Sensor Tower data is based on in-app purchases from Twitter’s mobile app. The company has more in-app purchases than Twitter Blue. However, Yousef said that most of that revenue came from subscription products, given that in-app purchase revenue increased significantly after Twitter Blue relaunched, with more revenue coming from increased tweets and other in-app purchases. Few in-app purchases. purchase income.
We reached out to Twitter for answers to these numbers.we didn’t get a reply.
