The IT Nerd

Recently in his latest attempt to get Twitter to make money. Elon Musk nuked the legacy verification checkmark from anyone who had one. Then he kind of walked that back by then giving them out to celebrities, people who criticized him, and dead people. It now turns out that this has made close to no difference in terms of Twitter Blue sign ups:

Approximately 619,858 Twitter users were subscribed to Twitter Blue as of the end of April. That’s around $5 million per month or $60 million per year.

The latest data was provided to Mashable by developer and researcher Travis Brown who has been tracking Twitter Blue subscriptions since early this year. Based on previous internal leaks from the company, Brown estimates his methodology for tracking Twitter Blue subscriptions pulls in somewhere around 90 percent of all Twitter Blue users.

Brown estimates that there could be between 640,000 and 680,000 Twitter Blue subscribers in total as of April 30.

To compare, Snapchat, a competing social networking platform, launched a premium paid subscription service last June and reached 1 million paying subscribers in just two months. Musk’s version of Twitter Blue launched in November. As of mid-April, Snapchat shared that its Snapchat+ premium service now has more than 3 million paying subscribers.

And these latest estimates include somewhere around 9,000 Twitter users with over 1 million followers who have been provided with a free “complimentary” subscription to Twitter Blue. The numbers also include users who have canceled their subscription previously, yet still show up as paid subscribers due to a long-reported apparent glitch.

When factoring in those free subscriptions that were handed out, the net growth of Twitter Blue subscribers falls in line with previous weeks. Unfortunately for Musk, the removal of Twitter’s legacy verified users just did not drive subscriptions.

The reason behind this is simple. There is zero value in having a blue checkmark because Elon has completely devalued it. And the fact that browser extensions like this one and this one which auto mute or auto block Twitter Blue subscribers cause that value to nosedive even further. The bottom line is nobody wants to pay Elon for something that people find to be a negative and not a positive.

Elon has really shot himself in the foot and achieved the opposite of what he wanted. Great job Elon! This illustrates how bad you are at coming up with viable strategies to drive revenue.

This entry was posted on May 3, 2023 at 8:15 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.