Even The People Who Were Eager To Pay Elon Musk $8/Month Are Cancelling Their Blue Subscriptions
from the $8-please dept
It remains kind of shocking just how badly Elon Musk has screwed up Twitter. He drove away somewhere between 40% and 70% of the advertisers on the site before he took over. And the advertisers have been pretty blunt that the problem is that Elon Musk himself is a real liability. He’s made advertising on Twitter a brand risk. Hell, he’s actually made just using Twitter a brand risk.
As we’ve said from the beginning, a plan to diversify revenue away from advertising actually made a lot of sense. And Twitter actually had the skeleton of a good idea in its original Twitter Blue service that charged $5/month for some nice-to-have additional features. But the company did very little to market the service or the features, so it wasn’t getting much usage. I actually initially thought that if Musk really focused on making that service more valuable and more well known, it could be an interesting thing to grow alongside the advertising base.
Instead, Musk focused on (for no clear reason) making the main “benefit” of Twitter Blue be getting what used to be a blue “verified” checkmark, except removing the “verified” part of it, which was what gave it what little value it had. And, he bumped up the price to $8/month ($11 if purchased on an iOS device).
He basically made this is his big monetization bet… and it’s flopped. Embarrassingly so. Advertisers running away took away multiple billions of dollars in revenue, while Twitter Blue subscriptions have added… a few million dollars to the bottom line? Back in November, it became clear that a very small percentage of people were interested in paying. A followup in February found the numbers of paying subscribers was pitifully small. Musk’s plan to charge organizations a much higher fee to verify the organizations seems to have fallen flat as well.
Last month, he finally figured out how to remove the “legacy” blue verification checks, and seemed to hope that would drive those users to paying, but 97% of them had no interest.
And now it’s getting even worse.
Because remember that tiny number of folks who signed up for Twitter Blue when Musk first relaunched it in November? More than half of them have already ditched their subscriptions according to Matt Binder at Mashable.
Out of about 150,000 early subscribers to Twitter Blue, just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30. Subscriptions are $8 per month – $11 on mobile.
The total early subscriber numbers are linked directly to internal leaks published(opens in a new tab) by the Washington Post last year showing that a total of 150,000 users originally signed up for Twitter Blue within just a few days of its launch in November. Twitter temporarily disabled new signups for about a month shortly after those users subscribed as a result of accounts signing up for Blue with the intent to impersonate major brands on the platform.
That means around 81,843 users, or 54.5 percent, of Twitter users who subscribed to Twitter Blue when it first launched in November are no longer subscribed to the service.
I may not be an internet marketing genius, but when you lose more than 50% of your initial monthly subscribers within six months… that can’t be a good sign.
And, it might be even worse:
Furthermore, it’s also possible that a portion of those users that show up as subscribed have actually already canceled their plans and are continuing to receive Twitter Blue’s subscription service for free. In previous reporting for Gizmodo, journalist Steven Monacelli has spoken with numerous former Twitter Blue subscribers who just can’t get rid of their subscription, blue checkmark and all, even though they canceled and haven’t paid for months.
The article has a lot more details on how little benefit users paying the world’s richest man a monthly fee have received in return. Many users seemed to expect that having a blue checkmark next to their name would somehow give them credibility and followers. But mostly, it just looks pathetic, which is why many of them have very few followers, and aren’t magically gaining new ones.
Speaking of those Twitter Blue subscribers who have single-digit followers, Brown says(opens in a new tab) “collectively these people have paid Elon close to $100k and together got under 8k followers.”
For what it’s worth, it’s fun remembering the people who kept telling me that Elon had a “Midas touch,” and that he’d clearly turn Twitter into a profitable cash-generating machine.
Filed Under: elon musk, subscribers, twitter blue
Companies: twitter
Comments on “Even The People Who Were Eager To Pay Elon Musk $8/Month Are Cancelling Their Blue Subscriptions”
🤣🤣🤣
(insert poop emoji here)
Re: I hadn't realized until now
I’ve never Twitted, mostly because this comic captured the early experience so clearly. But now I wonder if Musk’s automated poop emoji response to all press queries is a subtle, ironic reference to the same comic?
On second thought, nah.
Musk’s just announced that he’s going to start deleting unused profiles.
As always, he has completely failed to consider the ramifications of this (people are going to be just thrilled when their dead loved ones’ profiles disappear), so expect the usual butthurt backpedaling in the next few days.
Re:
Better, perhaps, than those dead loved ones’ accounts mysteriously reactivating and getting used for spam, nazi propaganda, and crypto fraud.
Re: Re: You misunderstand
The purge will free up the usernames for the spammers, scammers, and trolls.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/05/08/elon-musk-plans-to-purge-old-twitter-accounts-but-what-about-users-whove-died/
Re: Re: Re: not thinking clearly
In fairness, this was not all that well thought out at the beginning. You have a large flat namespace — there can only be one @username even if that is a common name. Had they been thinking at the start, they might have at least had some sort of prefix, e.g. @citycide-username, or @areacode-username, that would have helped disambiguate.
If this happened to make things easier for those interested in their local area, so much the better. And if Twitter started out to accommodate car phones and 140-byte limits, then area codes might be a somewhat reasonable choice, despite the fact that some people still have area codes from when they lived hundreds of miles away.
Re: Re: Re:2
I once hung out with three blokes, all called John Pope, and two of the lived two doors apart and were not related. An alphanumeric sequence appended to a name is is the only way to ensure a unique user name on a site.
Re:
Well that’s one way to get a bunch of very public declarations by major companies that were already questioning if it’s worth it to go back to the site to make clear to everyone they can tell that they most certainly are not doing so and anyone using their name on it is doing so fraudulently…
Re: Re:
And then suing Twitter for allowing it to happen, when it was easily preventable.
The only people earning money off Musk buying Twitter are lawyers.
Re: Re: Re:
Well, assuming he hasn’t fired them too at least and can be bothered to pay them.
Re: Re: Re:
Can they sue twitter? Any impersonation would be user generated content.
Re: Re: Re:2
Stealing peooles’ accounts against their own rules and handing them out to scammers isn’t.
Re: Re: Re:3
Doubtful the users own the accounts in any legal sense. It’s just Twitter doing things with its property.
Re: Re: Re:4
I.E. Section 230 guarding the Golden Boy, as estimated by a section of the “freeze peach” crowd, from spurious litigation over the actions of third parties?
How interesting.
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Surprise, another day, another MM anti-Twitter/Musk screed.
Meanwhile, in reality, Twitter is better than ever for its users and a wide variety of ideas and perspectives are available there on countless important issues. Truly a lovely spring.
Re:
[citation needed]
Re:
Everything is great
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf
Re:
BWAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Oh wait, you were serious. So, let me laugh some more:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Re: Re:
I’m afraid I have to inform you that your additional laughter is insufficient
/s
Re: Re: Re:
We require more vespene laughter.
Re:
Well, I suppose, when you are part of the Nazi worshipping, Trump sucking, racist, homophobic and plain ole’ fucking asshole group, then you’re right, that group is flourishing on Twitter right now.
Thank you for admitting that you are part of the fucking asshole crowd… not that we didn’t already know it though.
Re:
Here’s to hoping that all the revenue that you dimwitted assholes brought to all of those other freeze peach havens continues to flow to Twitter!
Re: Re:
I propose using the word “dimtwits” instead.
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Re:
MOTHER?
Re:
Cartoon dog surrounded by fire: “This is fine!”
Yeah, can’t say that’s my experience. Maybe for you it is, but not the majority of users.
…Are you high? Because that is definitely not what I (or most others I’ve seen) would say. I’ve seen a lot of shouting at people (without reasoning) and echo chambers, with people quick to block people who disagree, but not much in the way of a variety of perspectives.
Re:
How it’s clear you’re not actually on Twitter. Since Elon made it so that only Twitter Blue paying suckers show up at the top of replies, the replies on Twitter are PURE ECHO CHAMBER nonsense, of absolute complete fucking idiots living in a fantasy world.
Kinda like you.
It’s not “a wide variety of ideas.” It’s Elon’s prefered (deluded) set of ideas, and only those allowed. Sure, he allows a few people he pretends to disagree with so he can point to them and say “look how enlightened I am” but any serioues disagreement is now gone. Completely.
It’s literally the worst of what you idiots thought Twitter was before: an echo chamber full of haphazard, biased, politically motiviated moderation.
Re:
[Insert poop emoji]
Re: Re:
Here is your copy&paste object:
💩
Look at the 12D Chess grandmaster, everyone! Look at him and laugh!
Which resulted in death from starvation….
Re:
And Elon’s ears turned into those of a Jackass.
Re: Re:
Still more magic than Elon has.
Twitter: The World’s Most Expensive Trash Fire
or
How I Turned a Large Fortune Into Bankruptcy
Re:
How to Try in Business Without Really Succeeding
Re: When the WGA strike ends
I plan to write “Epic Fail: A Twitter Tragicomedy” with a cast of 280 characters.
All these righties will pay for blue checks!!!
(bunch of lefties just leave or use tech to remove the blue checks from their sight)
Those people we were paying to piss off aren’t seeing me anymore… maybe I should spend that $8 on the next PUA training seminar….
The whole point of twitter blue checkmarks is to verify identity, and stop trolls taking over accounts, eg this is the real account of celebrity x, writers,journalists , actors, etc if the blue mark is based on who pays for it it becomes meaningless ,
when it comes to twitter its the opposite of the midas touch ,it has lost billions in value ,advertisers have plenty of other places to go ,
celebs are embarrassed to admit paying for a checkmark
Can't imagine why more people aren't paying for that...
What was advertised: Verification of the account holder and the prestige of being one of the New Nobles.
What was delivered: Verification solely that the account holder was willing to spend $8/month, the ‘fame’ of being such a sucker that the user wanted to be associated with Elon by paying for a ‘Senpai noticed me!’ checkmark.
Re:
But of course, Shaq didn’t get his blue checkmark in the old twitter by paying $8/month, he got it from playing basketball and being really good at it. THAT’S what earned Shaq status, not paying a subscription fee for said status.
Who would have thought a few hundred thousand conservatives wouldn’t be enough to sustain a billion dollar business and would stop paying after it became clear they were not in fact more special for having the badge or owning any Libs.
Just watch this and see how confused he still is (trying to hide it with his fake laughs):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO8w6XcXJUs
Sounds soooo familiar...
He’s the man,
The man with the Midas touch…
A spider’s touch!