![]() Twitter users on mobile devices had spent nearly $1.8 million on Twitter Blue subscriptions in its first-month post-relaunch in December, the new data shows. (The higher mobile price is due to the app stores’ cut). Subscriptions are being sold for $11 per month (or the local equivalent) on iOS and Android, and $8 on the web. It also promises (but has yet to launch) fewer ads and more visibility for Blue users in replies. In addition to badges, Blue users can edit tweets, upload larger videos, have a “reader” view for longer threads and more. ![]() As such, the features - both those that are live plus those that Twitter promises are coming - feel more central to the mainstream Twitter experience. Twitter Blue originally launched in limited markets in 2021 as a service aimed at power users, with perks that might have only felt momentous to that group - bookmarking, a chance to “redo” a Tweet, ad-free reading of news articles and early access to experiments via Twitter Labs among them.īut under Musk, Blue’s taken on a different emphasis: it’s part of his strategy to rebuild the company’s revenue model. “Social media users are typically less inclined to spend $100+ all at once versus $11 for 1-2 months to try the service out and see if they enjoy using it,” he pointed out. Yousef told us Sensor Tower believes that annual subscriptions will be a “minimal” proportion of the $11 million. There are also questions about how recurring that $11 million will be over the coming months. To put the $11 million in Twitter Blue mobile subs into a revenue context, as a point of comparison, in Q2 2022, the last quarterly earnings statement Twitter released (when it was still a publicly traded company), advertising made up all but $100,000 of Twitter’s nearly $1.2 billion in revenue. Twitter had adjusted earnings because of it. A report earlier this month from The Wall Street Journal said that earnings, dated December 2022, which Twitter shared with investors, had noted a 40% decline in revenue. The company, according to multiple reports, has been bleeding advertisers since Musk acquired Twitter and took over as CEO. It’s not clear how many users overall Twitter has currently, but as of Q2 last year, it said it had nearly 238 million monetizable daily active users (its own metric). “The loss of advertising demand, fueled both by broader macro uncertainty and Twitter-specific platform issues, has made alternative revenue streams quite appealing for the social media network,” said Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower. is its largest market, with 246,000 subscribers spending around $8 million through their mobile devices. In the insights shared with TechCrunch, Sensor Tower estimates that Blue has more than 385,000 mobile subscribers worldwide on both iOS and Android. It wasn’t until yesterday that Twitter made the service available globally. ![]() The figures cover the 20 markets where Blue has been launched prior to this week. The firm also can’t break out who is paying for annual or monthly Blue subscriptions. While $11 million is a small figure, we should caveat that this estimate does not cover web-based subscriptions. Twitter has since tried to repair some of those relationships, including by way of partnerships with adtech companies DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS), for example, but it’s not yet clear to what extent revenue has improved as a result. But advertisers have also been hesitant to recommit to Twitter amid its rapid-fire changes, chaotic missteps and threats to general brand safety as Elon Musk rolled back earlier protections. In part, that drop is due to the overall economy, which has pushed marketing spend down. The $11 million figure is notable because Twitter is banking on Twitter Blue at a time when advertising - which traditionally has accounted for the vast majority of Twitter’s income - remains in rapid decline. ![]() Since relaunching three months ago as a big push into non-advertising-based revenue, Twitter Blue has only picked up $11 million in mobile subscriptions, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. So far, take-up has been fairly underwhelming. That points to a big question for Twitter and owner Elon Musk: Will that nail finally drive more take-up of the social network’s premium tier? Legacy Twitter checkmarks are disappearing on April 1st, Twitter says, and in the future, the only way users will be able to get the coveted blue badge is by paying for a Twitter Blue subscription.
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