Musk and Twitter are developing a version of Twitter Blue that will only show half of the adverts. That isn’t now accessible, but it will be soon, and Musk hopes to go even further with an ad-free subscription model later next year.
This might be beneficial; some individuals despise advertisements and will pay to have them removed from view. YouTube Premium, which now costs $11.99 a month, has an estimated 50 million users.
However, it may be difficult financially and will be primarily dependent on how many people sign up for Twitter’s $8 (or $11 on iOS) plan – since if Twitter wants to generate money, it must either show advertising or have a big number of users sign up for its new paid plans.
At this point, Elon’s declared objective for subscription income is half of Twitter’s revenue intake. If we go by what Twitter produced in Q2 of this year, the last time it announced its results, we’re looking at roughly $1.18 billion for the three months – or little more than $393 million per month. Half of the revenue is $196.66 million, meaning Elon wants to generate close to $200 per month from subscriptions alone, reducing the app’s reliance on advertising and allowing it to run with fewer brand safety and moderation regulations.
Based on $8 membership prices, that would need around 24.6 million paying customers, either paying $8 through the web or $11 via iOS. This is a lot, but given Elon’s fame and presence, it could be done. Maybe.
But, even if it works, it will complicate things from an ad standpoint, since if 24 million Twitter users are seeing half the advertisements, non-paying users will either have to see more commercials or Twitter would have to generate even more money from Twitter Blue to make up for the potential ad exposure shortage.
This is why Twitter isn’t implementing it right now since it has to accomplish its first milestone (20 million+ Blue members) before considering this part, or else the income gains would be diluted.
Adding an extra Twitter Blue tier on top of that, with no adverts at all, would either have to be incredibly expensive, or Twitter would have to sign up many, many millions more individuals to offset those losses.
Elon thinks that enough people will sign up to pay $8 a month in order to combat bots in the app – because if all of the genuine humans are ‘payment confirmed,’ the only non-checkmark accounts will be bots, assisting consumers in identifying and avoiding such accounts.
