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.
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. . ."
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