Twitter Blue Relaunched has Made Just $11M on Mobile in its First 3 Months – Twitter has announced that legacy checkmarks will be removed on April 1, and in the future, users will only be able to obtain the coveted blue badge by paying for a Twitter Blue subscription. This raises an important question for Twitter and its owner, Elon Musk.
So far, participation has been relatively underwhelming. According to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Twitter Blue has only gained $11 million in mobile subscriptions since its relaunch three months ago with a focus on non-advertising-based revenue.
The $11 million amount is noteworthy because Twitter is betting on Twitter Blue at a time when advertising, which has historically accounted for the vast bulk of Twitter’s revenue, continues to fall rapidly. This decline is partially attributable to the state of the economy, which has reduced marketing expenditures.
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Yet, marketers have been wary to recommit to Twitter in light of its rapid-fire changes, chaotic missteps, and concerns to general brand safety as a result of Elon Musk’s rollback of previous protections. Twitter has now attempted to rebuild some of these connections, such as through collaborations with adtech companies DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS), but it is not yet apparent to what extent income has increased as a result.
This estimate does not include web-based subscriptions, even if $11 million is a relatively small sum. Also, the company is unable to distinguish between yearly and monthly Blue subscribers. The data pertains to the 20 markets where Blue was introduced prior to this week. Twitter did not make the service available globally until yesterday.
Sensor Tower revealed that Blue has more than 385,000 mobile subscribers worldwide across both iOS and Android. The United States is its largest market, with 246,000 users spending approximately $8 million via mobile devices. “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.
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It is unclear how many users Twitter has altogether, but as of the second quarter of 2012, it claimed to have almost 238 million monetizable daily active users (its own metric). According to various sources, the company has been losing sponsors since Musk acquired Twitter and became CEO. According to a report published by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Twitter’s December 2022 financial report revealed a 40% decrease in revenue.
Twitter’s earnings were adjusted because of this. To put the $11 million in Twitter Blue mobile subscriptions into perspective, advertising accounted for all but $100,000 of Twitter’s almost $1.2 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2022 (when it was still a publicly traded company), the most recent quarterly earnings report available.
Twitter Blue was initially released in restricted areas in 2021 as a service geared at power users, with features that may have only seemed significant to this group: bookmarking, the ability to ‘redo’ a Tweet, ad-free reading of news items, and early access to Twitter Labs trials.
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Under Musk, however, Blue has taken on a new emphasis: it’s part of his plan to revamp the company’s income model. As a result, the features — both those that are already available and those that Twitter promises are forthcoming — feel more fundamental to the Twitter experience as a whole.
In addition to badges, Blue users can edit tweets, upload larger videos, and view longer threads using the “reader” mode. It also promises fewer advertising and greater visibility for Blue users in replies, neither of which have yet been implemented. Subscriptions are offered for $11 per month (or the equivalent in the local currency) on iOS and Android, and $8 per month on the web. (The higher mobile price is due to the app stores’ cut).
U.S. 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. This suggests that the service received over 160,000 mobile subscribers in the country in its first month of the relaunch, Yousef said.
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Following the debut of Twitter Blue in India, according to Yousef, India has become Twitter’s sixth largest mobile market in terms of in-app purchases. The analyst stated that the country was Twitter’s eighth-largest mobile market for in-app purchases approximately ten months prior to the company’s acquisition and subsequent relaunch of Twitter Blue.
