Twitter Blue
Twitter, of course you know what that is, allegedly is in the works of a new monthly subscription service as reported by researcher, or more rightly—Twitter leaker on Twitter, Jane Manchun Wong.
Wong also notes, “Twitter is also working on [a] tiered subscription pricing model, with one tier having more paid features than the other.” She also references to the recent acquisition of Scroll, the subscription service that removes ads from participating websites for $5 a month and pays the website a cut of the subscription fee from the users.
Tony Haile, the former CEO of Scroll—now at Twitter, tweeted the day his company was acquired that Scroll would “integrate into a broader Twitter subscription later in the year.” and he also said in a tweet that “The mission we’ve been given by @Twitter is simple: take Scroll and scale it so that everyone who uses Twitter can experience an internet without friction and frustration. A gathering of people who love the news *and* pay to support it.”
Twitter Blue will have “Bookmark Collections” to save different types of tweets in different collections and also a feature to undo tweets much like you can undo sending in Gmail for a set amount of time, probably 5 to 30 seconds.
Rough financial predictions
In Twitter’s Q1 2021 financial report, Jack Dorsey said this: “Total revenue reached $1.04 billion with ad revenue growing 32% and accelerating year-overyear growth in MAP revenue.” It also made a $68 million profit in the same quarter. In short, Twitter’s doing quite well and these new paid subscriptions will just boost their profits.
As of Q3 2020, Twitter has 353 million active users along with a total of 1.3 billion registered accounts. I’m no economist but with some simple math here’s what we can predict.
$2.99 per Twitter Blue user will be the lowest tier if there are going to be any tiers in subscription. Twitter has approximately 353,100,000 active monthly users. Lets suppose at first 10,000,000 of them ~2.83% of them subscribe to this. So, 10,000,000 x 2.99 = $29,900,000—might not seem a lot because this is just a very small percentage of users but if you look at YouTube, the situation could be deemed way better.
$11.99 per YouTube Premium user is the monthly rate for the ad free subscription. YouTube has 2.3 billion users—active per month! But when we look at YouTube Premium, it has got 30 million paying subscribers (35 million if you count the ones on the free trial). While calculating the percentage, I became a little generous and took the total users per month as 2,000,000,000 (2 billion) and the 30m paying subscribers. That’s just 1.5% of users are paying subscribers on YouTube! So this way we can’t really exactly predict what percent of users will subscribe to Twitter Blue and the userbase is of course different on both platforms, still the new premium tier(s) will be a revenue booster for Twitter.
