Elon Musk appears to have gone back on his $20-a-month plans for Twitter Blue.
His new plan is to charge $8 monthly for the Twitter subscription. Pricing will be “adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity,” wrote Musk in a Tweet.
According to Bloomberg, the company plans to sell verification checkmarks in early November.
In a Twitter thread on November 1, Musk outlined what subscribers would get:
- Priority in replies, mentions & searches, which is essential to defeating spam/scam
- Ability to post long video & audio
- Half as many ads
- And paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us
The thread also mentions a “secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure.” Musk refers to the current system for designating politicians as public figures.
Twitter Blue subscriptions are a fraction of Twitter’s revenue
Musk mentions that Twitter Blue’s revenue stream would “reward content creators.” However, we’re not sure the numbers line up for this claim.
The company earned $1.08 billion from advertising from Twitter’s second-quarter earnings report. But, unfortunately, that left them with a $344 million operating loss for the quarter.
There are around 300,000 Verified accounts on Twitter (via Bloomberg).
One of the proposed policies is to give those users a 90-day grace period before they either have to subscribe to Twitter Blue or lose their Verified status.
Even if every Verified account subscribes, that’s only $2.4 million in monthly revenue before operating costs.
That’s nowhere near the quarterly shortfall, so the economics for paying creators out of that money doesn’t hold up.
Musk likened the current Verified system to a “lords & peasants system” and called it “bullshit.”
The solution is not forcing people to subscribe to Twitter Blue for their checkmarks. The solution is revamping the verification system so it doesn’t verify bots, spammers, or white supremacists.
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