Billionaire and Big Bang Theory guest star Elon Musk bought Twitter for a whopping $44 billion last year, and he’s been trying his hardest to make the platform profitable. This included hiking up the price of Twitter Blue and throwing in the verification badge as a perk. Well, according to The Information (via Engadget), Twitter Blue only had a total of about 180,000 members by mid-January.
Twitter has been the talk of the town for the past couple of months since Elon Musk took the helm, and the stormy seas are calming down. The social media platform is now dealing with content moderation issues as far as inappropriate kid content is concerned. The distribution of child-abusive content is running rampant on the site with some videos getting nearly 200,000 views.
Twitter Blue is still low on subscriptions
As a platform, Twitter doesn’t have as many avenues for income as, say, Facebook. The company was only raking in about $1 billion every year before the takeover, and Musk is looking to change that. He plans to focus on Blue Subscriptions. That’s a tough sell because most people weren’t really on board with the subscription even when it was $3.
Now, the plan is much higher. Twitter Blue costs $11/month on iOS and Android. However, if you sign up through the web, then it will cost you $8/month. It costs more on mobile platforms because it’s to offset the platform fees that Twitter has to pay per transaction.
The company recently came out with a year plan for Twitter Blue. It costs $84/month. This is for those who really want to use all of the perks with Twitter Blue.
The report from The Information says that Musk wants half of the company’s income to come from Twitter Blue subscriptions. That’s pretty ambitious seeing as only about 0.2% of the company’s user base has Blue.
Elon Musk’s grand plan is for Twitter to pull in about $3 billion in revenue for 2023, which will almost triple Twitter’s Pre-Muskian numbers. That’s going to be tough, but he’s planning on introducing a more expensive payment tier that will show no ads at all.
The company is also planning on charging businesses $1,000/month to keep their verified status. We’ll need to see how that goes in the long run.
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