Twitter is earning even less from Twitter Blue than previously known

What do Cardi B, Tesla, former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, and MSNBC host Ali Velshi have in common?

they are all old subscribers to Twitter Blue, Twitter’s paid subscription plan, recently revamped by owner and CEO Elon Musk, which offers blue checkmarks to anyone who pays $8 a month (or $11 a month if you subscribe via a device). iOS). Yes, even Tesla, the company Musk is also CEO of, seems to have canceled the subscription.

New Twitter Blue subscriber data released(Opens in a new tab) by online researcher Travis Brown points out that just two months after Twitter relaunched Twitter Blue’s paid tier on its platform, it looks like subscription numbers may already be starting to stagnate.

In addition, one new report(Opens in a new tab) by journalist Steven Monacelli at Gizmodo points out that several Twitter Blue verified users who have stopped signing up to the platform, but their blue checkmark still remains active on their account. Some of those users who spoke with Monacelli canceled their subscriptions months ago, but their accounts are still marked as Twitter Blue subscribers, even though they haven’t paid.

As Brown confirmed to me, non-paying Twitter Blue users would be tracked as subscribers through the Twitter API, which is what the researcher uses to monitor subscription data. Brown noted that some of the users reported in the Gizmodo article were among those who finally unsubscribed in the latest data. Monacelli also confirmed that there are users he spoke to who still have the blue Twitter badge, even after his report and Brown’s latest data release.

Last week, 26,319 Twitter users unsubscribed from or were removed from paid Twitter Blue plans, according to Brown’s Feb. 12 statement. Some of these unsubscribed users include notable Twitter users like rapper Cardi B mentioned above. This would also mark the first time that Twitter Blue has experienced a decrease in subscribers as far as public tracking of this data is concerned.

There are some caveats to this tracked data, Brown tells me. Twitter sometimes removes active users from Twitter Blue to verify them if they change their display name. These users would usually show up as Twitter Blue subscribers once again. Furthermore, the only way for third parties to track Twitter Blue’s subscriptions is through Twitter’s public API, and there is a possibility that Twitter Blue sometimes loses new subscribers.

Furthermore, we now know from the Gizmodo report that some Twitter Blue users actually unsubscribe weeks or months before they are actually removed, so their unsubscribes may not be counted until some time later. With that said, the latest internal Twitter Blue subscriber data published in a report(Opens in a new tab) in The Information found that Brown’s estimates were extremely to close(Opens in a new tab).

so how many paying Twitter Blue subscribers does Twitter really have? That mentioned earlier report(Opens in a new tab) of The Information found that Twitter had 180,000 Twitter Blue subscribers in the United States as of mid-January, with an estimated total of 290,000 subscribers worldwide.

In 2021, the year before Musk acquired the company, Twitter generated more than $5 billion in revenue. ad revenue decide(Opens in a new tab) more than 90% of that value. Since Musk’s acquisition, half of Twitter’s top advertisers stopped running ads on the platform. Musk released his version of blue twitter envisioning a subscription-based model that could help offset these losses.

Based on the most recent internal data, Twitter is making just under $28 million a year… if all 290,000 Twitter Blue subscribers were actually paying, which we now know they aren’t.