After this weekend’s Twitter Blue drama, debacle, guerrilla marketing campaign – whatever you want to call it – Elon Musk shifted gears on Monday to promote Twitter’s other paid subscription feature called, well, Subscriptions.
The tweet may have been deleted
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“Content creators may wish to enable subscriptions on this platform”, tweeted(opens in a new tab) Musk. “Just tap on Monetization in settings.”
Subscriptions allow users to subscribe directly to a specific Twitter creator who has opted into the program. In turn, the creator can provide subscribers with exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Twitter spaces, and other paid content.
Musk’s tweet includes a screenshot showing the sidebar navigation menu on Twitter’s mobile app. Apparently Musk included it to show interested users where they could sign up. But, there is another piece of information included in this screenshot: it shows how many users are directly paying Elon Musk for his subscription-only content.
Next to Musk’s subscribers and subsequent counts is another number: subscriptions, which is actually a private metric displayed only to the specific creator so they can see how many users have subscribed to their paid content.
Musk’s subscriber count stands at 24.7,000, somewhere between 24,700 and 24,799 paying subscribers. The Twitter owner charges $4 for subscriptions to his account, bringing the amount of money he earns from the subscriptions feature to nearly $100,000 per month.
That’s just under $1.2 million per year, which would be a pretty good result for the average content creator. Musk enabled subscriptions on his account on April 15, so these subscribers have all joined in the past 10 days.
But, Musk is obviously an anomaly as the owner of Twitter and its most followed user. Another creator is unlikely to approach Musk from Twitter’s follow feature.
And, questioning Musk’s other metric, it’s actually quite low. About 0.018% of Musk’s more than 136.4 million subscribers pay to subscribe to Musk’s paid content.
The Follows feature existed before Musk acquired Twitter, as Super Follows. However, Musk wasn’t much of a fan of the brand and changed it to simply “Subscriptions” within weeks of taking office last year. The feature has been available since then, but it looks like Twitter is now refocusing its efforts on subscription marketing.
Like Super Follows under old Twitter, the feature failed take off. But, Musk seems intent on steering Twitter away from a advertiser supported platform, so it continues to focus its efforts on subscription models.
We haven’t really seen how Subscriptions under Musk will play out yet, but if it’s anything like how Twitter Blue has played out, it doesn’t look good. But, maybe it will end up being just as entertaining to watch play.