On April 1, Twitter owner Elon Musk was supposed to undress all old verified accounts of their blue tick badges.
However, this did not happen. It’s unclear why Musk backtracked on that date. But, maybe it has something to do with it.
As of Tuesday, only 12,305 of the roughly 420,000 old verified accounts had subscribed to a paid Twitter blue plan. Just over 3% of celebrities, professional athletes, influencers and media personalities make up the platform’s experienced users.
While Twitter Blue provides additional features such as the ability to edit tweets and write longer posts, the main selling point promoted to users is the ability to simply get a checkmark next to your username by paying $8 per month (or $11 on mobile devices). .)
Twitter Blue’s latest data comes from independent researcher Travis Brown, who was follow up(Opens in a new tab) Twitter data since January. Brown’s data represents approximately 90% of all Twitter Blue followers. Twitter Blue’s previous internal data leaks have assorted(Opens in a new tab) with Brown’s estimates.
If one adds government accounts with verified gray badges and business accounts that appear next to a gold checkmark to the pool of verified former Twitter Blue followers, those numbers increase slightly to around 15,000 users (or 3, 5% of these accounts in total). ).
Again, it’s after Elon Musk has threatened to remove verified blue badges from around 420,000 users. And this also follows Musk announcement that only Twitter Blue followers would be promoted in Twitter’s default “For You” feed.
With its biggest motivator yet to subscribe – the removal of the blue checkmark – Twitter apparently couldn’t even double down on its former verified Twitter Blue followers. A week before the April 1 date, Twitter had only converted 7,901 verified government, commercial and legacy accounts into paid subscribers, so there was a slight surge in subscribers as the April 1 date approached. april. However, many celebrities – from james lebron For Jack Black(Opens in a new tab) — have since gone public that they don’t plan to pay for Twitter Blue.
And with that looming threat of verification removal gone at least for now, Twitter only saw about 67 of those old verified accounts subscribe to Twitter Blue in the days following April 1. If Musk’s measures were to result in a surge in legacy Twitter Blue verified followers, it just didn’t work.
The tweet may have been deleted
(opens in a new tab)
(Opens in a new tab)
In a tweet since deleted(Opens in a new tab), Musk claimed Twitter would give old verified accounts a “few weeks grace, unless they say they won’t pay now, in which we will remove them.” However, The New York Times appears to have been the only verified legacy account that lost its tick badge. The press organization publicly declared he wouldn’t pay for Twitter Blue last week.
How many Twitter Blue followers are there now?
Musk officially spear Twitter Blue in November last year, but soon suspended the service as users started paying for a verification badge for imitate companies and brands. To combat this, Twitter deployed a feature that showed who had paid for Twitter Blue and who was a former verified account. Twitter Blue then RELAUNCH in December.
Last weekend, amid the dull blue signage, Musk changed course and deleted the note that distinguished the difference between an old verified user and a Twitter Blue follower with a tick. The Twitter blue mark has often caused mockery among Twitter’s most influential users, who often point out when a user has paid for Twitter on the website.
In the nearly 4 months that the subscription service has been live, Twitter has barely passed the 500,000 Twitter Blue subscriber threshold, according to Brown’s Twitter Blue data. This would bring Twitter Blue’s revenue to around $4 million per month.
And, it should be noted that these numbers could very well be even lower. Several Twitter users have share cases where the Twitter Blue tick continued to appear on their account even months after they canceled their paid subscription to the service. Brown explained that these accounts would be included in his data because Twitter continues to mark them as blue followers.
Many Twitter Blue users have very few followers
Like Mashable previously reported, half of Twitter Blue’s paid subscribers don’t even have four-digit followers and that’s still the case with the inclusion of the latest data. According to this data, 244,562 Twitter Blue followers have less than 1,000 followers. Of these, 88,085 accounts have less than 100 followers. And then there are the 2,585 Twitter Blue followers with no followers.
In a recent report(Opens in a new tab) Since Bloomberg, web analytics firm SimilarWeb found that of the 2.6 million people who visited the Twitter Blue subscription page on the web last month, only 116,000 people actually signed up for the service. And in a TechCrunch report(Opens in a new tab) as of March, mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower estimated that Twitter Blue had amassed around 385,000 mobile subscribers in the three months following its relaunch.
Twitter Blue was originally available exclusively on iOS devices. However, following a brief quarrel on Apple’s Twitter Blue subscription discount on iPhones and iPads, Twitter has rolled out an option to subscribe via the web. Musk pushed users to subscribe through Twitter’s website at $8 a month instead of the $11 mobile price to avoid revenue sharing with Apple. However, based on the data, it appears that the vast majority of Twitter users chose not to listen to Musk.
If Musk hopes that Twitter Blue subscriptions will ever compensate for loss than half of its advertisers, the company has a lot of work ahead of it. A recent report(Opens in a new tab) found that among Twitter advertisers who stayed, ad spend was down 89% from before Musk acquired the company.