After Twitter Blue this weekend dramaAnd disasterAnd Gang marketing A campaign — whatever you want to call it — Elon Musk switched gears on Monday to promote Twitter’s other paid opt-in feature called, well, Subscriptions.
The tweet may have been deleted
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Content creators may wish to enable subscriptions on this platform. chirp(Opens in a new tab) musk. Just tap Monetization in Settings.
Subscriptions allow users to subscribe directly to a particular Twitter creator subscribe to the program. In exchange, the content creator can provide subscribers with exclusive tweets, subscribers-only Twitter spaces, and other paywall-protected content.
Included in Musk’s tweet is a screenshot showing the sidebar navigation menu on the Twitter mobile app. Ostensibly, Musk has included this to show interested users where they can sign up. But, there is another piece of information included in this screenshot: It shows how many users are paying directly to Elon Musk for subscriptions-only content.
Next to Musk’s followers and following counts, there’s another number: Subscriptions, which is actually a special metric shown only to the specific creator so they can see how many users have subscribed to paywalled content.
Musk’s subscriber count shows up at 24.7k, or somewhere between 24,700 and 24,799 paid subscribers. The owner of Twitter charges $4 for subscriptions to his account, which makes the amount he earns from the subscriptions feature close to $100,000 per month.
That’s just under $1.2 million a year, which would be quite a successful outcome for the average content creator. Musk enabled subscriptions on his account on April 15th, so those subscribers have all joined within the last 10 days.
But it’s quite clear that as the owner and most-followed user of Twitter, Musk is an anomaly. It’s unlikely that any other creator has come anywhere close to making Twitter’s subscriptions feature Musk.
And looking at Musk’s other metric, it’s actually rather low. Only about 0.018 percent of Musk’s more than 136.4 million followers pay to subscribe to Musk’s paywall-protected content.
The subscriptions feature existed before Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, under the name Super Follows. However, Musk wasn’t a big fan of the brand and changed it to “subscriptions” in the weeks after he took office last year. The feature has since been available but Twitter now appears to be refocusing its efforts on marketing subscriptions.
As Super Follows under the old Twitter, the feature to fail For take-off. But Musk seems intent on getting Twitter off the hook Advertiser platform, so it continues to focus its efforts on subscription models.
We’ve yet to really see how subscriptions might work under Musk, but if it’s anything like the way Twitter Blue went, it won’t look as good. But, maybe that will end up being the case entertaining to watch play.