Twitter CEO Elon Musk revealed that nearly 25,000 people pay to see exclusive content from him through Twitter’s Subscription feature.
The revelation, which may have been accidental, showed that Mr. Musk has 24,700 subscribers. In a screenshot telling users how they could enable Subscriptions on their accounts, Mr. Musk included both his follower and subscription numbers.
Subscriptions on Twitter let users monetize their accounts by putting some of their content behind paywalls. Mr. Musk charges users $4 a month to view his exclusive content, meaning that, with the 24.7K subscribers, he takes home around $100,000 a month or a little over $1 million a year.
Mr. Musk enabled the new subscription service on April 15, so all of his subscribers are relatively new. It is likely true that most, if not all, of his subscribers also purchased verification with Twitter Blue for $8 a month.
While the extra $1 million a year may be a nice bonus for the billionaire, it is relatively small when paired with his follower count. Mr. Musk is one of the most popular users on Twitter, with 136 million followers. So less than 1% of his followers pay to subscribe to him.
The lack of popularity of Subscriptions on the site follows the implementation of Twitter Blue, which data suggests might not be very popular. Of the over 400,000 legacy verified accounts that had their blue checkmark removed last week, only 28 resubscribed, according to Twitter API. Twitter has around 330 million monthly users.
Twitter previously had a subscription strategy known as Super Follows, but the program failed to achieve any kind of widespread use.
• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.
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