After this weekend’s Twitter Blue drama, debacle, guerilla marketing campaign – whatever you want to call it – Elon Musk shifted gears on Monday to promote Twitter’s other paid subscriptions feature called, well, Subscriptions.
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“Content creators may wish to enable subscriptions on this platform,” tweeted Musk. “Just tap on Monetization in settings.”
Subscriptions allows users to subscribe directly to a specific Twitter creator that has opted into the program. In turn, the creator can provide subscribers with exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Twitter Spaces, and other paywalled content.
Included in Musk’s tweet, is a screenshot showing the sidebar navigation menu on Twitter’s mobile app. Ostensibly, Musk included this to show interested users where they could sign up. But, there’s another bit of information included in that screenshot: It shows just how many users are directly paying Elon Musk for his Subscriptions-only content.
Next to Musk’s followers and following counts is another number: Subscriptions, which is actually a private metric only shown to the specific creator so they can see how many users have Subscribed to their paywalled content.
Musk’s subscriber count shows at 24.7k, or somewhere between 24,700 and 24,799 paying subscribers. Twitter’s owner charges $4 for subscriptions to his account, which puts the amount of money he’s making from the Subscriptions feature at nearly $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 15, so these subscribers all joined within the past 10 days.
But, Musk is quite obviously an anomaly as Twitter’s owner and its most-followed user. It’s unlikely that any other creator comes close to making anywhere near Musk does from Twitter’s Subscriptions feature.
And, taking Musk’s other metric into question, it’s actually kind of low. Just around 0.018 percent of Musk’s more than 136.4 million followers pay to subscribe to Musk’s paywalled content.
The Subscriptions feature existed before Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, under the name Super Follows. However, Musk wasn’t such a fan of the branding and changed it to simply “Subscriptions” in the weeks after he took over last year. The feature has been available since then but it appears Twitter is now re-focusing its efforts on marketing Subscriptions.
As Super Follows under the old Twitter, the feature failed to take off. But, Musk seems intent to move Twitter away from an advertiser-supported platform, so he continues to center his efforts on subscription models.
We’ve yet to really see how Subscriptions under Musk could play out, but if it’s anything like how Twitter Blue has gone, it’s not looking good. But, maybe it’ll end up being just as entertaining to watch play out.
