FAILURE TO LAUNCH

Relatively Few People Are Paying for Twitter Blue, New Numbers Suggest

At one point, Elon Musk told employees that he hoped half of the company’s revenue would come from subscriptions. The company has a long way to go.

Despite Elon Musk’s sky-high aspirations for Twitter Blue, the social media platform’s subscription service, the project appears to have converted fewer people to paying customers than the billionaire had hoped. At one point, he told employees that he wanted half of the company’s revenue to come from subscriptions—a far cry from the paltry 180,000 people in the U.S. who were paying for Twitter subscription services, including Twitter Blue, in January, according to The Information. That number represents just .2 percent of the platform’s active monthly users, the outlet reported, a far cry from the 62 percent of U.S. users that represent Twitter’s total subscriber base. Twitter Blue costs $8 a month (or $11 if the user signs up via Apple iOS). The current number of subscriptions translates to roughly $28 million annually—less than 1 percent of the company’s revenue.