OV9

speedingfine wrote: Fri Nov 11, 2022 10:26 pm

In a best-case scenario where Twitter continues to gain 30,500 subscribers every day with zero cancellations, Twitter is looking at generating $7.32 million per month, or just over $87.8 million per year. That's not quite the half of $5 billion that Elon Musk seeks.

In a piece published earlier this week, Mashable looked at just how many paying subscribers Twitter could reasonably expect using industry standard e-commerce conversion rates and landed on around 600,000. Using Sensor Tower's data, Mashable also estimated that the previous version of the Twitter Blue plan only had 105,000 subscribers paying $5 a month. Casey Newton of The Platformer newsletter later corroborated this estimate, finding that Twitter Blue had "a little more than 100,000 active subscribers."

Musk has put all his eggs in this basket. In his first email to Twitter employees this week, its new owner stated that he wants half of the company's revenue to come from subscriptions as advertising revenue plummets since he took over. Twitter made $5 billion in 2021, so he'd need more than 26 million users a month to that monthly $8 fee. Musk has also said that Twitter's losing $4 million a day, so he'd need 15 million paying subscribers just to cover the $120 million in monthly expenses.