Elon Musk’s X still struggles to grow subscription revenue
Reading Time: 4 minutesElon Musk’s plan to reduce X’s dependence on advertising revenue by increasing paid subscriptions is still not taking off. According to a new, third-party analysis of the X Premium subscription service by app intelligence firm Appfigures, X has pulled in approximately $200 million in in-app purchase revenue across iOS and Android since the original 2021 launch of the subscription formerly known as Twitter Blue.
There are some caveats to this figure. For starters, the sum is based only on those purchases made via the mobile app, not the mobile web or desktop web. That means the true sum is likely higher, especially given X offers a discount for web purchases.
Then there are the commission fees to consider.
After paying app store commissions, X will have made a minimum of $140 million, the firm estimates. However, that figure will also likely be higher because Apple and Google discount commissions from 30% to 15% in year two. (Appfigures doesn’t have a way to reliably calculate how many subscriptions are associated with each commission rate, we’re told).
For further context, though Twitter Blue itself was launched in 2021, it was relaunched in December 2022 as Twitter under Musk pushed into non-advertising revenue. Within the first three months post-relaunch, the service brought in only $11 million in mobile app subscriptions, per data from app data provider Sensor Tower. A year ago, the company now called X launched two additional subscriptions, Basic and Premium+.
While there’s no way to definitively determine how many of X’s users are paying for X Premium subscriptions, there are ways to back into some estimates here, at least in terms of native mobile subscribers.
Currently, X continues to offer three subscription tiers: Basic, Premium, and Premium Plus with varying access to advanced features, like Grok AI, a blue Verified checkmark, and fewer ads, among others. The top in-app purchase (based on App Store data) is X Premium, which costs $11 per month on mobile.
In September 2024, X grossed $14.7 million through in-app purchases on mobile devices, according to Appfigures.
Since X is a private company with no obligation to share its user numbers publicly, one can only guess how many people are buying which subscription tier.
But if that revenue was generated mostly by its top in-app purchase, X Premium, that would equate to roughly 1.3 million paying users (i.e., $14.7M / $11).
If, instead, all the sign-ups were for X’s lowest tier, the $4 per month X Basic, then X could have gained as many as 3.7 million paid users during the month.
If we were to estimate that X’s paid users broke down by 70% on Premium, 20% on Premium Plus, and 10% on Premium Basic, that would equate to about 940K Premium users, 134K Premium Plus users, and 368K Premium Basic users. This split seems reasonable since X’s top three subscriptions (in order) are Premium, Premium Plus, then Basic. In total, those numbers combined would come to around 1.4 million paid users added during September.
Quarter-by-quarter, the picture does look a bit rosier for X Premium, as Appfigures’ estimates indicate that in-app purchase revenue growth jumped 30% from Q2 to Q3 after staying relatively flat in the prior period.
There are other in-app purchases available beyond X Premium to consider, like those for subscriptions to top creators on the platform. Elon Musk himself has a large following, for instance. Fortune reported last year that Musk was the most-followed user with 155 million followers, of which over 40,000 were subscribers — or .025% of his followers had subscribed. Today, Musk has 200 million followers. Assuming roughly the same percentage were subscribed, that would work out to around 50,000 subscribers. At $4 per month for the subscription, that would pull in around $200,000 per month in gross revenue.
Another user with a large subscription base is @stevewilldoit, as he follows anyone who subscribes to him. He currently follows 10.4K people on X. If three-fourths were subscribed, that would equal around 7.8K subscribers paying $5 per month, bringing in gross earnings of $39K/month before X’s cut is removed.
Though rough estimates, these additional figures are also important because they’re a part of X’s plan to grow its user base via creator content.
Last week, the company announced it would begin to pay creators based on engagement they receive from X’s Premium subscribers, instead of a cut of ad revenue — a change clearly meant to boost X subscribers. On the one hand, given that X had reduced the ad load for Premium+ subscribers to zero, this could open up more possibilities for creators to make money. But paying for engagement also often incentivizes clickbait or controversial content, designed to get replies.
Regardless, Bloomberg reported earlier this year that X generated $1.48 billion in total revenue during the first 6 months of 2024, according to financial documents shared with regulators. In other words, subscriptions are still a very small piece of X’s pie.
The introduction of the new program followed moves from X that alienated some advertisers, such as suing a group over their ad boycott and CEO Elon Musk telling advertisers to ‘go f— yourself.’ The company has since been trying to make amends, recently forging a deal to bring Unilever back into the fold.
Ref: techcrunch
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