In November last year, the new Twitter boss Elon Musk (Elon Musk) released the “blue Verified badge” paid service. Half a year later, there are currently less than 640,000 users paying to subscribe to the service. Although this number is not ideal, what is more, worrying is that the churn rate of early subscribers is too high.
Internal documents show that 150,000 users signed up for the service in the first few days after it went live, but Twitter subsequently suspended the service for a month because many users impersonated celebrities. As of April 30 this year, only about 68,157 of the 150,000 users are still using the service. This means that more than half (54.5%) of users no longer use the service.
Last year, a study released by subscription management company Recurly showed that the average annual unsubscribe rate for subscription businesses was only 5.57%.
In addition, among the 68,157 users, not all of them have been subscribing continuously. Some of these users may have canceled their subscription midway, or the subscription service expired at some point and then re-subscribed to the service.
In fact, there may be some subscribers who have canceled their subscription plan but still continue to use the “blue Verified badge” for free. Many Twitter users who have canceled their subscription services and no longer pay said that the blue verification marks next to their accounts still exist.
The service, which offers advanced features like an edit tweet button, costs $8 a month or $11 a month for mobile. For subscribers, the biggest draws seem to be the blue verification badge next to the account and the algorithm optimization feature. Subscribers can enjoy services such as halving the amount of advertising, uploading longer videos, and ranking tweets according to the quality of content.
However, many “blue Verified badge” expressed their dissatisfaction with Elon Musk on the platform, thinking that Twitter did not promote their tweets enough. About half of them reportedly have fewer than 1,000 followers.
The latest Twitter data shows that the proportion of various “blue V users” has basically remained unchanged. About 291,183 subscribers have fewer than 1,000 followers, 107,492 subscribers have fewer than 100 followers, and about 3,352 subscribers have no followers at all.
Among the users who have insisted on subscribing to the “blue Verified badge” service since its launch in November last year, about 1951 people have less than 10 fans.
In fact, few of those old “Blue V users” will subscribe to the new “Blue Verified badge” service. Twitter also offers “free” subscriptions to its many million-followed accounts.
These latest subscription figures come from developer Travis Brown, who has been tracking users of the Blue V Verified service for months. Brown said his research method was able to reach more than about 90% of subscribers, which is very close to the official data.
Regarding the subscribers of the “blue Verified badge” service with only a few fans, Brown said, “These people paid Musk nearly $100,000 in total, but the total number of fans added up is less than 8,000.”
