“Musk expects 69 million Twitter Blue subscribers by 2025“
According to The New York Times, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Twitter’s new owner, wants Twitter to make over $10 billion in subscription income by 2028, more than double the $5 billion in total revenue the platform earned last year.
Musk gave investors a taste of what to expect under his control in a pitch deck seen by the Times. This includes increasing the number of Twitter Blue customers to 69 million by 2025 and more than tripling it to 159 million by 2028, according to reports. Twitter Blue, which was launched last year and costs $2.99 per month, gives users access to an “undo tweet” button, app customization, ad-free content, and other exclusive features. Musk predicts a massive increase in overall Twitter users, from 217 million last year to 600 million in 2025 and 931 million in 2028.
Outside of Blue, the presentation deck describes plans for an undisclosed subscription service called “X,” which Musk estimates will attract nine million customers in 2023 and 104 million by 2028. Musk warned earlier this week that governments and corporations would be charged a “slight fee” to use Twitter. Whatever subscription “X” is, revenue from it and Blue combined is expected to reach $10 billion by 2028, accounting for a significant portion of the $26.4 billion in total revenue Musk predicts for the service that year.
According to the New York Times, Twitter is expected to make up the balance of its forecasted earnings from advertising, which Musk estimates would bring in $12 billion by 2028. In the past, Twitter’s primary source of revenue has been advertising, but Musk, who claimed in a now-deleted post that Twitter should remove ads for paying users, wants ads to account for only 45 percent of the company’s overall revenue.
Musk’s presentation PowerPoint is said to include plans to make $15 million from a payments business, which he hopes to expand to $1.3 billion by 2028. Visitors can presently tip authors, buy Super Follows, and interact with restricted shopping tools that direct users to vendors’ websites to make purchases. Musk, as one of PayPal’s co-founders, may, however, see room for expansion.
According to the New York Times, Musk also expects Twitter to make an undefined amount of money via data licensing, which includes selling Twitter’s millions of daily tweets to companies and developers who analyze the data for market insights or consumer patterns. Twitter made $572 million in data licensing and “other revenue” last year, but Musk hasn’t said how or whether he expects to expand this company. Because the copyrights of tweets belong to the users who submitted them, our editor-in-chief Nilay Patel points out that Elon “would have to dramatically rewrite the terms of service” of Twitter, not to mention face “major revshare and fair use difficulties.”
