Only 0.2% of Twitter's active users have paid for Twitter Blue subscriptions

Originally published at: Only 0.2% of Twitter's active users have paid for Twitter Blue subscriptions | Boing Boing

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Only 180,000 people have signed up for Twitter Blue.

A number of them are impersonating others, because actual verification of the user’s identity is minimal.

In other words, $15 million is 1.25% of its annual debt burden.

He’s trying to make this year’s payments by firing staff (often illegally), stiffing landlords and vendors, and selling off anything that isn’t nailed down. Meanwhile creditors like Prince Bonesaw are impatient to get their hands on his Tesla shares.

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He’s about as good at smus as I am at slelping.

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Lord Elmo of Mars bought tweedle so he could pump n dump his stocks. Freeze peach? bwahahahahaha! (wipes tear) you sweet summer child…

And once he gets to Mars, you better please his Lardship or you might end up as his dinner. You know this is what Peter T and co. would LOVE to be into (blood transfusions? heck, why not the whole hog? long pork for me and sauce for (basting) thee!)

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And of course, Musk-rat has said he wants to give away some of the little ad revenue he makes at Twitter back to creators.

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Is it 180,000 users or 180,000 users just in the US? Because if it’s only the US, the rest of the world might relieve, oh, another 1-2% of the debt burden.

Of course you have to be a Twitter blue subscriber to qualify, LOL. Obviously he’s not explaining what the criteria are for getting that revenue sharing, nor how much you could make - it’s clearly never going to be enough to pay for the subscription fee for (at least) 99.9% of subscribers. He’s just hoping that enough people will think they’ll win the Twitter lottery with viral tweets at some point if only they had a subscription… I don’t think anyone is going to fall for it, though. Not enough to push those revenue numbers, anyways.

But the ad situation seems pretty dire - diminishing numbers of ads with sadder and sadder content, so I can’t imagine anyone is generating any ad revenue right now. (Since Elno took over, all I see is ads for right-wing stuff, cheap toys and malware-infested clickbait sites.) I noticed that after recently blocking a couple super-scammy accounts with ads, I’ve literally not seen an ad on Twitter since. That really doesn’t indicate good things about their revenue streams, LOL. Elno’s other new scam proposal is charging “brands” $1000 a month for verification or, uh, something. I’m sure that’ll really help with retention and advertising.

Everything is so broken on Twitter lately - not just things failing, but all the deliberate choices like the API stuff blocking out third party apps and now bot accounts. (He backtracked a bit, claiming an exemption for “good quality” bot accounts, but since he didn’t explain what that meant, all the creators I see are giving up, not trusting that he’d come through in any reliable way.) I see tons of people either leaving Twitter or preparing to, as a result of this.

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The cool people are going to Fediverse servers, last one out of twitter is a rotten egg!

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“Only 180,000 people in the U.S. are paying for Twitter Blue. That covers about 1% of its annual debt.“

Nazis are notoriously cheap.

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“Rest” of the world is rather small at the moment, only Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the UK, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain

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I was being rather sardonically optimistic in my appraisal, even if they do have more users in those countries combined than the US (they supposedly have - or had - almost as many users in Japan as the US). I’m not even sure how functional they are in any country right now, given that they’ve either been kicked out or are being kicked out of their offices everywhere, on top of everything else. I wonder how much their ability to process subscriptions is compromised…

I think it’s safe to say, whatever the numbers end up being, Twitter is fuuuucked.

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What are you talking about? It’s at break-even!

Well, according to Elmo at least. I wonder what’s really going on. Is he just saying that because his ego told him to? Is someone afraid to tell him the real numbers? Is he too vain to wear glasses and missed a decimal point? Is he that bad at math?

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He’s probably talking about it being break-even from an operational viewpoint, magically ignoring the existence of the massive debt.

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Until one of his creditors, a particular Saudi prince, comes knocking and wants certain journalists banned and their tweets deleted permanently.

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A small price to pay to avoid playing “Can you fit into a suitcase?”

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@frauenfelder Did you mean overestimated? If you didn’t, I’m confused by this.

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Now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

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I think he might be using a few derivatives there. Perhaps he means that the rate of increase of losses has slowed down? Or just telling one of his jokes?

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I suspect this is it. He’s talking about operational costs - and only counting what Twitter’s actually paying, ignoring all the fines for violating labor laws around the world, payouts of various current lawsuits and back rent and, well, basically everything.

“We break even if you ignore all our costs and our debts!”

To be fair, it turns out that Elno is willing to do that for authoritarians even if he doesn’t owe them money.

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