Hey, how do you increase adoption of an already unpopular feature, without overwhelming your already stretched resources?
If you answered “raise the price by 67%, without improving the offer in any way”, you may qualify for Twitter’s product development team.
This week, Twitter started notify Twitter Blue followers that they will soon have to pay a lot more for their monthly subscription.
As you can see in this notification, the monthly fee for Twitter Blue access is going from $2.99 to $4.99 in the US, with all other regions as well. see the same relative increase.
Current Blue subscribers will be spared the additional costs for a few months, but from October everyone will face a 67% increase in costs – with no additional features, no process changes. Nothing.
Which, as noted, seems particularly odd given that Twitter Blue isn’t doing as well.
As part of Twitter’s latest performance update, released last week, the company reported that its revenue from “subscriptions and other” sources was $100 million in the second quarter of 2022, representing actually down 36% for this item, year over year.
This would suggest that Blue Twitter not really gaining traction at all, while Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal also noted in May that the company has not reached the “intermediate stages that allow confidence” with its new revenue and growth projects, including Blue.
Twitter didn’t share any official numbers, but independent information, based on payments made through app stores, also indicated that Twitter really doesn’t get much revenue from subscription payments.
So why raise the price?
This appears to be a negative move, which will result in more users signing up to try it out, which will drive the additional cost. And amid a broader economic downturn, which has seen the cost of living rise overall, will many people really be willing to pay $5 a month for NFT profile pictures and a few custom icons?
I suppose not. But Twitter needs to make money somehow, and as various commentators have noted, the company is also set to see a significant increase in legal costs due to its legal battle in come with Elon Musk.
Maybe that’s why the price is going up, but it looks like Twitter should at least look to sweeten the deal somehow, if they’re asking for more money.
I mean, Snapchat+, which is similar to Twitter Blue, would already overtake Blue subscriptions, just a month after its launch. Snapchat also added new features, like access to a desktop version of the app, exclusively for S+ users.
It looks like there are ways to make subscription deals like this work – though I’m not sure the seemingly random price increase is the growth hack Twitter might think.
