Question: Say you’re an independent company that was looking to improve takeup of its core subscription offer – if it was already unpopular to begin with, would increasing the price sound like a logical idea? Don’t worry, if you answered ‘No’, we perfectly agree with you, but this is what Twitter’s product development team went with.

This week, Twitter has begun informing Twitter Blue subscribers that they’ll soon have to pay substantially more for their monthly subscriptions. The monthly charge for Twitter Blue is jumping from $2.99 to $4.99 in the US, with other regions experiencing a relatively similar increase. At least in the US’s case, that’s a 100% increase, which doesn’t really sound too appealing.

The Blues for Twitter Blue 

Current Blue subscribers won’t have to worry about the additional charges at least for the next couple of months. However, starting from October, everyone will have to cope with the 67% cost increase, with absolutely no changes or additions in features and functionality. Yeah, that’s tough – though times are indeed uncertain right now and every company is out to make ends meet, this just sounds so much like a bad deal.

Stranger still is how Twitter opted to go with this given that Twitter Blue wasn’t doing too well to begin with. As part of its latest performance update, which was posted last week, Twitter reported that its revenue from ‘subscriptions and other’ sources totaled a paltry 100 million in Q2 2022 – a 36% YoY decrease for this particular element. This suggests that Twitter Blue wasn’t really gaining any sort of traction at all, while Twitter CEO Parag Agarawal noted back in May that the company ‘has not hit intermediate milestones that enable confidence’ with its many new initiatives, including Blue.

Twitter has yet to share the official numbers, but independent insight, based on payments made via app stores, has indicated that Twitter really isn’t making much revenue from subscription payments. This only works against the decision to increase the price. Why push through with such a thing?

All things considered, it’s a negative move no matter the angle you look at. Amid the broader economic downturn, which has seen the cost of living rise overall, just how many users would be willing to dish out the extra $5 just so they can show off their NFT collection? We’re guessing not. But like we said earlier, Twitter needs to make money one way or another. Another reason for this increase could be the significant jump in costs due to its coming court battle with Musk and Co.

The Wrap

The fight with Musk seems to be the main reason for the price increase, but it does seem like Twitter should at least sweeten the deal somehow, especially since it’s asking for more money. If you take a look at Snapchat+, which is similar to Twitter Blue, it’s already overtaking Blue subscriptions merely a month after it launched. Shortly after, Snapchat even introduced new desktop features exclusively to S+ users.

So, evidently, there are ways to make subscription offers like this work. However, Twitter seems to think that randomly increasing the price without as much as a tweak is a ‘Growth Hack’.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/3vzn66b