Twitter Blue's troubles: Twitter's app has only generated $6.4M in consumer spending to date

Elon Musk has a new plan to generate revenue for Twitter. Reportedly, the social media company’s new owner intends to revamp the Twitter Blue premium subscription, currently an optional $4.99 per month for a handful of perks, by upping the price to $19.99 per month while giving subscribers the coveted verification badge. While this plan is problematic for a number of reasons — buying verification devalues it, removing verification from existing users who can’t pay, like journalists and various notable figures, will aid the spread of misinformation — it’s also worth noting that Twitter Blue as it stands today has not been a success. The subscription itself is certainly due for a revamp — just not a completely misguided, ill-thought-out revamp like this. Launched in June 2021, initially in Canada and Australia, before expanding to the U.S. and New Zealand that November, Twitter Blue was meant to help the social media platform diversify its revenue and reduce its reliance on advertisers, who today account for more than 90% of Twitter’s total revenue. The idea with Blue has been to entice Twitter’s heaviest users — its power users — to pay a small monthly fee in order to gain access to…
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