Elon Musk – the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter – expects Twitter to earn nearly $ 10 billion in subscription revenue by 2028, a forecast that doubles the platform’s total revenue of $ 5 billion last year, according to a report of The New York times.
In the field viewed by the Times, Musk gave investors a sense of what to expect under his ownership. This reportedly includes an increase in Twitter Blue subscribers to 69 million by 2025 and more than doubling that number to 159 million by 2028. Launched last year, Twitter Blue is a $ 2.99 / month service subscription that gives users access to the “cancel tweet” button, customize the app, articles without ads and other exclusive features. Musk also expects huge growth in total Twitter users, growing from 217 million users reported last year to 600 million Twitter users in 2025 and eventually to 931 million in 2028.
The “X” subscription service should gather nine million subscribers next year
The presentation also outlines plans for an unnamed non-Blue subscription service called “X”, which Musk expects to bring nine million subscribers in 2023 and 104 million by 2028. Earlier this week, Musk hinted that he would charge governments and low-cost corporations to use Twitter. Whatever the “X” subscription, revenue from it and Blue combined should reach $ 10 billion by 2028, which is a large part of the total revenue of $ 26.4 billion, according to Musk, the service will reach the same year .
According to the Times, Twitter needs to offset the rest of its total projected revenue with ads, something Musk predicts Twitter will earn about $ 12 billion by 2028. Twitter has relied on advertising as a major revenue stream in the past, but Musk , who said in an already deleted tweet that Twitter should remove ads for paid subscribers, wants the ads to account for only 45 percent of Twitter’s total revenue.
Musk’s test reportedly includes plans to raise $ 15 million from some kind of payment business, which he expects to grow to $ 1.3 billion by 2028. Twitter currently allows users to tip creators to buy Super Follows, and interact with limited shopping features that link users to vendors’ websites to make purchases. However, as Musk is one of the co-founders of PayPal, he may see room for expansion.
I really can’t stress enough that Twitter has virtually no license data; the copyrights of the tweets belong to the users. Elon will have to radically change the terms of the service to resell tweets and has huge problems with revenue sharing and fair use to fight pic.twitter.com/2KPZeYkva3
– nilay patel (@reckless) May 6, 2022
The Times notes that Musk also expects Twitter to earn an unspecified share of revenue by licensing data, a business that includes selling millions of daily tweets on its platform to companies and developers that analyze data for market insights or consumer trends. Last year, Twitter earned $ 572 million (PDF) from data licensing and “other revenue,” but it’s unclear how or if Musk plans to expand the business. If Twitter were to resell individual tweets, our editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, said Elon would “have to radically change the terms of service” on Twitter, not to mention “huge revenue share and fair use issues.” , as the copyrights of the tweets belong to the users who posted them.
Building Twitter services will take some work, a likely factor behind Musk’s plans to hire 3,600 additional staff. The Times notes that Musk aims to have 11,072 employees by 2025, although reports say Twitter’s staff increased in 2022 and then declined in 2023, before rising again.
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