Twitter reportedly had just 180,000 subscribers in the US last month

Elon Musk may need to think of many more ways to attract potential subscribers to Twitter Blue if he wants the subscription service to become a major revenue stream. Accordingly The information, only 180,000 people in the US paid for a Twitter subscription as of mid-January, and that appears to be around 0.2 percent of the site’s monthly active users. The publication said it saw the information in a document that also revealed that 62 percent of the company’s paying users live in the United States. This means that Twitter has around 290,000 subscribers worldwide.

Twitter Blue costs $8 per month for users paying through the web — or $7 if paying for an annual subscription — and $11 for those paying through Apple’s or Google’s app stores. With the latter option granting the tech giants a cut in subscriber payments, Twitter still only gets $8 per month from users overall. With the current number of paying users, the site will only make $27.8 million per year from its subscription services. However, Twitter Blue only relaunched in mid-December last year after a rocky initial launch a month earlier. It’s bound to gain more subscribers, though it remains to be seen if it can achieve the growth Musk desires.

As The information noted, Musk told Twitter employees last year that he would like half of the site’s revenue to come from subscriptions. With the company paying more than $1 billion a year in interest just from the loans Musk took out to buy the site, the manager is targeting sales of $3 billion by 2023. Twitter needs to have quite a few subscribers to earn half of it from Blue. One way the company is considering to earn more from its subscription services is to offer a higher-priced membership tier that allows users to browse the site without ads. Twitter also reportedly plans to charge businesses $1,000 a month for their gold verification badges and an additional $50 a month for each account connected to them.

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