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Comment by thr0wawayf00 | Hacker News Reader

According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter needs 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to surivive:

> That is why the priority over the past ten days has been to develop and launch Twitter Blue Verified subscriptions (huge props to the team!). Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.

Is that even remotely feasible? Based on the commentary I've seen, Twitter Blue is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to their total revenue.

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> According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter needs 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to surivive [...] Is that even remotely feasible?

Yes, Musk can plausibly drive off enough advertisers to get advertising revenue down to parity with subscription revenue.

Don't see how it helps Twitter survive, though.

Revenue of $5bn. Let’s say that you burn half of it down, so you’re making $2.5bn with ads, and $2.5bn with subscriptions. If there 200M DAU, then that means you want to make $12.5/year, per user, for subscriptions.

I don’t see how that would be possible, even under the most wildly optimistic scenarios.

One area Twitter hasn’t excelled in is adding new users.

The good news is that if your revenue drops, so does your share of subscription. In that sense he's already helping the goal by doing the first part!

Q2 revenue was $1.18B on 237.8M mDAU. If they want $590M (50%) in subscription revenue, that's 24.5M subscriptons @ $24 per quarter. So they'd need to convert about 10% of the reported mDAU to subscribers?

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-s...

I don't think what he's proposing is to replace any ad revenue -- he's trying to grow revenue and take a company currently in the red into the black. I think he means to keep all the ad revenue, and then add that much again in subscription revenue. So: 20%, I guess? Or even more to make up for advertiser attrition? Which seems like... a ton.

not likely, subscriptions are very mature on YouTube and still only make up a tiny percentage of revenue. MKBHD did a good video breaking this down across other social networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c

I think it could only possibly work if "subscriptions" were not directly to twitter, but to other twitter subscribers. Premium follows to content creators, charities, individual journalists, or politicians. Where you get some "club only" content and interaction. And Twitter takes a piece off the top

-- I was more scared of the "upcoming economic downturn" - how bad are people expecting this recession to be? --

Just to service the debt that Musk loaded them with as part of the purchase, they're going to have to add a billion a year. They had 5 billion in revenue last year. So that would be three billion a year in subscriptions.

Given that Twitter had about half a billion users hat's six dollars per user in subscriptions to see six dollars worth of surveillance capitalism per year. Does that seem likely?

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