X still struggles to grow subscription revenue | Hacker News Reader

X still struggles to grow subscription revenue

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36 pointsLorenDB76 comments

When I joined Twitter, I could post something mildly interesting and get a few likes, retweets and a discussion. I saw tweets from my network and responded similarly. A few years back the algorithmic timeline appeared, and all of a sudden I was seeing tweets from people guaranteed to annoy me.

I can no longer use Twitter because noone saw my tweets. What is the point of that.

Recently I paid for a month on Twitter to see if it improved things. My replies were seen occasionally, but still noone sees my tweets. I reported someone whose timeline was full of tweets repeating the N word over and over. They responded that they didn't see a problem with that.

So I cancelled, because my membership got me literally nothing

Edit: I just checked and despite my 3000 followers noone responded to any of my recent tweets

I'd pay the $11 for no ads.

Currently, I see an ad every 4 tweets on the free plan in the X mobile app. The $11 plan promises to half the ads I see, so that would be every 8 tweets.

I'd get no ads with the $22 plan, but that's way above the amount I'm willing to pay to read tweets.

Currently, I pay nothing and see no ads in my desktop browser, presumably due to uBlock Origin. Then, Control Panel for Twitter[1] fixes the rest.

1. https://jbscript.dev/control-panel-for-twitter

You get zero ads in Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin and it also doesn't cost you anything.

I am sure that they will kill this eventually, but hey.

If you have to log in to read tweets, you're still the product.

But you'll still see the spam from people who use the $8 as an entry level advertising tier. The top replies to a viral tweet feature onlyfans promoters and other spammers with blue checks.

Control Panel for Twitter seems to be able to hide these.

Alas, if I could only learn to tolerate Android and go back to it.

Use pro.twitter.com(earlier called tweetdeck) and add home timeline to the deck.

Voila, Home timeline with zero ads

However, Twitter pro membership is required

Has Elon tried suing his users into paying for a subscription?

I think it will be a while before people are normalized with the idea of paying to read tweets.

I think a large fraction of the active userbase will be happy to pay, eventually. The catch is that the userbase will be so small by then it won't be enough to pay the bills.

It might yet survive as a personal PR machine, though.

Gonna be honest with the direction and quality of the average tweet on the site you'd have to pay me to read more tweets. Not sure how big the target demographic is for having people with profile pictures of Erwin Rommel and/or anime girls give you their take on current world affairs. I don't think you can run a pay for premium content model and 4chan at the same time.

Oh, they did exactly that. Trying to pay elite users.

...but those anime Rommels are the 1000x pageview elites in Twitterland, and they practice religious anti-commercialism, so that fell apart instantly.

The product is really more "pay to self-promote".

They have a dark pattern around annual subscriptions, i.e. I had a monthly subscription I wanted to downgrade, and with no confirmation they charged me for the entire year after I selected the lower tier and hit next.

This is probably why.

I issued a chargeback.

I never got into Twitter at the best of times, but I would read tweets if people linked them to me. Now that I have to have an account to view most stuff, Twitter has become extremely unappealing.

I do have a Twitter account, but I don’t want to sign into it to read something that is supposed to be public anyway.

Also, $22 to not see ads is obscene. I pay $21/month for my YouTube Premium family plan, and that’s for six people, and that includes unlimited music streaming, and that has no ads.

I guess at this point Twitter is just a place for Elon to be surrounded by fanboys?

Biosci Twitter used to be amazing. Great resource to find cool new articles if you followed the right people.

Now it is absolutely useless for that purpose. Such a shame. Death of a golden age.

It took 16 years to build Twitter into a roughly break-even ad supported product. Growing ad revenue is, generally, faster than growing subscription revenue. Even if X wasn't "struggling," there is no reason to believe it would take less time to build revenue back to when Elon bought it.

How does Appfigures estimate revenue?

They say "AI". https://appfigures.com/support/kb/682/how-appfigures-estimat...

X is much more fun now. I am not subjected to my own bubble, and I see opinions different from mine, which I often find irritating. Yet, given that I want to get out of the bubble and see opinions different from mine, X works wonders for me.

How do you get through all the Russian/CCP/Iranian $8 blue check propaganda bots and see any useful tweets? Twitter is only useful to me for checking on those people I actually follow. The firehouse is pure garbage, and yeah I did try to train it for a few days, I still only got garbage after Musk’s changes of promoting blue checks

At least 95% of accounts I follow are premium subscribers. The price is very reasonable if you consider the access to their Grok AI as useful.

How do you know they are real subscribers, and not just popular accounts that X granted the flair to?

I'd like to see credible data about the number of daily active accounts first because I highly doubt many people still use Twitter. The ones who still do probably mostly use it for free advertisement. Of course, Twitter's user base was massive, so it takes years for it to die.

The pay rail is broken

The quality of algorithm/recommendations on the platform has gone down sharply. In addition, I have noticed a slow uptick in bugs -- things failing to load, videos don't play, back button doesn't work, clicking profiles doesn't work.

Elon's acquisition of twitter was a total blunder, such a dramatic destruction of value in only a couple short years. I am less inclined to pay for the subscription now than I was on day 1. Hard for me to believe that it has any kind of long term future other than just slowly fading in relevance. Based on its current trajectory I expect it to either turn into or be absorbed by a super-pac ajacent right-wing propaganda org.

Some parts of AOL are still around, so I suppose the ongoing Xitter exodus will slow down at some point. Things like local government outreach and Myspace-like démodé bands might take years.

According to Elon, X is actually growing: https://x.com/search?q=all-time%20high%20(from%3A%40elonmusk...

Technically speaking, even AOL kept growing into the late 2000s. It didn't stop mailing out CDs till 2006. IIRC its userbase didn't max out until well after "still being on AOL" had turned into a meme.

According to Wikipedia, AOL peaked around 2001-2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#/media/File:Aol_subscriber...

Looks like mid-2002. OK, early 2000s then.

Weirdly, having an aol.com address is a badge of honor among conservatives. At least, some article which I can't find now said so (and it seems to check out among people in my circles who actively use their AOL address).

I still have mine from when I was a teenager, although I don't pay for it and never will. As an email provider, the main difference between it and Gmail is that Gmail will never ask me to install security software of dubious value, whereas AOL webmail will do so frequently.

Interesting, I wonder who all the new users are? Most of the accounts that I have followed are defunct, slowed down, or mirrored on other social networks.

Bots.

There’s an enormous bloc of K-pop fans and crypto shills that make millions of tweets, retweets, etc., per day. Maybe even a million per hour.

Edit: And that’s just for the English language, maybe quadruple that for all languages added up.

Plus India/Pakistan twitter + sports twitter + African twitter users make at least another million per hour in English by my estimates. And at least 5x that when adding up every language.

Thai twitter users makes probably make at least another million per hour, though mostly in Thai. Same for Japanese twitter users.

a man known for absolutely never making shit up at every opportunity. This time it’s the world famous metric “user seconds” that we all use at our own companies.

It's extremely difficult to put any credibility behind any stats he puts forward. He seems to consistently mislead and outright lie.

In that same thread of posting of user stats he has a another graph where he claims he tripled traffic within 2-3 months of closing the purchase of X.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1775526635749417258

Advertising is down, users are down, bots are up, Fidelity (an investor in X) says the value of its investment is down ~80%, and we're supposed to believe he tripled users in 3 months? It's all completely faked.

The guy just consistently lies and misleads, and somehow there is a core set of people that no matter how many times he's been exposed continue to believe whatever he says.

Was that graph meant to be an April fool's joke or something? The timing's fairly close. I don't see how anyone could _possibly_ take a graph of that shape, showing "organic traffic", without any explanatory caveats about what happened to cause the abrupt rise, or indeed any explanation of the metric on the right axis, seriously.

I’ve had a lot of good looking ladies with thousands of follows and very few followers, take an interest in my extremely non-influencer like rambling. I call BS on his growth. Maybe there’s growth in pockets, like those who love his political commentary? There must surely be a lot of people who didn’t like the liberal tech bias of previous years. I’m close to just closing my account, but might just let it go dormant.

In the past year or so, nearly every day I receive at least one new follower from an obviously bot account despite me never posting or replying in over 9 years.

I spent some time blocking a ton of them a couple weeks ago and it seems to have dropped off. There should be an app to automate that. There probably is.

Given that Elon is a notorious liar I would give zero credibility to his own self serving claims.

I've seen several third party estimates and they all show a significant (double digit percent) decline since Elon bought the platform, which seems a lot more realistic than his claim.

Where did you get the idea that he is a notorious liar?

He often promotes hate/lies with his “hmmm…. Interesting” retweets of what are often far right wing, sometimes outright racist, accounts, with straight up disinformation

The entire affair around having to buy twitter.

How was that a lie?

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-...

Not sure what's behind that link, as it requires a login, but generally when he's said this he's been using weird bespoke metrics that no-one else does. If you're saying "according to [obscure bespoke KPI], everything is brilliant, actually, then everything is probably not brilliant; if it was, you'd just use a normal metric of goodness.

X has the problem of boosting blue checks. Which basically means people pay money to get their way to the top, which leads to a few problems - engagement farming, spam/scams, and perhaps worst of all, a ring of grifters who all promote each other. I usually have to scroll way down, and often hidden behind 'may contain offensive content', to see much otherwise.

It'll last a while, but I don't see it having much legs. Eventually the free users will get bored of typing into the void and go elsewhere. The boosted users will have nobody left to grift, and will go too.

I don't dislike Musk or even X for that matter, I check it here and there. I just don't see it being a successful long term strategy.

The weird thing is, it's a mechanic that everyone already knew didn't work; dating sites, who pioneered pay-for-attention a few decades ago, have learned that they generally have to ration it to avoid it clogging up the whole system with something that no-one wants to see (if you open Tinder, and every profile you see is of people who feel the need to pay to get attention, say, then you'll probably uninstall Tinder).

I'm _kind_ of surprised Twitter didn't rip off one of the dating site rationing approaches ("You get 5 boosts a month with Twitter Premium" or similar). Just flat-out pushing every single reply by every single pay-for-attention user is obviously doomed to fail.

Well yeah, and people aren't clamoring to sign up for my new Face Puncher 9000 robot, either. I wonder why.

I bet if you sue them then they'll happily sign up for Face Puncher 9000!

I mean, you'd assume that anyone who wants it already has it; it seems a rather niche product.

Twitter had already been crap long before Elon got to it but after he purchased it it became significantly worse. The blue checkmark system of replies being boosted to the top leads for any reasonably popular tweet to be full of slop you have to scroll through to see genuine replies.

Nowadays a majority of twitter feels like a left wing echochamber and right wing echochamber fighting for attention on the home feed among repost bot accounts

“ CEO Elon Musk telling advertisers to “go f— yourself.” “

In context (ie truth), Musk was specifically telling advertisers that are blackmailing to dictate speech can gfy.

> blackmailing to dictate speech

Deciding not to buy from you isn't blackmail. Words have meanings. Blackmail has a definition.

Well GARM wasn’t sure that was true, so they immediately disbanded and that was praised as a first amendment win by the highest office holders in the us government.

> Well GARM wasn’t sure that was true

This is a lie.

> praised as a first amendment win by the highest office holders in the us government

Well, at one point the highest office holder in the US government looked directly at the sun during a solar eclipse, so this praise really doesn't say very much about whether it was a good or bad thing.

It’s tautologically the case that they wouldn’t have disbanded if they had 100% assurance this type of cartel was legal.

> It’s tautologically the case that they wouldn’t have disbanded if they had 100% assurance this type of cartel was legal

Also a lie. You should read up on SLAPP lawsuits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

Musk is pretty famous for bringing forum-shopped SLAPP lawsuits against his critics, because he has enough money to ruin other people with legal fees. They do generally get thrown out, but the legal system is not an efficient truth and justice machine like you pretend, and there's no federal anti-SLAPP law in the US, only state laws that don't apply in Texas when suing in a federal court.

But circling back, please tell me that you recognize a difference between the words "boycott" and "blackmail".

Did that get Elon his advertising back?

Boycotting != blackmailing. It's perfectly within an advertiser's rights, even if you or I disagree. Vote with your wallet, as they say.

One thing to note is that not only is it within an advertiser's rights, it's probably also the better business decision.

If you can do a marketing campaign on say FaceBook where your ads will be targeted to your narrow market or a campaign on Twitter where your ads will be haphazardly place; which would you do?

It's Elons own fault. If he wanted Twitter to be able to compete with its competitors he probably shouldn't've fired the engineering team.

they didn't demand that he say or did not say certain things. they informed him that they didn't want their brands advertised next to the sort of things that their customers would frown upon.

you'd think that in becoming a billionaire, he'd have picked up a few rules of business.

And the ability to do this is bad, but it's also just normal capitalism which Elon supports. I'm okay with capitalism shifting capitalism supporters.

It's also a choice that Twitter made long ago to be funded primarily by advertisers. You'd think the guy that blew billions on the site might have noticed that during the due diligence he most certainly did

Except it shifts the ones with power towards authoritarianism, not reflection.

I mean, it's just freedom of association. There are only very limited circumstances where a company can be forced to advertise somewhere (only example I can think of is tobacco and alcohol companies required to pay for anti-smoking/drinking/etc PSAs as part of legal settlements).

Which is fine when it's about people listening to you, but bad when livelihoods depend on it. We can do better.

livelihoods? didn't he fire most of the employees at Twitter? what about their livelihoods?

> you'd think that in becoming a billionaire, he'd have picked up a few rules of business.

Are you telling me that in your opinion Musk doesn't have elementary knowledge about business?

he signed a deal to buy twitter and didn't realise he'd have to buy it.

he told his advertisers to go f*ck themselves then sued then for not using his personal blog to advertise.

it seems that the businesses he has the least involvement in tend to do better, but what do I know, I'm just a poor rando.

Well, either that, or he's doing a very good job of cosplaying as such a person.

"Everyone who doesn't want to do business with me is blackmailing me! Also they're very mean!"

Very unpopular opinion but in think twitter/X is better now. I use it more than

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