To get funding for his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk had to show investors that the social media platform was better off in his hands than with the current owners.
Until now, many were left to wonder about how Twitter would change under Musk’s ownership. As it stands right now, Twitter isn’t all that attractive of an investment and change is necessary to make the service better both for users and the new management.
We’ve heard snippets of what could potentially come down the line in future and now thanks to the New York Times, we have a slice more. The outlet has reportedly obtained a pitch deck that Musk shared with investors promising what we can only describe as monumental gains.
For one, Musk plans to drive up the number of Twitter users to 600 million by 2025. Considering the service only boasts 198.4 million monetisable daily users as of its latest earnings call, that’s a big leap.
Essentially Musk is saying he can add 200 million users and some changes to Twitter every year for the next three years. How does he plan to do that? Subscriptions, at least that’s what it looks like.
The pitch deck is very much focused on how to drive up subscriptions on Twitter such as Twitter Blue. To that end, Musk says that he wants to have 69 million Twitter Blue subscribers on the platform by 2025. But, Twitter Blue is going to need some marquee features to make it attractive because bookmarks, undoing a tweet and customisation of the app aren’t features worth the $2.99 subscription fee.
However, there is another service that Musk teased dubbed only “X” that he says will being in nine million subscribers by 2023 and 104 million by 2028. While we could speculate about what this subscription could be, we’d be here for a few hours, but given that this “X” subscription is expected to generate $10 billion in revenue by 2028, it’s likely something big.
However, the question is whether these features will actually bring users back or bring new users to the platform for the first time. Clearly, Musk’s investors think there is something here but what investors think and what people actually do aren’t always the same thing.
While lessening Twitter’s reliance on advertising for revenue generation is a good thing, we’re not sure it will encourage users to join the service. By the looks, it seems Musk wants to offer two subscription options on Twitter which could split the user base and cause confusion as to which subscription is best.
The idea of asking users to pay to remove advertising is one that has been floated around, but even that doesn’t seem like a value add to us. Unlike platforms such as YouTube which effectively force users to watch or watch part of an advert, Twitter’s advertising is less intrusive.
These goals are rather lofty so we expect to see some massive changes coming to Twitter should Musk’s purchase of the platform be successful. Once that’s done though, we suspect investors will be keeping an eye on the platform and making their voices heard if Musk’s goals fall short.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
