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Twitter Users 6-10 Times More Likely to Quit Than Buy Twitter Blue

April 20, 2023 | Updated April 27, 2023

Legacy blue checks going away today, Twitter says. But more users are motivated to deactivate their accounts than to buy verified status

As of sometime today, a blue checkmark on your Twitter profile – once a status symbol that couldn’t be bought – will stand for verification as a customer of the Twitter Blue $8 per month subscription program, according to the company. However, putting blue checks up for sale doesn’t seem to have turned into a big business.

On the best day for the program in early April, about 6,600 people landed on the confirmation page for a paid signup, compared with about 38,700 who confirmed the deactivation of their Twitter account, according to Similarweb estimates. Although most disaffected Twitter users simply use the service less, rather than going to the trouble of putting a stake through the heart of their account, about 6 to 10 times more Twitter users are axing their accounts than upgrading them.

Key takeaways

  • In March, more than 1.1 million Twitter users deactivated their accounts, compared with about 116,000 who confirmed signup for Twitter Blue, according to Similarweb estimates for twitter.com. The ratio might be slightly better for Twitter Blue when we get the final numbers for April, but probably not by much.
  • For context, Twitter attracted nearly 3 million visits to its new account signups page in March, so signups for the free version of the service still outnumber deactivations by nearly 3 to 1.
  • Account deactivations spiked around the time Elon Musk took control of Twitter, at about 88,900 on November 20, but have since subsided, averaging less than 35,700 per day in March. However, in the first three months of 2023, Twitter web and app engagement fell on a year-over-year basis.

Deactivated accounts don’t show a mass exodus, but they beat Twitter Blue

In the first half of April, there were days when we didn’t collect enough data to make a projection (thus, the gaps in the chart below) – but from what we can see, Twitter Blue signups peaked at about 6,600 on April 2, compared with about 38,700 account deactivations that same day.

Free account signups beat deactivations

While they outnumber Twitter Blue signups, account deactivations are more than offset by signups for the free, ad-supported version of Twitter.

The early Elon era surge in deactivations has not repeated

In October and November, some of the people threatening to quit Twitter if Elon Musk completed his takeover actually pulled the trigger on deactivating their accounts – enough of them to cause a couple of noticeable daily spikes in traffic to the confirmed account deactivation page.

Since then, there hasn’t been another big stampede toward the exits.

Subscriptions are only one of the alternate revenue streams Elon Musk has talked about adding to reduce dependence on advertisers, but the big pivot to creating the X Corp “Everything app” is still just a plan. Subscriptions are the plan he has acted on, and the response seems weak.

So far, Twitter users would rather quit than upgrade.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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