October is behind us, which means it's time to check in on X's (aka. Twitter's) mobile revenue, a monthly series I started when Twitter started monetizing its users back in 2021. As the first social platform to do that, it was interesting to see how it'll grow, and now that Elon's at the helm, it's interesting to see how it's changing.
Unlike September, October was a positive month for Twitter. But...
According to our estimates, X earned $5.4M of net revenue in October from the App Store and Google Play. Compared to last October, before Elon took over, that's an increase of 829%! And that's all net, which means what X gets to keep after Apple and Google take their fees.
If you've been following the series, that's an increase over September's revenue, which was a bunch lower than August. So that's good!
But while October did beat September, it didn't beat August, and I find that potential problematic.
It's interesting because it could mean that subscriptions aren't as popular as many have expected that'd become.
See, before the summer, the only way to earn money on X was from subscriptions. That changed when X started paying creators by the number of impressions their posts got.
If those payments outweigh the revenue from subscriptions, there's less incentive to put effort into subscriber-only content and more incentive to go viral.
It's not necessarily bad for X, but it is interesting.
At the end of October, X introduced two new price tiers. One that's slightly cheaper (Basic) and offers functionality already offered in X Premium but not the blue check, and another that's slightly more expensive (Premium+) that gets rid of all ads.
I expect to see revenue rise thanks to Premium+ in November.
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