Elon Musk said on Sunday that Twitter is planning to offer a higher-priced Blue subscription that will have zero ads.
Musk, who acquired Twitter in October 2022 in a deal worth $44 billion, didn’t say how much the new tier will cost, nor when it will launch.
Twitter Blue currently costs $11 a month for iOS and Android users, and $8 a month for sign-ups made via the web. An annual rate for web signups is offered for $84. The higher rates for iOS and Android is Twitter’s way of dealing with the cut that Apple and Google take for purchases made via their app stores.
The premium tier is supposed to show half the number of ads that are currently shown to users on the free tier, though Twitter has reportedly yet to make the change. The new pricier tier, on the other hand, will do away with ads altogether.
In a follow-up tweet on Sunday, Twitter CEO Musk also said that ads on the platform are “too frequent and too big,” promising that the San Francisco-based platform will be “taking steps to address both in coming weeks.”
Last spring, when Musk made public his plan to acquire Twitter, he forecast that ads on the service would become less of a revenue driver for the company by 2028, accounting for 45% of total income, down from 90% in 2020. Instead, he said it was his plan to use subscriptions to drive revenue, a statement that led to a revamp of Twitter Blue toward the end of last year.
Current features for the premium Blue tier include a verification checkmark (awarded following a verification check), an undo-tweet option, bookmark folders for organizing bookmarked tweets, custom app icons so you can change how your Twitter icon appears on your phone, color themes to change the look of the app, and control over what appears on your navigation bar. Finally, there’s the ability to upload videos of up to 60 minutes via web, or 10 minutes via iOS and Android, compared to 4 minutes without a subscription.
