Less than 50% of first Twitter Blue subscribers continue paying $8 fee

In some shocking news for Elon Musk, more than half of the earliest subscribers of Twitter Blue who paid $8 a month are no longer subscribed and have reportedly ditched the blue ticks.

According to a Mashable report, out of about 150,000 early Twitter Blue subscribers, "just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30".

Citing data scraped by independent researcher Travis Brown, the report said that not many Twitter Blue subscribers are sticking around.

Musk and Twitter were yet to comment on the numbers cited in the report.

Reports last year showed that a total of 150,000 users originally signed up for Twitter Blue within just a few days of its launch in November.

The micro-blogging platform also temporarily disabled new signups for about a month "shortly after those users subscribed as a result of accounts signing up for Blue, with the intent to impersonate major brands on the platform".

According to the report it means that about 81,843 users, or 54.5 per cent, of Twitter users who subscribed to Blue initially have cancelled the subscriptions.

"That's an abnormally high churn rate for an online subscription service," the report mentioned.

As Musk forced his way into making every user pay on Twitter from April 20, an earlier report revealed that half of Blue service subscribers have less than 1,000 followers on the platform.

What's more, there were 2,270 paying Twitter Blue subscribers who have zero followers.

According to Brown, Twitter Blue currently has a total of 4,44,435 paying subscribers.

About half of all paid Twitter subscribers (about 2,20,132 users) have less than 1,000 followers.

On April 20, chaos prevailed on Twitter when Musk finally removed all legacy verified accounts with blue check marks, but allowed some celebrities to retain it.

In India, Twitter users have to shell out Rs 900 a month (or Rs 9,400 a year) to get Blue verified status.