With tweet editing, the most requested social media feature of all time, recently added to Twitter’s Twitter Blue subscription offering, you’d expect there to have been a big surge in Blue subscribers in the last week or so has, right?
Looking at the stats, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
According to Sensor Tower’s latest findings, Twitter hasn’t seen a huge increase in revenue, at least based on overall app ranking data.
As you can see in this chart, once Twitter Blue started tweet editing, it targets users in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand 4th of Octoberthere was a small jump, with Twitter slightly moving up the app revenue ranks in each region.
Twitter then went on to post the tweet edit for US-based Blue subscribers October 6thwhich also resulted in a ranking boost based on Sensor Tower’s highest earning app rankings.
The biggest jump, however, came on Sunday October 9th, where as you can see, Twitter climbed several ranks in the US, indicating a fairly significant shift in users paying money in-app. But since then it’s largely reverted back to the mean, which may indicate that initial interest in tweet editing hasn’t provided a big boost in Twitter Blue adoption.
Twitter seemed pretty confident that it would even increase the price of Twitter Blue in July, seemingly in preparation for the launch of tweet editing, which in turn would have been given that it was arguably the most requested social platform update intended to arouse more interest in its subscription offering.
And it could be a bigger driver than this data suggests – Sensor Tower’s findings here are based on comparative app rankings in terms of revenue, so Twitter may indeed have generated a lot of signups, driving these overall ranking shifts, what will be the case then you will continue to see increases each month as users renew.
But the initial excitement seems to have died down, and it will be interesting to see if users see continued value in tweet editing – giving you 30 minutes to revise your tweet and five edits within that timeframe.
Or, alternatively, you could just delete the tweet and start over, like we all have always done.
In a way, it feels like the hype surrounding the tweet edit has been overdone simply due to Twitter’s reluctance to add it. There’s no real, big impact of adding an editing option — every other social media platform has offered editing tools for years without any major issues or concerns. But Twitter’s resistance to providing such has made it a bigger deal than it probably is just because it wasn’t there, and making minor typos in tweets is annoying.
However, is paying for tweet editing annoying enough? Probably not because we’ve all adapted by now, everyone already has a process for reviewing and deleting tweets as you go. Sure, it would be handy if you could fix that error you find in your tweet at a later date (generally hours later, which would be out of the scope of the current tweet editing option anyway). But is it really that big of a deal?
I suspect that’s probably not the case, and now that we have access to the tweet edit I suspect most people have already lost interest as it really isn’t the revolutionary update it’s due to years of debate and campaigning.
But maybe that assumption is wrong — maybe it’ll get millions more people signing up for Twitter Blue and bring a whole new revenue stream to the app.
Again, the stats don’t seem to reflect this, and I asked Twitter for official numbers on prevalence since the announcement, which they refused to provide.
There have also been some interesting uses of tweet editing by brands that could spark new usage trends in the app.
But overall, it feels like the tweet-editing hype was mostly just that, and in reality most people aren’t really that keen on the option — or at least paying for it.
So it will be interesting to see how Twitter Blue changes if/when Elon Musk eventually takes over the app.
Musk was quite critical of Twitter Blue as a product, noting that it should be cheaper, should offer verification of some form within the package, “and no ads” if users are willing to pay to use the app. Also described by one of Musk’s confidants, investor Jason Calacanis Twitter Blue as “an insane piece of shit” in text exchanges with Musk, noting that:
“These imbeciles spent a year on Twitter Blue to give people exactly that… Nothing they want!”
It’s worth noting that Calacanis has signed up for Twitter Blue since those comments specifically praised the editing of tweets.
Whether or not these perspectives still reflect Musk’s views remains to be seen, but Musk may be looking to change what Twitter Blue offers either way, while also campaigning for editing to be made more widely available in the app.
That might be a better approach, making it available to all users — which Twitter says will eventually happen one way or another — but what I think the first answer really suggests is that the tweet edit isn’t that big of a deal, and it never was.
It only became one because Twitter refused to add it, but now that it’s here it’s just another matter.
