Elon Musk's plan to wean X off ad revenue remains suppressed. A new, third-party report into X Premium by a subscription service analyzing and surveying intelligence firm Appfigures suggests that X has brought in about $200 million in in-app purchase revenue across iOS and Android since the original launch of the subscription, now known as X Premium, when it first launched as Twitter Blue back in 2021.

Caveats: the figure is only based on those purchased via the mobile app, not the mobile web or desktop web; so, the actual number is probably higher, as X's offers discounts on web purchases.

Then, of course, are the commission fees.

Based on commission costs in the app stores, X will have generated at least $140 million, the company estimates. But that too will be a higher sum since Apple and Google start slashing commissions from 30% to 15% in year two. (Appfigures doesn't have a reliable way of calculating how many subscriptions are pegged to each rate, we're told).

To better put this into perspective, although Twitter Blue was first introduced in 2021, it was rebooted in December 2022 when Twitter under Musk advanced further into non-advertising revenue. According to Sensor Tower, the provider of app data, the service only raked in $11 million in mobile app subscriptions within its first three months post-relaunch. Last year, the company currently known as X launched two more subscriptions, Basic and Premium+.

While there's no way definitively to know how many of X's users are paying for X Premium subscriptions, there are ways to back into some estimates here, at least in terms of native mobile subscribers.

X is still available for free on its three paid tiers: Basic, Premium, and Premium Plus, with the latter two granting different levels of advanced feature accessibility, including Grok AI, a blue Verified checkmark, fewer ads, and others. The most expensive in-app purchase on X is the latter, mobile at $11 per month.

In September 2024, X raised $14.7 million from mobile in-app purchases, reported by Appfigures.

Since X is a private company and has no obligation to disclose publicly how many users it has, one can only guess at how many buying which subscription level are.

But if that revenue came from its top in-app purchase, X Premium, it would translate to about 1.3 million paying users, or $14.7M / $11.

If instead all the sign-ups were for X's lowest tier, the $4 per month X Basic, then X could have gained as many as 3.7 million paid users during the month.

If we assume that X's paid users split 70% on Premium, 20% on Premium Plus, and 10% on Premium Basic, that would mean around 940K Premium users, 134K Premium Plus users, and 368K Premium Basic users. That kind of split seems reasonable because X's top three subscriptions are Premium, Premium Plus, then Basic. In total, those numbers added up would be roughly 1.4 million paid users added in September.

It does look a bit brighter quarter to quarter for X Premium, with estimates by Appfigures implying that in-app purchase revenue is increasing by 30% from Q2 to Q3 after it remained relatively flat in the period leading up to that.

Not to be ignored are other in-app purchases besides X Premium: in-app subscription to popular creators on the service. On the Service, Elon Musk has a huge following, to mention one example. Last year, Fortune reported that Musk was the most followed user with 155 million followers of which over 40,000 were subscribers — or .025% of his followers had subscribed. Today Musk has 200 million followers. Assuming roughly the same percentage were subscribed, that would work out to around 50,000 subscribers. At $4 per month for the subscription, that would pull in around $200,000 per month in gross revenue.

Another high-subscribe-account is @stevewilldoit, since he follows everybody that subscribes to him. He's currently following 10.4K people on X. If three-fourths were subscribed, that would be about 7.8K subscribers paying $5 a month, grossing $39K/month before X's cut.

While very rough, these add-on figures are valuable in their own right, as they are part of X's strategy to grow its user base through creator content.

The company last week said it will start paying creators based on engagement they receive from X's Premium subscribers, and not based on ad revenue — clearly a bet on a catalyst for X subscribers. On the one hand, as X had lowered ad load to zero for Premium+ subscribers, this could make creators earn more through it. But at the same time, engagement payday usually encourages clickbait or contentious content, something designed to provoke replies.

Still, Bloomberg reported earlier this year that X generated $1.48 billion in total revenue for the first 6 months of 2024 according to financial documents shared with regulators. Which is to say, subscriptions are still a very small pie of X's.

The company introduced the new program after a series of steps by X, which seemed to alienate some advertisers in the process. These include a lawsuit filed by the company against a group of individuals who planned an ad boycott and CEO Elon Musk's infamous "go f- yourself" message to advertisers. That said, the company seems to have taken steps in apologizing for such behavior since then, even going as far as recently striking a deal with Unilever to return the product maker to its ranks.