It is, in truth, Snapchat that is seeing the most success in this new wave of social subscriptions, with its Snapchat+ option reaching four million paying subscribers, just a year after its introduction. As Twitter tries to sell users on the value of Twitter Blue and Meta extends its subscription offerings to more regions, Snapchat+ is soaring, reports Alex Heath of The Information.

At $3.99 per month, Snapchat+ offers a set of special add-on features for your Snapchat presence that notable doesn't include a verification check mark though it does provide a Snapchat+ badge.

Add-ons include:

Exclusive Snapchat icons
Deeper data insights on your usage and engagement
Priority Story replies
Custom post view emojis
Ability to freeze Snap Streaks
AI-generated profile backgrounds
For 750 million monthly active users, in Snap's case, these add-ons are well worth the value because they enrich the experience for the users, yet without being too recognizable so that they meet the usage factor.

Which is why Snapchat+ has had relatively good take up – although it is also worth noting that four million is only a tiny fraction of Snap's overall audience.

That is the big problem with social subscriptions. When Elon Musk rolled out Twitter Blue as a central element of his "Twitter 2.0" renewal plan, many analysts pointed out that the subscription strategy has been tested or experimented with by other apps before, to little fanfare among users.

But the basic framework of Musk's plan makes sense: if you can charge a small amount per user, that will make it harder for bot peddlers to create millions of profiles and use them to influence in-app discussion, because if enough users are paying, that will highlight bots versus real humans, in other words the humans will be paying subscribers and the bots won't.

The thing is, $8 per month is not a small money for many. And instead of trying to add utility into the package, Elon decided to sell verification ticks, which instantly lost their perceived value and exclusivity through selling them.

So while many Twitter users did want to be verified as a form of social currency in the app, selling checkmarks essentially devalued this as a product. Put that together with a middling Twitter Blue offering, features that most users don't care for, and it's pretty easy to see why only 0.3% of Twitter users have signed on to pay.

Meta might be doing even better still, though, with its Meta Verified plan selling checkmarks but attaching some value-add of direct in-person contact with account issues. For many Meta users that's worth the $11.99 a month alone - though Meta haven't served up any stats on Meta Verified take-up as yet.

Yet, at their best, it's hard to imagine that any of these subscription services is ever going to have more than single-digit penetration percentages among the users of each application.
YouTube Premium, which has existed for some years and gives a pretty fair value-add in no ads in-stream, reportedly currently has about 50 million subscribers. That's out of YouTube's 2 billion users – 2.5% of its overall audience.

It's at this point where Snapchat+ is at 0.53% of Snap's total user base, while Twitter Blue has made it to 0.3%, noted above.

It is a nice supplemental source of income, for sure, and a handy extra revenue pathway to have. But it is going to be no solution, as Elon had first hoped.

Still, Snap is happy to have that next revenue stream and has launched two new Snapchat+ features in a bid to win the ears-and-wallets of more subscribers.

Snap is adding 'expressive chat messages', or in other words, a new font size slider for your DMs.
They aren't dramatic functional improvements – which is important because that would shut out the non-subscribers to the app and thus Snap would lose people to that exclusion. But they do add value.

And if Snap plays a bridge function for the user's audience, there is certainly value in what Snapchat+ offers.