As a result, these businesses looked toward the mobile subscription economy to help make up for their losses. Social app subscriptions, like Meta’s new paid verification or Twitter Blue, have grown more common in the wake of Apple’s privacy changes, which clamped down on platforms’ ability to personalize targeted ads, decreasing the ads’ effectiveness and, therefore, the companies’ revenues. It could have still done so “as a joke,” but encouraged a longer-term commitment to the punchline. Still, given the slight bump in revenue, it’s worth wondering what would have happened if Tumblr had bundled the feature into an upgraded tier of its existing $4.99/month ad-free browsing subscription to boost its recurring revenues. (Tumblr’s feature has also been upgraded to include rainbow checks, which may turn into crabs at any time, as its parody continues.) The “Important Internet Checkmark” in-app purchase, as Tumblr calls it, is today available as a one-off - not an ongoing subscription like what Twitter and now Meta both offer. That said, Tumblr’s blue check mark and its ties to revenue make for an interesting case study amid a broader trend to move toward paid verification, even if it’s only a joke. Is the ‘exodus’ over? Here’s how Twitter alternatives have fared since Elon Musk’s acquisition Tumblr also offers other in-app purchases, like crabs, paid boosting, and ad-free browsing. It’s difficult to directly attribute these increases to Tumblr’s double blue check alone, however. Sensor Tower says the in-app purchase revenue on iOS is up 19%, compared with the prior ten months ahead of the blue check’s launch (January through October 2022). When looking at more long-term trends, Tumblr’s revenue remains up - but not by as much. While that’s not a significant figure in the grand scheme of things by any means, it still represents a 125% jump in spending compared with the prior three-month total of August through October 2022. Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising to see Tumblr’s double-blue-check joke drive incremental revenue for the service.Īccording to new data that app intelligence firm Sensor Tower provided to TechCrunch, consumer spending on Tumblr’s iOS app increased since November 2022’s double-blue-check launch, now totaling $263,000 in net revenue. Tumblr’s only viable business model is shitposting After being met with community backlash, at one point Post+ was being outperformed from a monetization perspective by crabs - a goofy paid feature that let users send animated dancing crabs to each other’s dashboards. The company, now operated by owner Automattic following its 2019 acquisition, launched its response to Twitter’s paid verification hustle with the addition of its own purely cosmetic double blue checks - a sort of tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to the idea that subscription-based verification had any real value.Īs it turns out, at least some Tumblr users were willing to pay - though perhaps not for clout, but because in-jokes have proven to be a more successful monetization strategy for the blogging network than some of its more legitimate attempts to make money, such as its creator-focused subscription, Post+. Tumblr’s parody of paid verification has already delivered the social network and blogging platform a 125% boost in iOS in-app purchase revenue since November, according to a new analysis of the app’s in-app consumer spending.
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