Snap Is Doing What Twitter Can’t

As Elon Musk threatens to charge all users with a monthly subscription to access Twitter, Snap is seeing a userbase more willing to pay to use the perks of its platform. Snap’s membership service Snapchat+ has reached a whopping 5 million users, which is officially halfway to its goal of 10 million.

Bloomberg reports that Snapchat+ is a new strategy for the photo-sharing app to increase profits, and it appears to be working. The 5 million user figure is a big leap from Snap’s announcement that it secured 3 million paying users back in April. Snapchat+ costs users around $4 a month and offers cheeky perks like a unique app icon and in-app customizations as well as account metrics and tools like the ability to boost posts and check how frequently people watch your stories.

“We’ve seen with Snapchat+ that people are willing to pay,” Snap VP of product Jack Brody said, as quoted by Bloomberg. “They’re excited to receive early access to experimental, exclusive features, and the more that we bring to the table, the more likely that is to be true.”

Snap launched the premium service in June 2022 with the company reportedly claiming that the amount of sign-ups has exceeded its own expectations. Some of the buzz around Snapchat+ is almost certainly due to “My AI,” which is the platform’s artificial intelligence, released earlier this year, that can only be unlocked with a subscription.

Elon Musk should take a page out of Snap’s playbook. After being forced by a court to buy the less-than-profitable social media platform last October, the tech billionaire quickly realized that he needed some other revenue streams to cover the massive amount of debt he’d racked up. Musk eventually removed all previously awarded verification from the platform and, in its place, offered users a blue checkmark for $8 as part of Twitter Blue/X Premium. Obviously, that didn’t stick, and more recently, Musk indicated that all Twitter users will need to pay.

As of April, Twitter had an estimated 640,000 premium subscribers with about half of the earliest subscribers having fled since signing up. Unlike Snapchat’s service, subscribing to X/Twitter has become a cultural signifier that a user supports Elon Musk’s right-wing ideology and general buffoonery. As long as the blue check remains the MAGA hat of social media, convincing users to cough up a credit card number will remain a tough hill to climb.