San Francisco, March 29 – As Elon Musk forces his way into making every user pay on Twitter, a report has revealed that half of Blue service subscribers have less than 1,000 followers on the platform.
What’s more, there are 2,270 paying Twitter Blue subscribers who have zero followers, according to Mashable.
According to researcher Travis Brown, Twitter Blue currently has a total of 444,435 paying subscribers.
About half of all paid Twitter subscribers (about 220,132 users) have less than 1,000 followers.
“Nearly 78,059 paying Twitter Blue subscribers have less than 100 users following their account — 17.6 per cent of all Twitter Blue subscribers,” he told Mashable.
According to the report, it is unclear how many of those “current” Twitter Blue subscribers are actually not paying.
Twitter hasn’t been removing paid verification badges from many users who cancelled their Blue subscription.
According to Brown, those users are still marked as “Blue verified” by Twitter, and show up in the data.
However, just 0.2 per cent of Twitter’s 254 million daily active users are paying for Twitter Blue, the report mentioned.
From April 1, Musk will remove all legacy Blue check marks. There are approximately 420,000 legacy verified accounts in total.
The Twitter CEO on Tuesday said that only verified accounts will be allowed to appear in ‘For You recommendations’, starting April 15.
“That said, it’s ok to have verified bot accounts if they follow terms of service and don’t impersonate a human,” he added.
Later, he again tweeted, saying “forgot to mention that accounts you follow directly will also be in For You, since you have explicitly asked for them”.
These Twitter statements by Musk have infuriated thousands of users, putting a question mark on the future of the micro-blogging platform which has lost several advertisers since Musk took over.