Ideally you'd also get ad-free access to Twitter itself, which I would certainly consider paying for. Considering the annual per-user revenue is ~ 12USD [1], this seems like something that would be financially interesting to Twitter.
Some how I don't think the people that want to pay to get rid of ads are the ones clicking on them.
Anecdotally someone I am close to doesn't seem to mind ads and regularly buys products from them, I block ads and rarely ever buy products from them. I'd pay for not being served ads in the first place
It's not necessarily about clicking the ad, it's also about brand awareness and the subconscious effect of having seen it.
In the back of your head when you see the product the next time, you might think to yourself "I've seen this somewhere before... it's probably reputable." Or when you're in need of something, that brand's product might pop into your head sooner as something to assess.
Anecdotally, I click ads and buy things from them all the time and I have all ad free subscriptions: YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, WSJ, Economist. Lots of stuff. Instagram doesn’t have an ad free thing but I would have paid for it in the past. Not any more though.
For some users this might be true, but not for everyone- whether the advertisers realize it or not. I refuse to buy anything from an ad. If I want to buy a widget and happen to see an ad in the search results for the widget, I'll then refuse to buy the widget because I saw an ad for it. I block every promoted tweet, and enable as much ad blocking as I possible can on all of my devices. I am probably worth a negative amount to advertisers because seeing their ads actively makes me disinclined to buy the product.
On the other hand, I realize that services cost money to build and maintain, and if the subscription came with ad-free (and data-mining free! "ad-free - same great ad-tech data-mining flavor" doesn't count) I would definitely subscribe.
That's worldwide. Their revenue per US user from ads is $4/month. Selling an ad-free subscription for $3/month can't work for them just from those numbers, and it gets worse when you consider that Apple will be taking 30% of the latter but not the former.
You can subscribe outside of the App Store, and I’d likely pay more than $4 a month to see only tweets, without ads. The only thing holding me back from paying for something like TweetBot is that Twitter has intentionally hobbled notifications for third-party apps.
Per international user is extremely misleading. Ad costs are wildly different based on geographic area, with the US being far higher.
FB, for example, pulls 4-5x the ARPU for US users compared with international. I'd expect twitter to have a similar pattern (though it depends on what 'international' means: Europe is only half the US).
The other issue with this is that the most engaged twitter users are going be the likeliest to sign up for a paid twitter service. These are also going to be the people pulling the average up.
Nope, it just provides access to articles without ads. Certainly has its uses if you use Twitter as a news aggregator, but it’s not that useful for me.
It's can be a Catch-22 in some cases. The same people most willing to pay to opt-out are the ones most coveted by advertisers.