That's probably how they can hit the $3 price-point though, I'm sure targeted Twitter ads these days bring in a lot more than $3/user/mo.
$3.72 billion (2020 revenue) / 12 = $310 million average monthly revenue
$310 million / 353.1 million (monthly active users) = $0.88 per user per month
Narrowing down to the monetizable daily active users, the users probably make up the vast majority of monetization:
$310 million / 152 million = $2.03 per user per month
Given that those users who are likely to pay for this service are probably even more skewed than that, yeah $3/month seems low. You're also somewhat selecting for users who have disposable income, which can't be great for ad value.
Many years ago I worked for a company that had tens of millions of US subscribers, my job involved modeling their behavior in order to allocate resources at least a week in advance. The law of large numbers is pretty amazing to see play out in front of you like that, where you can clearly see the bright lines between your market segments - fundamentally different kinds of people. I have a feeling that there is only one kind of person who would pay for twitter, which will very likely end up as a flag in a marketing dataset that certain companies would find well worth whatever twitter charges them (or their data-broker). Not unlike Volkswagen, on the eve of a big sales push for beetles, wanting a list of everyone who regularly buys peanut butter and cat litter.
But that doesn't sound right to me. Not all products and services are targeted at people with disposable income.
I think the truth is just that Twitter is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Why cut off advertising and data harvesting if people are willing to pay you just to change some colors and the app icon?
edit: here's an ARPU estimate for Twitter in 2016, it was around $2/quarter: https://www.statista.com/statistics/430874/twitter-annualize...
At this price point I wouldn't be surprised if they would lose money by offering no ads as part of the package.
https://investor.fb.com/investor-events/event-details/2021/F...
this is their q1 earnings presentation https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/FB...
US/CA arpu is $48.03 for just q1 (just 3 month not for the year). Global arpu is $9.27.
there's no way $3/mo makes any sense.
Well, it has a tier called (No Ads)*
However, the * is there because it still has ads on some shows.