The attorneys general in D.C., Maryland and Virginia are suing Uber, accusing the rideshare app of having a “deceptive” subscription service, Uber One.
All three attorneys general in the D.C. region are suing Uber, accusing the rideshare app of taking advantage of consumers through its “deceptive” subscription service, Uber One.
Nineteen states, including Virginia, Maryland and D.C., filed a joint lawsuit with the Federal Trade Commission against Uber on Monday. The complaint says Uber didn’t follow through on advertised savings, charged consumers during their free trial periods, and signed up users for Uber One without their consent.
The lawsuit comes after the FTC sued Uber in April 2025 for its subscription service. This new amended complaint requests penalties for the app’s alleged violation of the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, which ensures that consumers fully understand the terms of a subscription service before signing up.
The new coalition allows the 21 states and D.C. to seek restitution for these alleged violations.
The lawsuit says Uber not only charged people for subscriptions that they never signed up for, but didn’t deliver on promised savings supposedly included in the subscription. The FTC said in a news release that users have reported they didn’t receive $0 delivery fees and $25 in monthly savings, two key discounts Uber One advertises.
Another major complaint is that Uber One allegedly signed up and charged consumers for the subscription service without their knowledge.
D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said these subscription violations are unacceptable, especially given the high cost of living.
“No one should ever be stuck paying for a subscription they do not want,” Schwab said in a news release. “We are joining this lawsuit to stop Uber’s deceptive and illegal conduct and to ensure that the more than 100,000 DC residents who are paying for Uber One subscriptions have an easy way to cancel if they no longer wish to use the service.”
Uber One offers a free trial, which the court filing claimed was breached. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said many users were charged for Uber One before their trial ended.
“Free trials should actually be free — not traps that lock Marylanders into unwanted monthly charges,” Brown said in a news release.
The lawsuit also says Uber made it extremely difficult to cancel Uber One subscriptions, stating that consumers had to go through 12 actions and seven different screens. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said these steps trapped consumers.
“Deceptive enrollment and billing practices have no place in the marketplace,” Miyares said in a news release.
In addition to D.C, Virginia and Maryland, the other states on the lawsuit are Alabama, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
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These days, Black Friday is the longest day of the year. We’re a week out from the big day, but amazing deals are already popping up for some of our favorite subscription services. This is a great time to lock in a long-term deal on a streaming platform like Apple TV or HBO Max, but there’s even more to explore beyond that, from a big discount on MasterClass (to pick up a new hobby with all the money you’re saving) and one of the best offers I’ve ever seen for DeleteMe (which cleans your personal data off the internet while you kick back with your new Amazon Prime Video subscription. We’ll update this list for the rest of the month as new deals go live.
Best Black Friday subscription deals
MasterClass
MasterClass is one of our favorite gift subscriptions. If you often find yourself on the internet without knowing why, MasterClass has hundreds of celebrity-led courses to help you put that time to good use. Each one is split into bite-size videos so you can control how much you study at a time. Highlights right now include creative writing classes from Margaret Atwood, home cooking lessons from Alice Waters and a crash course in battlefield tactics from General Stanley McChrystal.
Quicken Simplifi (one year) for $36 (50 percent off): We named Quicken Simplifi the best budgeting app this year largely because it lives up to its name. This is the cleanest budgeting app on the market, with an interface designed to welcome newcomers and no key information more than a scroll away. It’s also cheap, especially with this Black Friday deal, and very good at detecting and categorizing your important transactions.
Monarch Money (one year) for $50 (50 percent off with code MONARCHVIP): Monarch Money, our other favorite budgeting app, is giving new users half off for Black Friday. It’s a little more complex than Quicken Simplifi, but it also gives you finer-grained control, including detailed reporting, balance sheets and instant graphs. The standout goals feature lets you establish savings and wealth baselines that feel amazing when you hit them.
Rosetta Stone Lifetime Unlimited subscription for $149 (60 percent off): Rosetta Stone was pioneering visual language courses back when software still came in boxes, and it’s still one of the best language learning apps. Today, its method works as well as ever, with patient learning based on pictures, terms and recordings. This deal gets you a full lifetime subscription with access to all 25 languages in the library.
Audible (three months) for $3 (80 percent off): For literally $1 per month, you can get access to Audible’s enormous library of published audiobooks, podcasts and Audible Originals (which can be anything from never-before-heard books to live performances). It’s only three months, after which you’ll have to cancel or renew at the regular price, but an audiobibliophile can cram a lot of listening into 90 days.
Headspace (one year) for $35 (50 percent off): Out of all the meditation apps available, Headspace is our favorite. It doesn’t just help you relax and de-stress, but also teaches you to practice meditation as a skill, with sessions building on each other in organized courses. There’s a massive library of standalone guided meditations with all kinds of instructors, and it’s easy to search for the ones that work best for you. This deal gives you half off a full year.
Calm Premium (one year) for $40 (50 percent off): Once you’ve finished your Headspace meditation, head over to Calm for every other stress-relieving activity you can think of. This packed subscription gives you a huge library of relaxing content, from music and restful soundscapes to its popular “sleep stories” with celebrity narrators telling bedtime stories for children and adults alike. If you’ve ever wanted to be lulled to sleep by Harry Styles, Matthew McConaughey or Idris Elba, this app is for you.
DeleteMe (all services) for 30 percent off with code BFCM30OFF25: DeleteMe scrubs your information from people search sites and other public-facing data brokers, dramatically reducing your online presence. It’s a time-saving and user-friendly automation of a Since using it monthly, we’ve noticed a sharp decrease in the amount of spam emails, texts and calls to our personal addresses.
Adobe Creative Cloud (one year) for $389 (50 percent off): Adobe Creative Cloud is half off for one year right now, coming out to $389 for one year when you pay upfront. (There’s a discounted $35 monthly rate as well, working out to $420 for the year.) Creative Cloud is Adobe’s most comprehensive design package, including InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere and over 20 other apps. Whip up a website with Dreamweaver, paint on a digital canvas with Fresco or edit photos in Lightroom. It’s a pretty steep cost for an individual, but puts a one-year subscription well within reach of a creative business.
Best Black Friday streaming deals
HBO Max
HBO Max’s streaming lineup needs no introduction — The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, The White Lotus and The Last of Us are all in the Max mix, plus dozens more of the shows that helped conjure Peak TV. This deal comes with access to Warner Brothers film hits like Barbie and Dune, plus Discovery’s reality lineup. This one-year subscription is the version with ads, but the savings are massive enough to make that worthwhile.
Apple TV+ (6 months) for $36 ($42 off): Apple TV+ is offering a six months of access for only $36 for Black Friday, which comes out to only $6 per month. The deal is live now for new and returning subscribers. Through December 1, you’ve got a great chance to stream shows like Severance, The Morning Show and For All Mankind for less — just remember the deal only applies if you subscribe directly through Apple and not through a third-party service.
Fubo Pro (first month) for $55 (35 percent off): Fubo is the live TV service that helps sports lovers cut the cord. When you sign up, it asks you your favorite teams, then automatically records every game they play. Fubo Pro includes 249 channels, covering everything from your local NFL and NBA networks to real ESPN8 (The Ocho) content like PowerSports World. There are even plenty of non-sports channels, and with 10 allowed screens per subscription, your whole family can enjoy the selection at once.
Plex (lifetime pass) for $150 (40 percent off): Plex offers personal media servers you can use to organize your digital collection — imagine your own curated Netflix homepage that nothing ever vanishes from. It’s also a streaming platform in its own right, with movies and TV from all genres and eras. Plex did just raise its prices, so now’s your chance to get a lifetime pass for close to what it used to cost.
Walmart+ (one year) for $49 (50 percent off): No, Walmart hasn’t started its own streaming platform, but it would probably have some pretty great drama. What you do get with Walmart+ is free shipping on carts over $35, exclusive deals, drone delivery in some cities and more. And if you did come here for streaming, Walmart+ also comes with your choice of Peacock Premium of Paramount+ Essential (we recommend Peacock Premium because it’s more expensive on its own).
Best VPN deals for Black Friday
Proton
is our pick for the — a secure, trustworthy app that doesn’t sacrifice features, speed or usability. Although its free plan does come with unlimited data, we recommend upgrading to get the full set of servers and features. With this deal, you’ll get servers in 117 countries; better yet, every one of those we’ve tested so far can unblock Netflix.
ExpressVPN Basic (15 months) for $52.39 (73 percent off): ExpressVPN may be the most user-friendly VPN for sale right now, with fast download speeds (only 7 percent losses in our last test), quick connections and apps designed to stay out of your way. It’s not the most feature-rich, but it excels at any bread-and-butter VPN task, staying leak-free and unblocking Netflix everywhere. You also get access to server locations in 105 countries.
Surfshark Starter (27 months) for $53.73 (87 percent off): According to the tests we ran for our latest review, Surfshark is the fastest VPN right now, with its download speeds, upload speeds and latencies all beating out competitors. It has more to offer beyond speed, too, as it’s able to constantly rotate your IP address and generate double VPN paths between any two servers you choose.
NordVPN Basic (27 months) for $80.73 (74 percent off): NordVPN got very positive marks in our last review, where we called out its fast internet speeds, wide network of server locations and selection of exclusive features. It comes with a range of dedicated servers for obfuscation, onion routing, torrenting and more. Plus, it’s one of the first VPNs getting a jump on post-quantum encryption.
CyberGhost VPN (28 months) for $56.84 (84 percent off): CyberGhost is always cheap — in fact, we named it the best budget VPN — but it’s never behaved like an economy option. Its Smart Rules automation controls are the deepest in the industry, and its server network reaches 100 countries. Speeds are also quite good, though connections occasionally take a moment to establish.
Private Internet Access VPN (40 months) for $79.20 (83 percent off): Although we weren’t wholly positive about Private Internet Access (PIA VPN) in our recent review, we can’t deny it’s a worthwhile choice for an affordable VPN. Although speeds can fluctuate, it comes with lots of desirable features on all platforms, like port forwarding (which makes torrents more stable) and two kinds of split tunneling.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Do you remember the time when Netflix was a DVD rental service that delivered DVDs to your home? You would be forgiven for thinking of those years as the distant past, but the company only switched its business model from delivery to streaming in 2007.
In just under two decades, subscription services have changed the way people shop, play and work. Businesses are also taking advantage of subscription services. As we head for the middle of 2025, though, the subscription economy is showing signs of yet another shift as it expands beyond digital services. What may the future hold?
Subscription services have existed for hundreds of years. Since the early 1800s, consumers could access magazine subscriptions through the mail. In Britain, milk deliveries have been handled by subscriptions since the 1860s.
More recently, the subscription economy has become synonymous with a wide range of services from media to meal deliveries. As an ecommerce business model, subscription-based businesses have been outperforming their traditional counterparts for some time, with subscription revenues growing five times as fast between 2012 and 2018 as the average of the S&P 500.
At the end of 2024, reports showed that Americans were spending nearly $1,000 per year on subscriptions, with the entire market likely to reach a value of more than $900 billion by 2026. Consumers have clearly embraced the convenience and predictability that subscription-based services offer. Underlying this growth is a shift from an economy focused on ownership to one that values access more highly.
Who benefits from subscriptions?
Subscriptions have grown in popularity across demographics. While younger generations have been faster to adopt these services, almost every consumer segment has been won over by the combination of personalization, convenience and easy modification of the service.
Businesses benefit from predictable revenue streams and an unparalleled opportunity to drive customer loyalty. Subscription-based streaming services like Netflix not only allow businesses to learn consumer preferences for content, but they also make it easy to tailor content selections to meet those preferences and give subscribers more of the content they want, encouraging them to spend more time on the platform.
Compared to the traditional magazine subscriptions of several centuries ago, subscription companies often benefit from direct customer feedback by measuring whether someone streamed their suggested content or not. Magazine publishers of yesteryear had to rely on letters to the editor or receiving feedback via cancelled or growing subscriptions.
Until now, we have focused on business-to-consumer (B2C) subscription services in this article, but a significant part of the industry’s growth and transformation has been driven by business-to-business (B2B) subscription models.
Before going into detail, let’s take a look at some of the industry’s overarching trends:
Diversification is perhaps the most noticeable change in the B2C and B2B sectors. From physical products like cosmetics and services like movie streaming, subscriptions have moved on to offer access to software, car sharing and meal kits delivered to your door.
Growing personalization is another major trend in the sector. Take Netflix, for example: Subscribers receive suggestions for content as soon as they finish watching a movie or series. Moreover, if a subscriber changes their viewing habits and doesn’t use the platform as regularly as usual, they’ll receive more emails from Netflix encouraging them to return and use the platform more frequently.
Subscriber communities are another fairly recent addition to the economy. To encourage even greater brand loyalty, subscription providers are realizing the value of building communities around their products as opposed to relying on two-way communications between the brand and its users alone. Social media platforms, online forums and in-person events allow subscribers to connect with each other, therefore building greater brand loyalty in the long term.
New subscription services
Talent subscriptions:
Two of the most notable extensions of the subscription economy come from the B2B side of the sector — talent and hardware subscriptions. So-called talent subscriptions are changing the way HR professionals manage recruitment. Like with other subscriptions, companies pay a monthly fee to access recruitment services as and when they need them.
The main benefits of talent subscriptions include more predictable and manageable hiring costs, access to a talent pipeline and highly qualified professionals on the spot without long lead times and easy scalability.
Traditionally, companies faced escalating recruitment costs when they needed to expand quickly and grow their workforce fast. Subscription-based recruitment allows for this type of scalability but caps costs with the help of a simple monthly fee. Recruiters estimate that companies could save as much as 30 to 50% of the cost of standard approaches.
Hardware subscriptions:
Staying on the B2B side of the subscription economy, hardware subscriptions are becoming just as popular as software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions have been for several years. Rather than investing in computers and other devices, hardware subscriptions allow businesses to access the devices they need when they need them without long-term commitment.
B2C subscriptions already cover a wide range of products and services. Noticeable trends in this area include a shift from acquisition to retention with the help of re-engagement campaigns and increased flexibility.
Industry experts have said that trial subscriptions have moved from being a conversion tool to becoming more exploratory, for example. Consumers are looking for greater flexibility and overall ease of use.
The subscription economy continues to be one of the most significant parts of the overall ecommerce sector. The demand for subscription-based products and services remains high in both the B2B and the B2C areas.
However, there is no guarantee of success for either long-term subscription providers or new entrants to the market. B2B and B2C customers’ expectations have grown in the past few years. To meet those expectations and drive retention, companies need to offer flexible subscription plans, products and services that are easy to use and deliver value immediately. Perhaps most importantly, personalization of services can drive long-term loyalty and growth.
Do you remember the time when Netflix was a DVD rental service that delivered DVDs to your home? You would be forgiven for thinking of those years as the distant past, but the company only switched its business model from delivery to streaming in 2007.
In just under two decades, subscription services have changed the way people shop, play and work. Businesses are also taking advantage of subscription services. As we head for the middle of 2025, though, the subscription economy is showing signs of yet another shift as it expands beyond digital services. What may the future hold?
Nearly everyone in the digital age has a story of a nightmare subscription that came back to haunt them. Whether it’s an add-on or an upgrade, free trials are designed to be easy to opt in and difficult to opt out. Predictably, it’s not an accident. Signing up for a free trial of something often takes a few minutes. To cancel, on the other hand, can feel like an endless maze to the exit.
However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Thursday that it intends to make it just as easy for subscribers to cancel as it was to sign up with a new “click to cancel” rule. The rule would require businesses to make enrollment and cancellation equal parts effort, rather than a lopsided system skewed towards trapping users.
“Some businesses too often trick consumers into paying for subscriptions they no longer want or didn’t sign up for in the first place,” FTC chair Lina M. Khan said in a statement. “The proposal would save consumers time and money, and businesses that continued to use subscription tricks and traps would be subject to stiff penalties.”
Cancellation: Canceling a service would have to be the same method and number of steps as it was to sign up.
Additional offers: Before services or companies extend additional offers to users as they try to cancel, the business would be required to ask if the user wants to hear them. If not, the business would have to “take no for an answer,” and nix any existing steps.
Reminders and confirmations: Businesses would be required to give an annual reminder to consumers in negative option programs (subscriptions where a consumer must take action to reject the service or cancel) before auto-renewing.
The proposed rule is part of the FTC’s ongoing 1973 Negative Option Rule which cracks down on deception and unfair practices regarding subscriptions, memberships, and other recurring-payment programs.
“We’ve seen a dramatic growth in subscription-based business models over the last few years, which just underscores the urgency here,” Khan said, per Vox. “Companies should not be able to manipulate consumers into paying for subscriptions that they don’t want.”
While the proposed rule would be a godsend to millions, it’s still in the beginning stages and may take months to get approved, if it goes through.
If you haven’t heard, Google Stadia is shutting down and closing shop next week. But before the never-quite-successful game streaming service dies, it has provided one neat (and free) little gift you can only play for a few days before it all goes offline.
Launched back in 2019, Google Stadia was a costly and massive investment from Google into the world of video games. Powered by the cloud aka a bunch of servers and off-site computers, Stadia’s big promise was instantaneous gaming on the go. No more updates or expensive consoles. And while it sometimes worked, the high cost of games, lack of features, small library, and internet costs ended up dooming the service. Sure, some superfans logged thousands of hours into it, but for most, it just wasn’t what they wanted or needed from a video game platform.
So it wasn’t surprising that in September of last year, Google announced the end of Stadia. In five days, on January 18, the video game streaming service will shut down. With the end so near, it seemed unlikely that Stadia would receive any new game releases. Yet, Google has published one final game. But don’t expect some big open-world RPG or remake. Instead, the final Stadia game is Worm Game, an internally developed title used to test Stadia long before it became a public service.
We probably were never meant to see or play this Snake-like test game as it sports fairly rudimentary graphics and kinda ugly menus. But in the final days of Stadia, it appears the devs working on the project were able to provide its community one final treat. Even better, anyone can play Worm Game as it’s free. (Which makes sense considering the Stadia store stopped working already.)
The game’s store page features this nice and touching description of the game and what it was used for:
Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world. “Worm Game” is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.
Is Worm Game some incredibly important or amazing thing? Not really. However, it’s still really cool to get a peek behind the scenes, and thanks to videos of Worm Game, this little piece of test software will be somewhat preserved for folks to look back at years from now.
This is a nice way to make the controller—which has one of my favorite modern D-pads on it—more useful and easier to hook up to more devices. I doubt the devs who worked on Stadia for years were planning for the controller to be the only thing left of Stadia in 2023, but here we are.
That’s what Ryan Culver, Caroline Elston and Lowell Bieber, the Indiana-based friends behind charcuterie subscription service Platterful, discovered when they teamed up to launch their venture last year — and made $40,000 in their first month.
Culver and Bieber previously partnered on a health-and-wellness subscription box, which they successfully scaled and sold in September 2020.
This time around, Culver’s logistics and shipping experience and Bieber’s operations expertise proved to be the perfect pairings with Elston’s background in digital marketing and burgeoning charcuterie business.
Entrepreneur sat down with the trio to learn how they built their meat-and-cheese side hustle — and continue to fuel its growth.
“We really didn’t have any idea of how to pair things well together — certainly not how to create a board.”
Culver and Bieber wanted to start another subscription service after the sale of their first, and recognizing the gap in charcuterie offerings, saw a prime opportunity.
“We definitely wanted to repeat the subscription model,” Culver says. “We could’ve just created this brand [that had] standalone products that you could buy, which we do offer as well. But really the crux of the business is tied to that subscription model. We were both still highly interested in the recurring revenue that comes in each month. It’s almost like a guaranteed buffer to keep the baseline cost of the business covered.”
The only problem?
Culver and Bieber didn’t know anything about the business of meat and cheese.
“We had no knowledge of charcuterie,” Bieber recalls. “We just knew it was a growing space and that we liked to eat meat and cheese. But we really didn’t have any idea of how to pair things well together — certainly not how to create a board.”
“Meeting Ryan and Lowell [who already had] all of that operational background on subscription boxes and fulfillment was like the perfect timing and the perfect marriage.”
Culver and Bieber began looking for someone to help them get their venture off the ground. Their search led them to Elston, a marketing professional who also operated a grazing-table side hustle serving events like weddings, birthday parties, bridal showers and more.
“I love meat and cheese as well — no surprise there,” Elston says. “I loved cheese boards and would get them at restaurants. They were starting to catch on two, three years ago, so whenever people would come to my house or there were family gatherings, I would always make a board.”
Elston continued to get creative with her boards in 2020 for her college friends’ 30th birthday celebrations, and when people suggested she go into business for real, she decided to do just that. From there, it “caught fire;” Elston would craft 10-15 small boards every weekend in addition to five to six grazing tables for larger events. She was also about to become a parent.
“Meeting Ryan and Lowell [who already had] all of that operational background on subscription boxes and fulfillment was like the perfect timing and the perfect marriage,” Elston explains, “because it was a way that I could continue this creative outlet that I found and fell in love with, but I didn’t have to run all over the city of Indianapolis to do so.”
“We took a month or so to build out our website, and that blew up in December, which was great to see.”
Platterful planned a crowdfunding initiative on Kickstarter to gauge market interest but had to pull the campaign at the last minute when the co-founders learned their business was considered “reselling” — “even though it’s much more than that,” Elston says.
But with a quick pivot to Indiegogo, Platterful was back on track.
“The Indiegogo did well,” Bieber says. “And then we took a month or so to build out our website, and that blew up in December, so that was great to see.”
Platterful did $40,000 in sales during its first month, and despite being a “very seasonal business” with spikes in popularity around major holidays, it’s been able to sustain that growth. This December, the business is poised to at least double last December’s earnings.
Culver’s logistics company Lessgistics fulfills Platterful’s orders. “So I kind of see both sides of [the process], which is interesting,” he says. “It gives us full control over the shipping experience, which we like.”
“One of our big 2023 goals is just to ensure our packaging and presentation looks very nice when customers open it.”
But Platterful’s journey hasn’t been without some challenges. Even though Culver and Bieber had subscription experience, the co-founders did have to contend with a new complication: cold shipping.
“Some of the meats are shelf stable, but all of the cheeses need to be refrigerated,” Bieber says. “So we have to make sure that they’re arriving cold, and that [brings] a whole new set of challenges that are frankly kind of expensive. We had to figure out how to still offer good value to the customers at an affordable price.”
“We’ve gone through six or seven iterations of packaging so far,” Culver says, “and we’re still working on that now, continually making that better. One of our big 2023 goals is just to ensure our packaging and presentation looks very nice when customers open it. So it’s always been kind of a work in progress.”
“[With co-founders] you have other people to lean on — if you’re having a tough day, maybe someone else is having a good day.”
Of course, balancing full-time jobs with a fast-growing side hustle is no easy feat either. But having dependable partners to fill in the gaps makes all the difference.
“We all have our core jobs, but there’s also still a lot of free time, pockets at night or in between lunches, breaks, whatever,” Culver explains. “So we stay in contact throughout the day, each day. Not Saturday and Sunday, that’d be a little too much. But Monday through Friday for sure.”
Platterful also has two employees in the Philippines who handle significant portions of customer service and corporate outreach.
“We’re all in and out all day long,” Elston continues, “and very stressed with a lot to balance. [But it’s] a blast and stuff I really want to do. So we all make time for it because it’s like our baby, and it’s going very, very well, and we’re all very committed to making it work.”
Bieber agrees.
“I feel like it would be really hard to do [these things] alone,” he says, “because you don’t have a support system. [With co-founders] you have other people to lean on — if you’re having a tough day, maybe someone else is having a good day. That balancing act of having three different people going in it together, plus the rest of the team, is what makes it sustainable.”
So for those breaking into the subscription box industry? Find yourself a complementary set of business partners first.
Much of Twitter’s ad sales team has been fired or pushed out. Large companies from General Mills to Macy’s have paused advertising on the platform, with more potentially following suit after new owner Elon Musk’s decision to restore the account of former President Donald Trump and other controversial figures. And any cursory scroll of the platform will likely show you fewer big brand ads.
That would all seem like horrible news for a business that generates the lion’s share of its revenue from advertising. But Musk may not care.
The Tesla CEO has previously said he “hates advertising” and, as Twitter’s owner, professed a desire to make the company more reliant on subscription revenue than advertising dollars. Twitter has always struggled to turn its outsized influence in media, politics, and culture into a highly successful advertising business. And without needing to please advertisers, the billionaire would be freer to implement his “free speech” vision for Twitter.
“I’ve always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter … it’s never been a great advertising platform,” said Larry Vincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Twitter’s advertising business has long been smaller than that of rivals like Facebook, in part because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting.
To successfully overhaul Twitter into a thriving subscription business would be to buck the trend of many other media properties that have struggled with the model. And Musk’s attempts right out of the gate have faltered. An updated, $8-per-month version of the Twitter Blue subscription service that allowed users to buy a verification checkmark had to be halted after just two days when it was abused to impersonate prominent people (notably Musk himself), businesses, and government agencies. Musk initially said he would relaunch the service on November 29, but on Monday suggested he might further delay it “until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.”
Some industry watchers have also questioned whether, given Twitter’s somewhat niche status as a relatively small platform used largely by members of the media, politicians and academics, such a subscription service could be widely adopted. Even if all 217 million daily users Twitter reported having at the end of 2021 signed up for Musk’s $8 per month subscription, the annual revenue would still be less than a quarter of the size of rival Meta’s.
Still, some industry insiders have reason to think he can pull it off. “Twitter over the last month has been far more entertaining than Netflix and easily worth $8,” Roy Price, the founder of Amazon Studios, said in a tweet Saturday. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a tweet, “don’t underestimate” Musk. And Twitch co-founder Justin Kan tweeted that he thinks Twitter is “likely to survive just fine (and potentially thrive!)” in part because, unlike some high-profile users who have announced their departure from the platform, most regular users likely don’t care about who’s leading the platform and how.
Indeed, Musk’s shift away from advertising and toward a subscription model could work if Twitter can survive having its entire revenue decimated beforehand, keep its systems up and running, avoid violating laws around copyright infringement and hate speech, and also remain in good standing with Apple and Google, which control the app stores on which Twitter depends.
The stakes to pull it off are significant for Musk. After borrowing billions of dollars to finance the Twitter takeover, Musk is up against the clock to turn what was already a struggling business into a company that can generate enough cash flow to pay back his debt. He may also risk his reputation as “a gifted and audacious entrepreneur who made Tesla work against widespread doubts and naysaying,” said Robert Bruner, professor of business administration at University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.
Whether he likes advertising or not, the business made up 90% of Twitter’s revenue prior to Musk’s takeover and replacing it won’t be an immediate shift.
In the wake of the chaos at Twitter in recent weeks, there has been talk of brands quitting the platform out of concern that their ads could end up next to objectionable content. But that may not be the only or even primary reason advertisers have walked away — or why attracting new ones could be tricky. Advertisers are also likely on edge about Twitter’s stability, as users and former employees raise concerns that the mass exodus of staff could leave the platform vulnerable to glitches and outages.
Brands may also be miffed that many of Twitter’s ad sales employees who managed their campaigns have been fired or pushed out, including after another round of layoffs and exits Monday.
Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. “When you let go of a staff that was as veteran as Twitter’s and there’s no one there to respond to those [brands], you basically reduce the value of the ad platform.”
By bringing Trump and other controversial figures back to the platform, Twitter may have greater appeal to the right-leaning advertisers that do business on alternative platforms like Trump’s Truth Social. While there is a market to advertise to “people buying gold, people buying survivalist home kits, guns and weapons,” Twitter has long been known as a more politically neutral, if not somewhat left-leaning, platform and may struggle to attract such companies, said Michael Serazio, a communications professor at Boston College.
Musk is also going to have to contend with potential pressure from regulators, as well as the app store operators at Apple and Google, if he wants to succeed in turning Twitter’s business around. A group of US senators has already called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Musk’s Twitter over potential violations of the company’s 2011 consent decree. And Europe’s Digital Services Act may impose limits on just how free Musk’s “free speech” Twitter can be.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.” The app stores have previously removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content, and Roth suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.
Most importantly, Twitter will have to keep users invested in the platform if Musk’s subscription strategy is going to work. And it’s not just existing users — Musk will also need to attract new people to the platform, which has long struggled to break out of its niche status and grow its user base, by ensuring it’s filled with must-read content.
In the weeks since Musk took over Twitter — which was immediately followed by an uptick in hateful content — there has been much hand-waving from users about moving to other platforms, and several high-profile accounts have announced their exits, including director Shonda Rimes and model Gigi Hadid. But it’s not clear that there has been a broad drop-off in the user base; instead, Musk has claimed in tweets that platform usage is at an all-time high.
So long as Musk can keep Twitter functioning properly despite having fewer employees, many users will likely stick around, perhaps even more so following the return of controversial accounts that tend to make news with incendiary comments on the platform. Musk himself has pointed out that even as people fret about the demise of Twitter, they’re doing it on the platform itself. And the billionaire has proposed making it easier for creators to earn money on the platform, which could also drive usage.
Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.
“Even as both Musk and Trump are driven by the gravity of the attention economy, it doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to cash in on it,” Serazio said. He said Musk likely made the decision to restore Trump’s account because “it was going to cause headlines, it was going to cause attention,” adding that “the attention won’t save Twitter … but I don’t know that [Musk] has any other strategy other than the attention economy, even if he doesn’t know how to profit from it.”
