Masterclassing

Snapchat now has five million paid subscription users

Tim Green

Social media firm Snapchat has confirmed it has passed the five million user milestone for its Snapchat+ subscription service. It's added a million since June.

How big can it get? According to Bloomberg, Snap’s CEO Evan Spiegel expects the service to reach 10 million subscribers in the 'medium term'.

Snapchat+ was launched in June 2022 as a premium service that offered exclusive, experimental and pre-release features $3.99/month. Over time it added more exclusives such as early access to AI products such as My AI chatbot and Dreams. Among the premium features currently offered are:

Pin as #1 Best Friend
Story Rewatch Indicator
Custom App icons
Snapchat+ Badge
Priority Story Replies
Custom Notification Sounds
Chat Wallpapers
Chat Effects
One free monthly Snapstreak Restore

At launch Snapchat+ was available in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Five million is a respectable number, but it is still a tiny fraction of the company's global community of 750 million monthly users. And the revenue generated is a similarly insignificant chunk of the firm's overall income from ads.

Still, the progress of Snapchat+ does indicate the extent to which the social giants are taking paywalls seriously. Over at Twitter/X, the paid service X/Premium has (reportedly) 1 million subscriptions. And this week X boss Elon Musk hinted that the company was considering putting the entire service behind a paywall.