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Last year, Elon Musk was forced to accept the fact that he’d made a $44 billion impulse purchase after finalizing the sale that made him the proud new owner of Twitter.
That acquisition has been a fairly expensive headache for the billionaire who’s repeatedly drawn the ire of users who have been less than thrilled with his approach to managing the social media platform, as he’s caught a ton of heat for some questionable decisions he’s made since taking over as CEO.
One of the biggest issues Musk has faced is figuring out how to make money from a website that historically struggled to monetize its massive user base prior to the sale.
While he’s attempted to address that issue by offering a monthly subscription in the form of Twitter Blue, that program has been responsible for a number of high-profile controversies and mostly failed to attract enough interest to put a dent in the money Twitter continues to hemorrhage.
In November, Tumblr opted to have some fun at Musk’s expense when it gave users the chance to purchase two Important Bliue Internet Checkmarks for $7.99, which came with literally no perks aside from the right to display them on your profile.
However, that turned out to be a pretty solid decision.
According to TechCrunch, Tumblr saw a major spike in in-app sales on the iOS store, as data obtained from Sensor Tower shows the company saw revenue grow by 125% compared to the three-month period before the introduction of IBICs.
There’s no way to know exactly how much of the estimated $266,000 in revenue Tumblr has generated since November can be attributed to the virtually meaningless checkmarks, but that’s a pretty solid return on an investment built on a foundation of trolling.