Paid checkmarks on Twitter roll out in new subscription plan
Twitter has officially rolled out its revamped Twitter Blue subscription, including a verified checkmark for all subscribers.
Twitter Blue
Previously, the monthly subscription cost $3.99, but the price has increased to $7.99 under the new leadership of Elon Musk.
Although users pay the company for premium features, it only partially removes advertising. Instead, they can expect to see "half the ads," according to Musk. Other features include editing tweets and the verified badge.
That badge has been a point of contention lately. Initially, it was meant to mark accounts that went through a verification process with Twitter so that users could trust that the account was authentic.
However, Musk wants any Twitter Blue subscriber to receive the badge, whether they are government officials or a bot from a foreign country. He tweeted on Wednesday that "Blue check will be the great leveler," which seems contrary to the pay-to-play model that's been introduced.
Right now, Twitter users have to click on a blue check to see why the user has the denotation. At some point, there may be a more visible way to tell the difference, without a click-through.
The company recently pushed an update for true verified accounts to have a separate gray badge and a label on specific pages that says "Official." Twitter removed the new title for now but may include it for certain Twitter Blue subscribers in the future.
Since Musk acquired Twitter, advertisers have been leaving or pausing their ad campaigns as they reevaluate the company's new leadership. Twitter Blue, along with other ideas, is one way to bolster the company's funding, although time will tell how effective that will be.
Read on AppleInsider
Twitter Blue
Previously, the monthly subscription cost $3.99, but the price has increased to $7.99 under the new leadership of Elon Musk.
Although users pay the company for premium features, it only partially removes advertising. Instead, they can expect to see "half the ads," according to Musk. Other features include editing tweets and the verified badge.
That badge has been a point of contention lately. Initially, it was meant to mark accounts that went through a verification process with Twitter so that users could trust that the account was authentic.
However, Musk wants any Twitter Blue subscriber to receive the badge, whether they are government officials or a bot from a foreign country. He tweeted on Wednesday that "Blue check will be the great leveler," which seems contrary to the pay-to-play model that's been introduced.
Right now, Twitter users have to click on a blue check to see why the user has the denotation. At some point, there may be a more visible way to tell the difference, without a click-through.
The company recently pushed an update for true verified accounts to have a separate gray badge and a label on specific pages that says "Official." Twitter removed the new title for now but may include it for certain Twitter Blue subscribers in the future.
Since Musk acquired Twitter, advertisers have been leaving or pausing their ad campaigns as they reevaluate the company's new leadership. Twitter Blue, along with other ideas, is one way to bolster the company's funding, although time will tell how effective that will be.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Oh this keeps getting better and better.
It has already been used by new accounts to get the blue check, then they change their name to "Twitter Support" or similar and send out cryptocurrency scams. "Twitter Blue is free for anyone holding Bitcoin! Just visit this site and give it your cryptocurrency wallet credentials to prove you have some!"
I’m on Tribel now.
Or dying at least.
I've personally buried it.
I think I heard Elon still laughing...
It appears they are attempting to create an iPhone/AirPods effect, where when other users see a blue checkmark they will want one to be part of the click.
Unlike Apple, Twitter is not providing enough value to warrant the cost of be an exclusive member.
https://mastodon.social/explore
It pulls in comments from other servers so would be the best place to start.
https://mastodon.social/@nytimes@mstdn.social
Every other social media network outside of the top few is going to look like MySpace compared to Facebook though. Just now they have a fraction of the users, 1-2 million at most vs over 300 million on Twitter and it will probably stay that way for a long time. The fact people struggle to figure out how the alternatives work is one reason why. For mass adoption, they have to lower the barrier to entry. Another reason is high profile users/celebrities who want the most followers as they are promoting products and services. Most of them will be staying on Twitter.
Alternatives are also harder to scale because they don't have the investment and hardware to back it up. Mastodon servers were crashing under the load, even at under 1/100th the size of Twitter:
https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-users-mastodon-meltdown/
It seems like Twitter subscriptions to verify users isn't where the high demand is. Usually businesses monetize what's in demand. The demand on Twitter is for people to read high value comments and conversation topics. High value commenters should be verified free and the demand would be for people to pay to view all of their tweets and be able to message them. They could charge tokens/seeds per DM and share revenue with the high profile users and people can buy tokens via IAPs. Their payments/subs can also act as a verification mechanism because bots are much less likely to pay anything.
High value posters can get a gold verify tick (a-list celebrities, big companies, heavily followed/liked commenters etc), maybe silver for politicians/b-list celebs, normal subscribers can get a blue verify tick but won't be mistaken for a high profile user. Non-subscribers would still be able to view content but with more ads, maybe time-delayed tweets.
Twitter is one of those businesses where making money conflicts with their purpose. The aim of the business is to give everyone a part of the conversation but to operate at scale, they need a lot of revenue and they can only make money in ways that make the experience of taking part in the conversation worse.
Twitter revenue was $5b in 2021, $4.5b from ads, net loss of $0.2b. To make a reasonable income like $2b net profit, they'd need around 20m subscribers out of over 300m users. I think that would be easier to do monetizing the demand to read high value comments than the demand to write under a verified profile but it seems attainable one way or another.