Elon's first big move: pay to remain verified on Twitter

https://www.platformer.news/p/elons-first-big-move-pay-to-remain

by firstSpeaker • 4 years ago

34 46 4 years ago

"Twitter is strongly considering making its users pay to remain verified on the service, Platformer has learned. If the project makes forward, users would have to subscribe to Twitter Blue at $4.99 a month or lose their badges.

Executives at the newly Elon Musk-owned company have spent the weekend discussing the move and making plans related to the project, according to two people familiar with the matter."

knodi• 4 years ago

$4.99 monthly seems quite high for something that was free.

qull• 4 years ago

It wasn't exactly free, but a crony system from what I can tell. Honestly feels way too cheap at 5$ for what it is and the unjustified weight it carries.

tfsh• 4 years ago

a 4.99 monthly expense for accounts have who'm are likely to be world leaders, public figures, large organisations and the odd charity/public good insitute is not a steap price.

Statistically, of course it's a large increase. However from a business perspective I do not think so. A quick search indicates there are 294,000 accounts, and at 4.99 a month that would yield Twitter $1,467,060 a month, which is hardly anything. Especially as I imagine ~10-15% of those accounts will decide to forgo the badge, either in protest or because they just don't care.

yieldcrv• 4 years ago

I've bought many social media accounts before, this is way more efficient and less disaster prone than paying for likes/followers, as you won't get bots. You'll get a professionally curated and grown account with the level of engagement to your choosing, with the audience geared towards the brand/theme of the account's content.

What people don't realize is that each individual account is like purchasing a business. There are way too many similarities to think of it any differently.

When you buy an account, you get all the DMs which often include a whole network of traders, promoters, service providers, negotiations, trade lines. Typically you also get the email address and password used to create the account, which has even more of this.

You are mostly getting ROI pretty quickly by doing a few promos really quickly. Its actually based on a multiple of getting ROI.

Purchasing an account is a fairly low trust environment, fraught with scams. Most social media Terms of Service actually exacerbate this, by mostly banning the concept of buying/selling an account. Since this happens, the platform should actually be facilitating these transactions and there is a lot of value to extract. Escrow services charge 30% right now, but a network of trusted traders is better and more valuable.

With that said, $4.99/mo for the tip of the iceberg of the value of these accounts is extremely underpriced. Tolerable overhead costs are in the thousands if we are being honest. This should be its own separate tier than just "Twitter Blue", as it will price out too many people to operate at scale, but this is definitely a model that is neglected by social media platforms right now.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

To me it seems rather cheap. Specially for something that could not have gotten before without nepotism and corruption.

Comevius• 4 years ago

Those verified active users are the lifeblood of the platform, but there can't be that many of them to justify rolling unnecessary obstacles in front of them.

bequanna• 4 years ago

Not really an obstacle to tweeting.

It’s nothing other than making people pay for a status symbol.

lesuorac• 4 years ago

Hopefully not. At 5$ I would hope they would actually check the account marked as verified is actually the individual/etc that they claim to be ...

williamsmj• 4 years ago

It’s a status symbol now. If it becomes a paid feature of privately owned Twitter then, whether they like it or not, it’s going to become a badge that says the owner supports an incredibly divisive specific person.

throw_m239339• 4 years ago

Those verified active users are the lifeblood of the platform, but there can't be that many of them to justify rolling unnecessary obstacles in front of them.

They bring money to Twitter how exactly? That whole "verified" scheme was always a joke, given who gets to be verified or unverified. Either it's about real identities or it's a worthless ideology approval badge.

nequo• 4 years ago

They bring money to Twitter how exactly?

They draw an audience to the platform and they tweet things that journalists want to write about which is free advertising for Twitter that draws more of an audience.

CamperBob2• 4 years ago

Exactly. It would make more sense to pay them.

rdtwo• 4 years ago

Yeah that’s dumb. Better sell twitter yellow as a lower form of twitter blue

everfrustrated• 4 years ago

I would happily use Twitter in a mode that meant I only saw content and replies from verified humans and nobody else.

TheLoafOfBread• 4 years ago

any Nitter server -> Find person you want -> RSS feed

dschuessler• 4 years ago

For those who don't know: Nitter is an alternative self-hosted Twitter client.

One public instance: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/

Github repository: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

stevage• 4 years ago

Charging celebrities $5 a month doesn't seem like a great way to make a lot of revenue.

MichaelCollins• 4 years ago

Make it scale with the number of subscribers? It would be abused of course, but isn't twitter already?

midoridensha2• 4 years ago

They need to charge the subscribers too.

dang• 4 years ago

Two problems with this submission: (1) title is baity and misleading, and the subtitle immediately takes it back ("considers").

(2) it appears to be hardwalled (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989).

sn_master• 4 years ago

How'd that work with people from countries like Russia, Iran etc which have US sanctions?

gwnywg• 4 years ago

I'm not into whole 'Elon takes over Twitter' drama, and most likely I'm not their target audience. But for whatever it may matter, I stay away from any platform that tries to verify me, even if most of them manage to successfully track me... I guess this service may bring some value to 'famous people'..

cheriot• 4 years ago

It's the verified users that make Twitter relevant. Pushing them away won't go well.

There's a large number of people using Twitter professionally and all Elon comes up with is... pay for the check mark? The Twitter saga might be the thing that brings down his image as an entrepreneurial genius.

mcphage• 4 years ago

The subtitle is “Under pressure to generate revenue quickly…” so… under pressure from whom? I though Twitter was no longer publicly traded?

belthesar• 4 years ago

Probably the nearly 12 billion dollars in debt the company's in now post-acquisition.

midoridensha2• 4 years ago

Hopefully they stick to this plan, but the price is much too low. In addition, they should require payment from regular users too. I really do hope they try to squeeze as much money out of their users as possible, and then some.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

This seems reasonable move. Let those who get most out of Twitter pay for it. Additionally maybe corporate users should be charged lot more. Depending on scale and reach.

techdragon• 4 years ago

Yeah, it might be slightly more valuable to IBM or FedEx than $20. But for me $20 is just slightly too much, I like twitter as an open first community, despite all its well established faults, I feel it’s less bad than all the others.

amadeuspagel• 4 years ago

Good. The bluecheck right now is a combination of moral approval, connections and importance. Verifying identity is a service, it costs money, it's reasonable to expect people to pay for it, and to provide it to anyone willing to pay for it.

Elon's first big move: pay to remain verified on Twitter

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