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Twitter to Charge $20 a Month for Verified Accounts, Reports Suggest

BaldiMac said:
We know how they were verified.
help.twitter.com

X Verification requirements - how to get the blue check

The blue Verified badge on X lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic. Learn about which types of accounts become Verified.
help.twitter.com help.twitter.com
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We don’t know if every one who meets these requirements get verified. It would be nice to go back to the checkmark being about verification and not some sort of status thing but I’m not sure charging people $20/mo is the way to go about it.
 
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Zest28 said:
Twitter is a business, not a charity.

Google has been loosing money on Youtube for years also, so they will start locking features behind paid tiers too.
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elon told me it was a public town square for free speech.
 
Honestly, if you're a multi-millionaire celebrity, or someone with a million followers or whatever, it's not unreasonable for you to pay $100K/year for access to something like Twitter. Just a business expense for your brand.

That aside, it would be completely reasonable to charge you based on number of followers, and cap the ability to gain new followers until you pay to join the next level up. That's probably what I would be doing if I were Musk.
 
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hagjohn said:
Not everyone is an engineer. There are a lot of support staff and not to mention those who do not work for Twitter. Try thinking outside the little box you are in.
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Nope, I give zero F's. Twitter was staffed with a bunch of do nothing jobs. Videos of what people do while working at Twitter are all over TickTock. It's a joke. If they're not engineers, they can just learn to code.
 
Rogifan said:
What about all the unverified accounts that aren’t active? You can’t force people to be active on a platform. Unless adding a checkmark to someone’s Twitter handle is really labor intensive and expensive I don’t see what the point of charging them for it is other than Musk doesn’t know how else to raise more revenue. But the number of verified accounts is so small and if you assume not everyone who is verified will chose to pay the revenue he’ll raise from this is pretty minuscule.
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No one is forcing someone to be active. My point was that if someone is going to pay for something, they are more likely to want to get use out of it i.e. be more active. A more active account, especially a higher profile account which is what a verified account is more likely to be, can be good for Twitter.
 
BuddyTronic said:
Even though I still do not understand what Twitter really is for, or how to use it, or what goodness it really has, I might go for validating my Twitter account name, but I just don't use Twitter, so I'm not even sure I want to.

I just looked at it - Ive had an account for a long time - different username than here on MacRumours.

I'm still feeling pretty dumb on this Twitter thing.

IF I am not a celebrity, do I need Twitter? I really don't care about following anyone - Not Taylor Swift, Not even Elon.
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think of it as an unbounded, interactive news aggregator.

-you go to macrumors.com on your browser to read only the news published by macrumors, and you click through to the forum to discuss with other registered members on those specific articles
vs
-you go to twitter.com and see a shortform feed of any type of news, published by anyone in the world, on each feed you can discuss with anyone (a twitter user, rather than a macforums.com user) on that subject.

the network expansion is like x10000000 folds.

Rogifan said:
But what is the point of monetizing the checkmark? It’s certainly not going to raise that much revenue.
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the point is $20 is more than $0. twitter has ~500k verified accounts * $240 annual = $120M. if you assume more than half refuse to pay, that's still a net gain of $50M.

my guess, that's not the end of the monetization. they might charge to send targeted message to followers, or perhaps charge per post for verified accounts, the people who have incentives to post (to promote/sell/brand build).

Rogifan said:
Facebook and Instagram don‘t require a subscription to verify identity. Why is Twitter different than Instagram?
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because they're different products with different means of interaction and different revenue strategy.
 
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BaldiMac said:
You said we "have no idea how they were verfied in the first place". I provided a link to how they were verified. It includes the criteria to be eligible for verification. Not sure what you are implying is missing.
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We're talking about approval and rejection, not eligibility.
 
monstermash said:
Honestly, if you're a multi-millionaire celebrity, or someone with a million followers or whatever, it's not unreasonable for you to pay $100K/year for access to something like Twitter. Just a business expense for your brand.

That aside, it would be completely reasonable to charge you based on number of followers, and cap the ability to gain new followers until you pay to join the next level up. That's probably what I would be doing if I were Musk.
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yup. commercially speaking, even with 10,000 followers on most platform is the threshold where you will be approached for social-advertising deals.

i.e., "we'll pay you $xx to make a post mentioning our product; $yy to review our product; $zz to endorse our product"

the math is simple, if $xx>yy , where yy is the platform cost, then it's an economically positive decision.
 
hudson1 said:
We're talking about approval and rejection, not eligibility.
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Not according to your original post that I responded to and later quoted again. It was simply about how they were verified.

But if that's what you meant, then your original post makes even less sense since we don't know who will be approved and rejected under the new policy.
 
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I think some of you have verification confused lol. blue badges and verified profiles are also for people who may have duplicate/fake accounts. being verified let's you know that it's really that person and not some fan account.

of course there are people who are verified who are pretty much nameless and don't have anyone trying to impersonate them, but still.
 
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BaldiMac said:
Not according to your original post that I responded to and later quoted again. It was simply about how they were verified.

But if that's what you meant, then your original post makes even less sense since we don't know who will be approved and rejected under the new policy.
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Good grief. Do people have to spell out the entire context of their posts for you when others have already spelled it out?
 
gank41 said:
What a stupid businessman. Doesn't he realize that a lot of the 230 million or so Twitter users would be more apt to pay $4.99 a month than $19.99 a month? This truly shows how out of touch he is. I mean, does it come with Disney+ or do I get extra online storage? 🤣
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The thing is the "verification" will be worth it to some and just a drop in the bucket to most of those who are verified anyway. This isn't aimed at the common person who isn't even verified on Twitter currently.
 
hudson1 said:
Good grief. Do people have to spell out the entire context of their posts for you when others have already spelled it out?
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Not sure what your point is here. Again, I accepted your revised premise and responded to it. Can we talk about that instead of bickering?
 
PhotodudeCA said:
I bet Putin's troll farms can afford the $20 fee. And so it begins...
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And what would be accomplished by doing that? All you have to do is put no meaning behind the blue checkmark.

I already consider it worthless and pointless since the criteria for getting one was very vague, and it'll be even more pointless/worthless when you can buy it.
 
IllinoisCorn said:
Lol. The engineers are paid very well. This is how the real world works—produce on deadline or you are gone. So many babies on this forum!
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LOL. Nope.

If I was a skilled engineer at Twitter I'd be ignoring the idiot Musk and getting my resume listed asap. Plenty of non-toxic workplaces out there (unlike Twitter, my company is profitable and hiring).
 
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