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X, the social network formerly known as Twitter,
today announced that it is testing a "Not A Bot" program that charges new, unverified users $1 per year to post and interact with content on X.
Not A Bot is being tested in New Zealand and the Phillipines at the current time, and it only applies to new users. The X support account says that existing users are not affected "within this test."
Charging users $1 per year is meant to "reduce spam, manipulation of [the X] platform, and bot activity." X claims that subscription options have "proven to be the main solution that works at scale" to combat these issues.All new accounts in New Zealand and the Philippines will be required to verify a phone number and then pay a $1 USD fee to create posts, reply, repost, quote posts, and bookmark posts. New users who do not pay the fee will only be able to read posts, watch videos, and follow accounts.
There is no word yet on whether Not A Bot will be expanded to additional countries and to users who have already signed up for X but have declined to pay the monthly fee for a premium subscription.
Article Link:
X Tests 'Not A Bot' Program That Charges New Users $1/Year to Post
The
total “
rebadging” of the Twitter Brand is
not working.
The intangible value in the
Brand Equity of Twitter is hard to put a dollar figure on, but one thing’s for certain:
it was valuable.
Very rarely in Product Marketing History does a Brand become an (English) noun or verb, like the verb, “tweeting.”
Before the words, “photocopy,” “photocopying” and “photocopier” were invented, people said a “xerox,” “xeroxing” and a “Xerox machine.”
Xerox
owned the photocopier market back then, but Xerox had a problem:
no one associated the Xerox Brand with anything but — what we now call —
photocopying.
For instance, Xerox tried to compete with IBM in mainframe, minicomputers, personal computers and office products, but its efforts were a
miserable (and expensive!) failure.
Xerox’s computers might well have been
way better than IBM’s, but buyers felt
safer and more comfortable just going with IBM when it came to computers. (Ironically or “conversely,” at the same time this was going on, IBM tried to sell a line of IBM photocopiers to compete with Xerox — but
failed. Buyers just didn’t associate the IBM Brand with photocopiers.)
Meta is wise to keep facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp separate Brands.
Each app specializes in one thing and has its own unique Brand to reflect that.
When the former facebook tried to expand into product categories consumers didn’t associate the company with, it was a spectacular failure. Witness
facebook Portal.
And when facebook/Meta has tried to expand into other product categories that people just don’t associate the Brand with,
they have failed as well.
But the success of the Twitter Social Media platform resulted in average people inventing, using and popularizing English language words like, “tweet,” “tweets,” “tweeting,” “tweeted”…
Rebranding Twitter as “X” is a terrible idea. People
aren’t saying “x-ing,” I “eXed” it, “I read it in an X,” etc.
And turning Twitter into X and then making X an “everything app” like China’s (scary)
WeChat app — as is the company’s stated plan — will be about as bad an idea as if Meta decided to
kill off the Instagram and Whatsapp Brands and bring them all under one umbrella Brand.
It wouldn’t work.
And X won’t either.
˙
