Barely a weekend has passed since Elon Musk bought Twitter, and the first evolutions of the social network are already arriving; and as expected, not all of them will be greeted with joy by users.
[Cómo descargar tus datos y tweets de Twitter, “por si acaso” ahora que Elon Musk la ha comprado]
One of Elon Musk’s top priorities is to make money from Twitter. It’s not just that the company’s finances are improving, it’s that much of the $44 billion spent to buy the company comes from banks and investors who will want it back with interest.
Twitter Verified Paid Accounts
Second revealed Casey Newton of PlatformElon Musk has already noted the charge users to verify
Verification on Twitter originally originated as a way to combat accounts impersonating famous people and organizations, and was granted manually after a verificati on process that usually involved proving that we were who we said we were. Over time, he became a status symbol within the network, for better and for worse, and the company was aware that he could be improved, but never changed him.
The blue Twitter mark indicates that the user has been verified
Now Musk wants to charge for this privilege instead of granting it just to verify our identity. As it expands The edgeMusk wants to associate the blue badge with Twitter Blue, the subscription service, etc. raise the price to $19.99 monthly; the service currently costs $4.99 and provides access to additional features such as editing tweets.
Users already verified will not escape this new policy and will have a maximum of 90 days to subscribe if you don’t want to lose the blue mark; in other words, if they don’t pay, they run the risk of other users showing up with the same name and trying to steal their identity.
Musk is betting heavily on this feature as an easy way to generate revenue, to the point that he has imposed a deadline on his employees to implement it; if November 7 is not available to be published, they will be firedlike many others in recent days.
However, it is highly doubtful that verification revenue will save the company, which continues to rely primarily on advertising revenue. According to Twitter itself, there are just over 420,000 verified users, and even in the unlikely event that they all paid the fee, that would be nearly $8.5 million per month; seems like a lot, but it’s a small change next to the 1,176 million dollars that the company entered in the second quarter of this 2022.
For such a pittance, Twitter has a lot to lose if blue-marked users disappear. There is no shortage of voices to emphasize that many people use twitter to follow accounts with blue mark; if they stop using the service because they don’t want to pay, Musk could end up with a significant loss of users in the coming months. Additionally, blue brand users create much of the content that goes viral on the network, and this type of content is precisely one of the most important assets for Musk, who wants to monetize it further.
