Musk today said he planned to charge US $8 a month ($12.50) for Twitter’s subscription service, called Twitter Bluewith the promise to let anyone pay to receive a coveted blue check mark to verify their account.
In a tweet, the world’s richest man used an expletive to describe his assessment of “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.”
He added: “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
According to internal Twitter planning documents, Twitter could also take away the blue check marks of currently verified users if they don’t start paying the higher $19.99 price for the subscription product within 90 days.
“$20 a month to keep my blue check?” he tweeted yesterday, followed by an expletive.
“They should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
Following up later in a reply, King wrote, “[i]t ain’t the money, it’s the principle of the thing.”
Musk replied to King with his most explicit acknowledgment yet of the proposal to charge for account verification.
“[W]e need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers,” he said. “How about $8?”
On Tuesday, Musk reiterated the $8 price point and shared more details for his new plan.
He said subscribers would get priority in replies, mentions and search, as well as the ability to post longer video and audio content while getting half as many ads as free users.
Publishers that work with the platform will also get to bypass the paywall, according to Musk.
“This will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators,” he added.
The remarks highlight both how tenuous some of Musk’s initial plans for Twitter may be and also the urgency he faces to boost the revenue and profit for a company that lost money for most of its history.
He also lined up a substantial amount of debt financing to pay for the deal.
Since the acquisition of the social media platform on last week, the billionaire has quickly moved up Twitter, including disbanding the board and firing its top execs.
In tweets over the weekend, Musk polled his followers about whether to bring back Vine, Twitter’s defunct short-form video service, and said “absolutely”
in response to a user’s suggestion to rethink the platform’s character limits.
It’s unclear how committed Musk is to pursue any or all of these changes.
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While the blue check mark has emerged as a status symbol for users, it’s also designed to ensure people can determine which accounts are authentic and which are not, particularly for celebrities, brands and other authorized accounts.
If Musk were to create a paid barrier for verification, there are concerns it could make it harder to distinguish whether a notable name is a bot or not.
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