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Are you tired of not having that coveted blue checkmark on your Twitter profile? Well, now you can lock in your paid-for checkmark for a year at a time with Twitter’s new annual payment tiers for its verification scheme.
Looking for a way to add some extra pizazz to your Twitter profile? Look no further than Twitter Blue’s new annual payment scheme! Not only can you score that coveted blue tick, but you’ll also save around 13% per year.
Plus, with added perks like tweet editing, the ability to post longer videos, priority replies, and potentially even fewer ads, what’s not to love?
The Details
But hold on, before you get too excited, the prices for Twitter Blue may be exorbitant in certain areas.
Take Australia for instance, you’d be coughing up a whopping $19 per month for a mere graphic in the app. And to add insult to injury, the perceived value of the endorsement is being diminished by the very program you’re investing in. It’s worth mentioning that the Android pricing for the new program is just as steep as iOS, meaning Twitter is trying to offset Google Play store charges with its steep pricing.
You might be wondering, why would anyone pay for a service that’s deteriorating day by day? With regular errors and outages that only worsen the user experience. But, some people may find value in buying a blue tick, though it’s worth noting that anyone can click on that checkmark and see that you’ve bought it.
So, is it truly worth it? Does it really give you more perceived importance or status in the app?
Here’s the thing, the value of the blue tick may change once Twitter decides to take away all the ‘legacy’ blue ticks. This will prompt users to re-evaluate whether they truly want the marker or not. After which all users will be either subscribed to Twitter Blue or not, which could make it more valuable.
However, the secret is out that you can just buy the tick, so it’s not the endorsement it once was.
And with even representatives from the Taliban buying up blue ticks to fake legitimacy, it all seems a bit flawed and not worth the money.
It seems that not many people are on board with Twitter Blue, at least according to the current take-up stats.
Research conducted by Travis Brown shows that only around 225,000 people have signed up for the new program. While that may seem like a lot, it’s nowhere near the level of interest that Twitter needs to make this a relevant consideration for revenue or bot-battling.
For example, Elon Musk’s stated goal for subscription revenue is half of Twitter’s intake. If we go by Twitter’s Q2 earnings this year, that’s around $1.18 billion for the three-month period, or just over $393 million per month.
Half of that is $196.66m, so Elon’s aiming to make close to $200 per month from subscriptions to reduce the app’s reliance on advertisers and operate with fewer brand safety restrictions and moderation rules.
Based on $8 intake per subscription, that would require around 24.6 million paying subscribers, or 100x the current Twitter Blue take-up.
And if Twitter wanted to use this program as a means to weed out bots, they would need around 70% of their user base, or 167 million paying users, to sign up. But, neither of these is likely to happen.
And when you factor in the ongoing problems with the program, like verifying the wrong people because there’s no actual verification process in place, it’s just a broken, messy and disjointed exercise that has done little more than add a whole range of random badges to accounts in the app.
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