After overpaying to buy Twitter, Elon Musk is now looking at ways to make money from Twitter users. One such money minting plan that Musk has to make Twitter users pay to retain their verified blue tick badge on Twitter. While Musk hasn’t come up with a real business plan around it yet, reports claim that Twitter may now charge $20 a month from users to retain the blue ticks. Not just that, Twitter users may be even forced to buy a Twitter Blue subscription.
The initial reaction doesn’t seem to be optimistic for Musk as most users are willing to give away their blue ticks if Twitter forces them to spend money. Most users believe that the verification process should continue to remain free, like it is at the moment.
What’s interesting is that Musk is willing to bargain the price down to up to $8 instead of $20. In fact, this approach by Musk seems like he is embracing “some-revenue-better-than-no-revenue” for making sense of spending $44 billion on Twitter.
American author Stephen King took to Twitter to criticise the $20 charge and said, “$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
Musk quickly responded: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” He further replied, “I will explain the rationale in longer form before this is implemented. It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls.”
$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) October 31, 2022
So, basically Musk thinks that making people pay for a verified social media account is the only way to keep real people on the platform. This concept is, of course, debatable. Having said that, Musk makes some sense when he says that advertisements alone can’t help Twitter’s revenue grow.
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