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Musk’s social network will charge businesses and organizations $1,000/month for verified status
As Elon Musk promised, Twitter’s previous verification regime of blue check marks will soon be a thing of the past.
The social network, which bought the mega-billionaire last year in a debt-heavy $44 billion deal, announced Thursday that starting April 1 it will remove verified tick status from accounts that Twitter verified were noteworthy before the Musk acquisition. unless they have subscribed to Twitter Blue or the business-focused Twitter Verified Organizations plan.
The only individual Twitter users who have verified blue ticks are those who pay for Twitter Blue, which costs $8/month over the web in the US and $11/month through in-app payment on iOS and Android. Earlier Thursday, the company made announced that Twitter Blue was now available worldwide.
For businesses and brands, Twitter recently introduced a gold check mark and shifted government bills to a gray check mark. As previously indicated, a subscription to the social network’s new Twitter Verified Organizations program in the US – which is the only way to keep a gold or gray tick badge – costs $1,000/month (plus tax) and $50 /month (plus VAT) for each additional connected sub-account. (See prices here.)
Twitter first introduced verified accounts in 2009 to help users identify that celebrities, politicians, businesses and brands, news organizations, and other accounts “of public interest” were real accounts and not impostors or parodies. The company previously did not charge for verification.
Musk believed that Twitter’s old verification system was “corrupt” and opened blue ticks for every paying customer — perhaps an attempt to democratize the status symbol, but also a means for Musk to generate a much-needed new revenue stream. “There are way too many corrupt legacy Blue ‘verification’ checks so there’s no choice but to remove the legacy Blue in the coming months,” Musk tweeted in November.
Prior to Musk’s change allowing everyone to get a blue check, Twitter had more than 420,000 verified accounts. After taking over, Twitter changed the wording of the description of obsolete verified accounts to say they “may or may not be noteworthy.” (Musk claimed he was responsible for the wording.)
In November, two weeks after Musk closed the Twitter deal, the company launched Twitter Blue with the tick as one of its premium perks. But after two days, it suspended signups as a deluge of users set up fake and parody accounts that appeared to be “verified.” The company relaunched Twitter Blue the following month with new measures to prevent impersonators.
In Musk’s first company-wide memo to Twitter executives last fall, he said the company would need about half of its revenue to come from subscription services. “Without significant subscription revenue, Twitter is unlikely to survive the coming economic downturn,” he wrote.
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