The Twitter social network withdrew this Thursday blue check marks to accounts that are not credited to Twitter Bluea subscription that costs 8 dollars a month (7.29 euros), thus definitively breaking the business policy prior to Elon Musk, when Twitter gave this verification free of charge to public persons.
“We will remove legacy verification marks,” the Twitter Verified account had announced yesterday in a tweet.
Twitter Blue users can edit their tweets, post content of up to 10,000 characters, and have their tweets boosted by the platform’s algorithm. Yet only 0.2% of web users pay for Twitter Blue: In March, Twitter Blue had around 116,000 confirmed signups across the web, up 138% from the previous month, according to Similarweb.
This amount of subscriptions does not produce enough revenue to offset the money the company lost when various companies stopped advertising on Twitter with the arrival of the CEO of Tesla and XSpace.
Musk’s constant controversies and swings during his first year online have caused advertisers to flee the 2006-founded social network in droves, causing ad revenue to recently plunge by as much as 75%, according to The Washington. Post.
Many users and media outlets have said they don’t plan to pay the fee of $8 per month per employee and $1,000 per month for their organizations’ checkmarks – the latter being yellow. As is the case of The New York Times or the actress Halle Berry, who announced yesterday that she will join the “unverified”.
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The date that has been chosen for this change made us think at first that it was perhaps a joke, since April 20 -written 4/20, in English- is for many “marijuana day”, and that joke Musk has already used it on other occasions.
In 2018 Musk tweeted: “I’m considering taking Tesla public at $420. Funding secured” and later said it was a joke.