Twitter Inc's new owner Elon Musk has confirmed that the microblogging website will now charge its owners $8 a month for its Blue service, which includes the "verified" badge.
Musk on Tuesday tweeted: "Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month."
In the move viewed as a move to boost subscriptions and make the social media network less reliant on ads, Musk added that the price will be adjusted by "country proportionate to purchasing power parity."
A blue check mark next to a person's user name on Twitter is a verification from the site that the account belongs to the person/company.
He added: "You will also get: Priority in replies, mentions and search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam. Ability to post long video and audio. Half as many ads. And paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us."
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
The new suggestions come just days after the billionaire entrepreneur bought Twitter for $44 billion last week.
Earlier, reports had emerged that Twitter was planning to bring about a new subscription plan which costs $4.99 a month, to include the verification feature. It could also take away the blue check marks of currently verified users if they don’t start paying $19.99 price within 90 days. This triggered much backlash among long-time users with a poll showing that over 80% of Twitter users claimed they would not pay for the blue tick.
Many like author Stephen King, who has nearly seven million followers on the platform, voiced their disagreement. "$20 a month to keep my blue check?” he tweeted on Monday, followed by an expletive. "They should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron." King wrote, "[i]t ain’t the money, it’s the principle of the thing."
Musk later acknowledged King's tweet, to which he replied: "[W]e need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers,” he said. “How about $8?"
According to Musk, this will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators.
Besides the Blue, Musk is also planning other revamps, including disbanding the board and firing top executives. This weekend, he tweeted a poll asking his followers about whether to bring back Vine, Twitter’s defunct short-form video service. He also responded encouragingly to a user’s suggestion to rethink the platform’s character limits.
Meanwhile, Twitter's advertising chief, Sarah Personette, tweeted on Tuesday that she had resigned from her post last week. The mass exodus of Twitter's top management, including its advertising and marketing chiefs, leaving the company in the past few days has reportedly triggered advertisers too.
