Elon Musk said on Tuesday that Twitter will start charging $8 (€8) a month for a subscription. This will give users a blue tick and less advertising.
The social network already has a subscription service for paid features, but now that Musk owns it, he wants to launch a more expensive and popular service to bring in more money for the platform.
“The current system of lords and peasants, with those who have the blue tick and those who don’t, is bullshit,” said the CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX.
“The people have power! Blue for $8 a month.” Musk’s offer combines Twitter Blue, which already costs $5 (€5) a month for a better reading mode and editing tools, with the blue tick, which allows eligible accounts to verify and confirm their identity.
At the moment, only governments, companies, the media, and political, cultural, or sports figures can ask for this kind of authenticity. Badges can be taken away if the rules of the platform are broken.
Twitter users had different things to say about it. Some praised the move, saying that the current system was “unfair” and needed to be changed, while others questioned whether verification would work if it could be bought.
Musk took over Twitter last Thursday, and on that day he told engineers to work hard on making the system better.
He also said that paying users would get other benefits, such as having their tweets show up first, being able to post longer videos and audio messages, and seeing “half as many ads.” He also told subscribers that “publishers willing to work with us” could help them get around paywalls.
The price to subscribe will be changed based on the currency of each country. “It will also bring in money for Twitter so they can pay people who make content,” Musk said.
Reports in the news said that Musk was looking into how profiles were verified and how the blue check marks were given. Twitter used to give these to profiles that it thought were interesting based on its own rules.
In a recent poll, more than 80% of Twitter users who answered said they would not pay for the checkmark. About 10% said they would be willing to pay $5 per month.
“Helping humanity” By Buying Twitter
Since the beginning of his $44 billion (€44.4 billion) takeover bid, the richest man in the world has said over and over that he would shake up Twitter because he wanted to “help humanity.”
But Musk has said in the past that he would let banned users like former US President Donald Trump back on the platform. This has raised some concerns. No public decisions have been made about this.
Musk has said in the past that making money wasn’t his main goal.
But Twitter is much less profitable than its Silicon Valley neighbors Google and Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. 90% of Twitter’s income comes from ads (which owns YouTube).
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