Twitter will charge $20 a month for verification badge
Twitter intends to start charging $20 per month for verification; if the team behind it doesn’t finish by the deadline, Elon Musk will fire them. Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter, has issued his first ultimatum to his staff: either meet his deadline to establish paid verification on Twitter, or quit.
According to persons familiar with the subject and internal email viewed by The Verge, the instruction is to convert Twitter Blue, the company’s optional $4.99 per month subscription that unlocks more services, into a more expensive subscription that also validates users.
The new Twitter Blue subscription will cost $19.99, as of right now, according to Twitter. Verified users would have 90 days to subscribe under the existing arrangement in order to keep their blue checkmark.
On Sunday, it was announced to the team members that failure to launch the functionality by November 7 will result in termination.
In the months before to his acquisition, Musk made it plain that he planned to change the way Twitter validates accounts and manages bots. He tweeted on Sunday that “the entire verification process is currently being revised.”
The initial information that Twitter was considering charging for verification came from Platformer’s Casey Newton. By the time of publication, a Twitter spokeswoman had not responded to a request for comment.
Musk has acted rapidly to make changes at Twitter, modifying the homepage for logged-out users just three days after becoming “Chief Twit.” He’s contemplating mass layoffs of middle management and engineers who haven’t recently added to the code base with the assistance of Tesla engineers he’s hired into Twitter as consultants. Managers have already started compiling names of staff members to lay off, and the cuts are anticipated to start this week. Since Musk assumed leadership on Thursday evening, those assigned to carry out his ideas have worked over the weekend and into the wee hours.
The Twitter Blue membership became publicly available over a year ago as a way to read articles from some publishers without ads and make other changes to the app, such changing the colour of the app’s icon on the home screen. Advertising continued to make up the vast bulk of Twitter’s revenue in the few quarters after that launch that it declared results as a publicly traded company. Musk wants subscriptions to increase to account for half of the business’s total income.
