New York ( Business) — Twitter is considering offering verified accounts to users willing to pay $19.99 a month for a subscription service, and could remove the coveted blue checkmarks from profiles that already have them if they don’t start paying for it. product in 90 days, according to internal Twitter documents seen by .
The plan and pricing may change as Twitter’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, works to make his mark on one of the world’s biggest social media platforms. It’s also unclear if some users with verified accounts could be exempt from paying the monthly fee: many international organizations and charities, for example, are verified on Twitter.
The changes would upgrade an existing paid feature on Twitter known as “Twitter Blue,” which currently costs $4.99 a month and is available in four countries, including the United States, to add verification. According to internal Twitter planning documents, which was able to see, it appears that the pay-for-verification feature would only roll out in those four countries initially and would be priced at $19.99 per month.
TheVerge was the first to report this Sunday of the collection plan. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The whole verification process is being renewed right now,” tweeted Musk on Sunday. That same day, the billionaire interacted in a survey which Jason Calcanis tweeted, a member of their inner circle, wondering how much they would pay to get verified on the platform. A large majority of respondents selected the “would not pay” option.
“Interesting,” Musk tweeted in response to the survey.
Musk was quick to make changes at Twitter, including firing its top executives. In this weekend’s tweets, Musk polled his followers about the desirability of recover vine, Twitter’s defunct short video service. he also replied “absolutely” to a user’s suggestion to rethink the platform’s character limits. Musk’s degree of commitment to making any or all of these changes is unclear.
Even before the purchase agreement was closed, Musk suggested the possibility of linking verification to a paid subscription service. In April, the billionaire said that Twitter’s paying subscribers “should have a check mark“. In another tweet noted: “The price should probably be ~$2/mo, but paying 12 months up front and the account doesn’t get verified for 60 days (watch out for credit card chargebacks) and gets suspended without refund if used for scam/spam.”
Although the blue check mark has become a status symbol for profiles, it is also designed to ensure that users can determine which accounts are authentic and which are not, especially in the case of celebrities, brands, and other influential accounts. If Musk were to create a paywall for verification, it could make it harder to distinguish whether a notable name is a bot or not.
Musk, who previously said he wanted to “defeat spam bots,” made the prevalence of spam and fake Twitter accounts a central element of his effort to opt out of the acquisition deal, before backing down earlier this month. and move on.
— ‘s Clare Duffy contributed to this report.
