OK, something is very, very wrong here. Either I am an idiot (a distinct possibility), or the rest of the world is. Allow me to explain. In case you’ve been visiting Mars the past year, you know Elon Musk bought Twitter, and about every 37 seconds, there’s an article about what he’s doing with the place. The biggest news right now is what’s going on with the “blue checkmark”, and that is where the confusion begins.
See, Twitter has always been a horribly-managed company, and its products are a confusing mess. In fact, there’s really only two public-facing features, and they’re both called almost exactly the same thing. The first one is the “Twitter Verified” blue checkmark, which famous people and celebrities have next to their Twitter handle so that people like me don’t go out there and pretend to be Kanye West:
Then there’s a product which they called Twitter Blue (when, in fact, ANY other name would have been better, like Twitter Plus, SuperTwitter, etc.) which charges $8 per month and gives any user a few extra features, such as the ability to “undo’ a tweet.
So, again, let me be clear. Twitter Verified is something that is something the Twitter Corporation APPLIES to an account, after a verification process, and it’s a huge status symbol. Twitter Blue is a SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE that any slob can pay for. They are totally different and totally, totally, totally unrelated to one another.
However, from every story I’ve read recently, every single article (and even Elon Musk, from what I can tell) has totally conflated these two things, which is puzzling as hell to me. So there’s all this chatter on major news outlets, including the New York Times, about how the blue checkmark is going to be available for $8 per month to anyone who wants it. Umm, WHAT??
So, again, either Tim Knight is the ONLY person who actually understands these are two separate things, or else I’m so thick and dim-witted that I’m totally missing the boat and everything else has got their heads wrapped around this thing.
I’ll say one last thing: if Elon asked me for revenue ideas, I’d give him two rock solid ones:
- Yes, charge for the verification mark, and not only that, but base the charge on the account’s popularity. So if some journalist with 5,000 followers has it, charged him like $1 per year. But for someone like Stephen King (who has millions of followers, and, by the way, who already has said he won’t pay a penny to keep his checkmark), charge them, let’s say $10,000/month, because having a verified account on Twitter is a big deal, and it’s worth a lot. So they should pay to keep it.
- Instead of having the automated, totally opaque verification process (which I’ve been through many times), charge people $100 to apply, AND EXPLAIN TO THEM the reasons they were not accepted, if they were not.
Anyway, end of rant.
