We have good (?) news for all you Twitter Blue fans out there – you now have the option to lock in your paid check mark for the whole year! Yup, that’s right, Twitter’s adding new annual payment tiers for its misguided ‘verification’ scheme. Unser Twitter’s new annual payment option for Twitter Blue, users can save around 13% a year for the blue tick, the ability to edit Tweets, post longer videos, priority ranking of replies, and all of the other goodies offered by Twitter’s revamped subscription option.
Paid For The Year
It’s a good expansion since it offers users more flexibility in terms of payments, but we can’t say the same for pricing. Prices, right now, are pretty steep in some regions and increase on iOS to boot. $84 a year? Hey, at least you save $12 versus paying for each month, which is honestly perhaps the biggest win here.
It does look like people won’t really buy into this. Just look at normal Twitter Blue’s monthly sign-up rate and you’ll get what we mean. Twitter’s service is eroding day by day; the once bustling app is now riddled with daily outages and a plethora of errors that only work to worsen the user experience. The clinch here is that they want you to pay for it.
To cut them some slack, some can justify the purchase of a blue tick, but it’s a bit contradictory since people can also click on your check mark and see that it was simply bought and not, which was once a popular belief, ‘earned’. Does having an ‘elevated’ status on a currently declining app really worth it? Well, it could be, provided that Twitter just goes off and ends all of the ‘legacy’ blue ticks, which would prompt those users to think about whether they really want the marker or not. All users would then be either subscribed to Twitter Blue or not, making it more valuable. Again, the bottom line here is the mark can be bought and is simply no longer the endorsement that it once was (pre-Musk). Do you really want to be associated with something that even the Taliban was able to buy up?
According to research by Travis Brown, around 225,000 people have signed up for Twitter Blue, which is a lot, but still nowhere near the needed amount for Twitter to make it a relevant consideration from a revenue or bot-battling perspective. If Twitter plans to push this further and use the program to weed out bots, then you’d assume that it would need around 70% of its user base signed up, which is around 167 million paying users. The current tally is just 1.3% of that.
Neither of these is likely to happen, and when you also factor in the ongoing problems with the program (i.e verifying the wrong people), what you’d be paying for is essentially a broken, disjointed exercise that offers no more than a range of random badges.
The Wrap
At least Twitter’s making some money from it, right? $1.8 million a month isn’t something to scoff at, especially now that it really needs all the money it can get. It’s not that we’re questioning wanting users to pay for something, it’s more the principle of why they should pay. Unless it gives the average user a range of options that they otherwise would never have access to unless they paid, then it wouldn’t be worth paying at all for whatever Twitter is offering right now. But hey, it’s there, and if you want, you can save up to 13% on annual costs if you take it up.
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