Meta is taking small steps through this trend, rolling out the paid blue mark softly and in waves. But for Twitter, it came in like a wrecking ball: since the first announcement in November 2022, Twitter Blue, its premium subscription service that allows any user to purchase the blue stamp for only $8 per month, has become one of the biggest (and controversial) themes around the bluebird social network.
But what is going on with Twitter lately
To better understand why Twitter Blue is so controversial, it is important to take a step back and understand the Whatsapp Database path Twitter took to get us here.
The first buzz around Twitter Blue was how chaotic the rollout went – a lot of fake accounts start impersonating brands and relevant identities on the platform. And this is a little funny since the whole blue mark thing was created to prevent this kind of situation. As you can imagine, this discredited Twitter Blue – and Elon Musk’s decisions as the CEO as well.
At the time, Twitter took a step back and “killed” Twitter Blue just a few hours after launching it, but just enough time to recalculate the route and relaunch it a month later with better eligibility criteria. And the main reason for such disbelief is that anyone can buy it moving forward – the stamp is no longer something “prestigious”, that people aim to conquer.
In addition to that, the “legacy” blue checkmark (the previous one based only on authenticity criteria and provided free of charge for users) has been officially discontinued. This means all users that previously had the blue stamp will lose it, and Twitter Blue is officially the only option available for those who want to have the stamp alongside their username.
But, well, having the verification accessible to everyone doesn’t seem to be going very well. A growing number of users are creating memes and mocking the paid checkmark, making life difficult for Twitter CEO, and engagement with Twitter Blue is pretty low.
According to a new report from The Information, which had access to Twitter’s internal information, less than 300K users have subscribed to Twitter Blue – this represents less than 0.2% of Twitter’s monthly users.
And what will happen moving forward
It’s not a secret that since day one as Twitter CEO, Elon Musk’s main goal is to make Twitter profitable again by trying different approaches and also scaling Twitter Blue. But, has he gone too far now? And, more importantly: is forcing brands to invest even more in the platform really the right way to go? Considering the Gambling DAT sensitive and turbulent scenario going on in bluebird land, I don’t think so.
