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Comment by artfulhippo | Hacker News Reader

Assuming that you "work on Twitter", ie, your career is in part built on Twitter, what do you think the value of a Blue Check is? I would bet it's worth more than $1000/yr to the average person in the "Twitter Middle Class" (someone using Twitter for work but not at mega scale). Even a single digit percentage point boost in engagement is worth a lot, or do you disagree?

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A lot of journalists are financially poor, or at least don't make much income from their jobs. $1000/yr is a lot of money for journalists, especially at local newspapers.

Quite a few accounts I follow also don't have a Blue Check. If it started to cost money, I'm sure a lot of journalists would just choose not to be verified. The reason is that I'm not convinced that a Blue Check is tied to engagement with your Tweets, but rather the quality of your work outside Twitter.

Twitter is worth about the same as say a Bloomberg News or WSJ subscription to me. Perhaps slightly more. That is to say I’d pay a few hundred bucks for it.

But there’s no way I’m spending $1,000 a year on it if I can’t expense or write it off taxes (right now my usage is a mix of personal and non-personal, so it’s hard to correctly account for it).

An issue is that for some it's not worth as much as for Twitter. If my local police department uses Twitter to send out notifications on a current event the blue check confirms authority. Without the mark one can't distinguish original from fake/parody within the platform, which hurts the platform.

But there certainly is a demography who would pay well. Question is where to draw the line.

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