This is why 8$ is a good idea - the bird will never be free when it can easily be blackmailed by advertisers.
One of the fundamental misunderstandings comes from the fact that one's usage of a site like Twitter is generally worth more to the ad-buying community than to the users themselves. This is why Facebook, arguably the strongest social platform, does not charge its users.
Also, users create the content so charging them means you have less inventory to sell.
They’d need something like 20% of what Musk claims is their fake, bot-inflated mDAU—far more than existing blue checks, Blue subscribers, and “heavy tweeters” combined—subscribed at $8 to substitute for advertisers.
But $8 for a blue checkmark and ads? No thank you. I will certainly not pay a company that still treats me like a commodity if I can avoid it.
The $8 is for algorithmic juice for your tweets and half the normal ads, as well as the blue check.
People are not that stupid
[edit: hedge between 12M and 13M]
An ad-independent revenue source is a good idea, but not the blue checkmark program, as it currently means some kind of identity verification, and 'random' folks having it may cause problems:
> Want to call yourself Citibank Password Verification? Here's your blue tick, thanks for the $8. Want to say you're the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and announce you're abolishing the police? $8. Call yourself WXBM Local News Arkansas and invent a school shooting? Yours for $8
> Trump is banned? No problem, you can be Trump for 8 dollars, verified by Twitter. Or you can be Barron Trump and "expose the dark truth about your parents". Whatever. Go mad.
* https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1588306300450263041
No. Many random people have been given blue ticks. Some people happen to just wake up and have a blue tick. I doubt many celebs went through the process of identity verification.
Journalists basically get it for free regardless of their journalistic ability or follower count. They could sign up to Twitter after getting a job at CNN and get blue tick.
Blue tick as it is right now is an abused meaningless system now.
That's OK. Twitter verification was "Twitter verified this person's identity", not "this person asked Twitter to verify their identity". Twitter can and should do so proactively in scenarios like this.
> Journalists basically get it for free regardless of their journalistic ability or follower count.
Yes, they're one of the specific categories permitted to apply laid out at https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit....
A lot of these low prices are subsidized by venture capital as the companies chase market share.
For example, Spotify is ludicrously underpriced. Less than 10 bucks a month to hear basically every song ever recorded? Not sure that can last.
When it launched, it had to compete with "free" via piracy.
[0] https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts
[1] https://www.musicweek.com/digital/read/spotify-tells-competi...
Sure, “the bird” will be free, in a sense, when it’s profitable and doesn’t care about advertisers, but that freedom is free for Elon to do whatever he wants with it.
Not freedom for users or in any other (actually good) sense of that bloated meaningless word.
Sorry if I am being dangerous/spreading misinformation, just asking the question
The reverse is quite clear in how various Gulf states like Qatar buy lots of advertising for the state as a whole .. with the unspoken assumption that their poor human rights record won't be mentioned as much.
How are advertisers blackmailing Twitter?
They sell medicine, people don't pick what medicine they get for the most part, their doctor does. (yes there are exceptions) The number of people who would push back against a medicine because "pfizer had ads next a twitter post with racial epithets" seem vanishingly small.