Is this in reaction to, or because of Twitter? Many seemed yo have denounced the paid verification feature, but does this signal that it's something people will pay for?
Twitter is an announcement platform. Facebook is a discussion platform. Comments, replies to comments, no content length limit, ability to upvote, etc.
Imagine paying for this...
How much time should it take to implement a subscription payment?
With all the respect to Facebook scale, more than 1 month would be a failure.
I'm not saying that Facebook did it because Twitter did it, but the timing of it seems more than a coincidence and they are using the same justification for doing it as Twitter.
It's quite likely that Twitter doing it successfully overcame the risk aversion that large corporations are oversupplied with.