Which Sucker Companies Are Going To Pay Elon Musk $1,000/Month To Get An Ugly Gold Badge?
from the greater-fool-theory dept
Elon Musk’s next big revenue bet is that companies really, really, really want to show up as “verified.” All evidence suggests that very few Twitter users are interested in paying Elon $8/month to constantly break the site or engage in ego-driven experiments that make the general experience worse.
A few weeks ago, we found out that he’s trying to get organizations to pay $42,000 a month to access the Twitter API, and maybe that was just a framing technique. Because Twitter has announced the next round of its check mark program, which begins with deleting the “legacy” checkmark holders (which, honestly, to many of us is a huge relief), but also telling businesses and organizations they need to pay $1,000/month if they want to keep their checkmark.
The page for “Twitter Verified Organizations” says (laughably) that they’re “creating the most trusted place on the internet for organizations to reach their followers.” Which is kinda hilarious that anyone believes that. And, apparently, the way to create “the most trusted place” is to make sure that no users know whether or not organizations are legit or not unless they’re willing to pay through the nose.
In the US, it’s a flat rate, $1,000 per month, with a $50/month additional fee for each “affiliate seat subscription.”
That “affiliate” seat subscription” appears to be for employees that work for the company who are promoting it:
The best marketing comes directly from real people on Twitter. Now, you can affiliate your organization’s champions so that everyone knows where they work. Affiliates receive a small image of their organization’s Twitter account profile picture next to their name every time they Tweet, send a DM, or appear in search.
You can affiliate anyone who represents or is associated with your organization: leadership, product managers, employees, politicians, customer support, franchises, sub-brands, products and so on. An account you invite to affiliate must accept your invitation.
I’m sure some sucker companies are going to pay up, but this is going to get expensive very fast for any small or medium-sized business, so why bother? And, yes, this is all flat rate pricing, so giant consumer packaged goods companies may be willing to pay, but non-profits? Small businesses? Governments? It applies to all of them:
Twitter Verified Organizations enables organizations of all types–businesses, non-profits, and government institutions–to sign up and manage their verification and to affiliate and verify any related account.
In some ways, this is just Musk making a bet on extortion. Organizations and governments that don’t pay will be much more likely to get impersonated on Twitter and risk serious problems. So Musk is basically betting on making life so bad for organizations that they’ll have to pay these ridiculous rates to avoid people impersonating them.
I’m not sure how that creates “the most trusted place on the internet,” but then again, I didn’t set $44 billion on fire to fuck up a website I didn’t understand.
Filed Under: extortion, non-profits, organizations, trust, verified
Companies: twitter
Comments on “Which Sucker Companies Are Going To Pay Elon Musk $1,000/Month To Get An Ugly Gold Badge?”
Ah yes that worked out so well in the past that Twitter decided to create the verified program for free instead of waiting for the ever escalating number of lawsuits that they’d have to get out of, as not being the right target for the lawsuit (the target has to be the scammers not Twitter), or lawsuits that would require them to hand over data identifying scammers impersonating persons or organizations.
And those scammers are the ones who are willing to pay that paltry thousand fifty dollar sum if the return on that investment is more then that that (plus costs of the rest of setting up he scam).
'Nice account you got there...'
Nothing says ‘this company is run by an idiot who has no idea what he’s doing, scrambling to find new sources of income’ quite like extorting your users by saying that you’ll be revoking past verification status unless people start paying out a thousand bucks per month to keep it.
While this may work on some companies I strongly suspect that it’s just going to force a number to ditch the platform entirely and make very big, very public statements that they are no longer on it so anyone using their name is doing so fraudulently.
Those check marks will be as valuable as the blue check mark where, according to MSN:
No slanted language there!
Re:
… what? If you want people to understand and potentially agree with you you’re going to need to provide a bit more information than that I’m afraid.
i’m sorry, what exactly does that $1k a month get other than a 10×10 png?
Re:
Obviously the value of a Twitter VFT (VeryFungibleToken) has escaped you!
Re:
In Elmo’s mind, the most important thing: proof the check cleared.
Re:
…other than a 10×10 png?
Nothing.
Great deal, no?
Obvious Joke
sees date of implementation
“Is this out-of-season April Fool’s joke?”
Depressingly enough, I can think of several companies.
Hobby Lobby, Chik-Fil-a, Koch Industries and their subsidaries, News Corp and their subsidaries, John Deere…
Yes, all the “conservative” leaning ones.
Anyone who gives that clown money for ANYTHING is a fool at best.
Maybe Devincow?
It is still a verification
A check mark next to your Twitter name now just means, “I’m Stupid!”. Why TF would any non-stupid person give Elon Musk a monthly subscription fee?
A thousand dollars to make a fake account, you say?
A bargain! That’s less than the gas fees when I drain everyone’s wallets!
But it's not good even for those companies supporting the extortion
If/when SomeCorp forks over the $1k, they’ve now got THREE new or unresolved problems:
1) If they’re not a MAGA company, they may get mercilessly mocked.
2) They’ve got no additional protection from scammers/trollers making accounts pretending to be SomeCorp (“SomeCorp Official(tM)”, “SomeCorpUSA”, etc.)
3) No users can assume that an unverified “SomeCorp” isn’t legit, because maybe SomeCorp just didn’t want to pay up. Or maybe SomeCorp USA pays, but “SomeCorp Midwest” (a regional affiliate) doesn’t want to or “SomeCorp Support” decides not to.
Hiding the blue check is a response to people passing around blocklists of all blue checked accounts.
Re:
“Hiding the blue check is a response to people passing around blocklists of all blue checked accounts”
How do they get around a person simply not using twitter?