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