Mark Zuckerberg May Have Better Luck With Elon Musk's ‘Blue Tick’
Three months ago, Elon Musk announced an $11 monthly subscription service to give Twitter users a blue verification check mark.
On Sunday, Meta Platforms Inc. announced largely the same thing: a $15 subscription service(1) for users to get a blue verified badge,(2) so long as they provide a government-issued ID.
Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is a shameless copycat. He cloned Snapchat's Stories feature (even calling it “Facebook Stories”), launched a copy of TikTok called Reels and imitated the live video app Periscope with Facebook Live. The strategy works. Many of these clones, like Stories and Reels, take off successfully on Instagram.
This will likely be the case with Zuckerberg's new subscription service, even though at first glance it looks incredibly off-putting. Who'd want to pay to give Facebook their ID? The thing is, this isn't really aimed at regular users of Facebook and Instagram. It's aimed at creators, particularly on Instagram, and the real selling point is reach.
Creators typically make money by partnering with brands and posting sponsored content. A fitness influencer might use a post to sing the praises of a specialized foam roller, for instance. But these creators live and die by how many people “like” their posts, a metric that usually corresponds with views; so the more likes they get, the more money they can demand for sponsored content. And Meta's new subscription service offers “increased visibility and reach” in search and recommendations. The company has positioned this as being about verification, but it's really about giving certain posts more of a chance to go viral.
Twitter's subscription service has floundered, and only about 0.2% of Twitter's US users had paid for
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