Twitter CEO Elon Musk has unveiled his plan to roll out a lower-cost verification service plan for small businesses on the micro-blogging platform.
Musk revealed this plan after a Twitter user had suggested that the $1,000 per month verification plan for small business owners was expensive.
The user @JoelDeTeves wrote, “$1,000 a month is pretty steep for small business owners. Musk, have you considered a sliding scale based on the # of associated users”
Musk responded,
“We will have a lower cost tier for small businesses but need to manage the onboarding of organizations carefully to prevent fraud”.
The Tesla billionaire further added that the $1,000 per month is meant for larger organizations, which suggests that there will be a subsequent rollout of a lower-priced verification plan for small businesses.
Currently on Twitter, big organizations/businesses are mandated to pay $1,000 per month, plus an additional $50 monthly for each affiliated sub-account, to maintain the gold check-mark verification badges the company introduced in December, replacing the blue checkmarks.
The new pricing for gold check-mark status falls under the new Twitter Blue for Business service, which is “a new way for businesses and their affiliates to verify and distinguish themselves on Twitter.
Notably, during the launch of this verification plan for businesses, Twitter gave a free pass to the top 500 advertisers that spend the most on its platform as well as the top 10,000 organizations by follower count.
For individuals, Twitter Blue, which includes a blue checkmark, costs $8 per month purchased on the web and $11 per month through Apple’s iOS. The company relaunched the program in December with new safeguards designed to prevent the deluge of impersonators that flooded the platform.
Since acquiring the platform for $44 billion in October last year, Musk has made Twitter Blue a top priority. Investors King understands that one of the major reasons is because the company has seen a major drop-off in advertising revenue.
Also, Musk says the changes were made to combat the issue of advanced AI-run bot swarms taking over the platform. Since verified accounts would make it more costly to use bots and easier to identify them, Musk thinks the new measures can help him tighten his grip on bot accounts.
