Within less than a week since Elon Musk puts himself in the driving seat, the world’s richest person has started dictating his term to Twitter employees.
Now that he is the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk has issued employees his first ultimatum: meet his deadline to implement pay-per-click verification to Twitter or leave and go home.
The goal is to convert Twitter Blue, a free feature that validates the users and a $4.99 a month subscription which unlocks more features, into a really expensive feature, reports The Verge. Twitter is planning to price tag the new Twitter Blue subscription at $19.99. Interestingly, the company will also charge the same to all those existing verified users who already have Blue Tick on their profile. They will be offered 90 days to join or lose the blue mark.
Twitter employees involved in the project are informed about the deadline, which is November 07, 2022, to finish and roll out the feature. Failing to dos so, they’ll be dismissed.
The decision, however, shouldn’t surprise anyone. Musk has been very clear before the acquisition that he was looking to change how Twitter authenticates accounts and handles bots. The day after his acquisition, Musk tweeted: “The whole verification process is currently being overhauled.”
It was Casey Newton from Platform who first revealed that Twitter is contemplating pricing for authentication.
Although it’s been only three days for Musk to be into the role of “Chief Twit“, he has started rolling the dice quickly to make changes to Twitter, starting from changing its homepage for log-out users. With the assistance of Tesla engineers who have joined Twitter as advisors, he is planning massive reductions in middle management or engineers who’ve not contributed to the base of code. The layoffs are scheduled to start this week, and managers have already started working on the list of employees who are no longer needed. The employees who are responsible for executing Musk’s projects since the day he assumed control, were working into the late hours of the night and into weekends.
Twitter Blue subscription was launched a year ago in order to let verified users access ad-free articles by certain publishers, and also make adjustments to the app, for example, the option of a different colour for the home icon on the screen.
Musk has never been a big fan of companies dependent on ad revenue. Hence, he wants to reduce Twitter’s reliance on advertising as much as possible. During the last few quarters, following its launch of the Twitter Blue Subscription, Twitter declared earnings as a public corporation which reveals the overwhelming dependency of the company on advertising revenue. Musk seems committed to the subscription model to make it account for 50% of the company’s total revenue.
Experts believe that the move to price tag Twitter Blu Verification makes perfect sense. It will not just reduce help users to identify real authoritative accounts, but also let only active and serious people apply for it. This way, an account with the Blue verified tick will get back its lost glory on a platform crowded with hundreds of millions of users, trolls and bot accounts.
