Why the blue tick doesn’t stick

In perspective

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, he has made significant (and questionable) efforts to improve the top and bottom lines of the company. Over the past few months, several stories have broken regarding Twitter layoffs to save costs, at times displaying an almost apocalyptic scene where employees on Slack channels do not know who is left. At other times, the company has been sued for failing to pay rent for various offices.

On the flip side, he has also tried to increase revenues. And it is this aspect of post-acquisition Twitter that has captured a lot of the spotlight. If you were on Twitter’s strategy team during the first month of the Musk era, you could have come up with a range of avenues to generate revenue. For instance, increasing the number of advertisers or increasing the average spend per advertiser Alternatively, the company could have considered modifying content (such as newsletters) and charging for how it was distributed.

Instead of focusing on any of those efforts, Twitter (and Musk) have chosen to monetize the blue checkmarks, and even the best of their efforts have come back with mixed results. Let me explain why.

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When the blue tick was first introduced in 2009, the idea behind it was really simple. The company used the mechanism to indicate which accounts were authentic. So if Rohan Seth wanted to say it was really him handling the Twitter account, the check mark was a way to do that and keep impersonators in check. However, over time, the tick automatically ended up becoming a status symbol on the platform. Being verified started to mean you were someone important, so the check mark’s purpose evolved to be a status symbol on the platform. Over the past decade, the verification policy underwent several nuances, but the end goal remained simple: the badge represented authenticity and was given to important people or organisations.

That was then. Now, in the post-takeover era, things have begun to get a little more complicated. As a result, there is not a lot of clarity in what the badge is supposed to do, especially when it is a source of monetisation and one that the company seems to be betting its future on.

Let us say that the idea for the verification is still to be a status symbol. How much value will the check mark have if any user can get it by paying Rs 900 a month? For instance, every time a conversation about Twitter has been brought up in the past year, I have always been asked if I have been made to pay for the check mark yet (the answer is still no, and I don’t intend to). It will make little sense for the average user to shell out that kind of money when the return is not a status symbol but general curiosity and judgement.

There is also no feature that makes the product worthwhile for the majority of users at Rs 10,800 per year. For instance, the subscription doesn’t remove ads entirely from the platform; instead, it just reduces them by 50 per cent. Further, let’s say the idea behind using Twitter is to keep up with the news. For that amount of money, most people could subscribe to India’s most prominent newspapers for better quality journalism while freely using the comments on Twitter to keep updated with public sentiment.

On the flip side, we are likely going to see several “news” outlets readily pay Rs 900 to gain legitimacy. However, the revenue earned from that will not likely significantly impact Twitter’s balance sheet. Still, it will disproportionately impact the company’s information ecosystem, especially since the feature will also help them stand out in comments and replies while providing them with more legitimacy than they should have.

All of the above is to say that Twitter’s initiative has not taken off because there is no clarity regarding what the check marks are supposed to be signifying in Musk’s Twitter. Musk has recently argued that legacy verified accounts are “corrupt,” and even if we buy that argument, at least we understand what that system was trying to accomplish, however mixed its success may have been.

Once the value proposition of the new verification mechanism is clear, we can then make a judgement on whether the price is justified or not. As it stands, it is unclear why the average user should subscribe at all, let alone how much they should be paying for it.

(The writers is an independent researcher on tech and policy)