Elon Musk Wants Brands to Pay the Freight on Twitter with $1,000 Monthly Charge

Tesla CEO and new Twitter owner Elon Musk recently announced plans to charge businesses $1,000 a month to keep their verified checkmarks. Twitter Blue for Business will charge brands that use Twitter to interact with customers to turn around Musk’s investment woes.

Variety reports that Twitter has introduced Twitter Blue for Business, a new service for businesses that will enable businesses and brands to verify their accounts and stand out on the social media platform. In order to keep their gold checkmark verification badge, the new service will charge organizations a monthly fee of $1,000 plus an extra $50 for each affiliated sub-account. The gold checkmark will serve as a verification symbol for organizations and the associated people, businesses, brands, and even fictional characters, replacing the previous blue checkmark for businesses.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, introduced the new price for gold checkmark verification as part of his strategy to boost subscription income and pay down debt from his $44 billion acquisition of the social media network. Eventually, the platform will stop displaying the legacy verified checkmarks, at which point only paying individual and business users will be verified.

Twitter Blue, which features a blue checkmark and is available to individuals, costs $8 per month when purchased online and $11 per month when purchased through Apple’s iOS. In order to avoid confusion, as occurred when Musk first ordered the Twitter Blue redesign, the company launched the service with new security measures.

In addition to the new verification service, Musk has disclosed that starting on February 3 for Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter will begin sharing ad revenue with creators for “ads that appear in their reply threads” He made no mention of the specifics of how the program will operate, such as how much users can anticipate being paid.

With Musk’s chaotic takeover in late October, Twitter is attempting to regain the trust of advertisers who have stopped running ads on the platform. In an effort to win back advertisers’ trust, the company recently announced partnerships with two brand-safety analytics vendors to provide new tools that guarantee tweets about advertisements aren’t offensive.

Read more at Variety here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan