Dallas Mavericks owner, billionaire investor, and noted leftist Mark Cuban has publicly criticized Twitter’s new subscription protocol, Twitter Blue, specifically for Elon Musk’s handling of verified accounts and monetization strategy.
CNBC reports that leftist Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a multibillionaire investor, has publicly criticized Twitter’s new subscription protocol, Twitter Blue, particularly for the way it handles verified accounts. Cuban claimed in a series of tweets that CEO Elon Musk blew an important marketing chance by not providing more incentives for users to sign up for the platform’s premium service.
“Twitter CEO Elon Musk botched a marketing opportunity, and could have gotten more users to pay for Twitter Blue’s $8 monthly subscription if he’d offered more incentives,” Cuban wrote in one of his tweets. “There were 100 ways [Musk] could have asked legacy checks for $100. Egalitarianism was the worst of them all. It’s Diet Coke level.”
Musk decided to remove the blue checkmarks from users who had previously been verified when he implemented Twitter Blue, making them instead a product that could be purchased. This decision, which many have argued effectively reduces the value and credibility of these checkmarks — which were originally designed to be a symbol of trust and verification on the platform — has sparked controversy and debate. Cuban thinks that this decision could have been handled better and has diminished the appeal of Twitter’s verification system.
Twitter Blue’s sales page in March received 2.6 million visitors, according to web traffic analyst Similarweb. However, according to Bloomberg, only 116,000 users actually paid for a subscription in that month, indicating a low conversion rate and perhaps a user backlash against the changes to verified accounts.
Cuban suggested different ways for Twitter to monetize the blue checkmarks in response to this problem, including the possibility of charging users $100 annually for extra benefits. For instance, Twitter could offer AI monitoring of fake accounts, promote tweets from a user-selected nonprofit, or even permit tweets with an unlimited number of characters. The $100 annual fee that Cuban is proposing is roughly equivalent to the $96 that Twitter Blue subscribers would pay for the current service each year.
Cuban is still upbeat about the platform’s future and its potential to reclaim its prior authority and popularity despite his criticisms and worries. He recently tweeted that Twitter was “unique and right now irreplaceable,” expressing optimism that the social media behemoth would recover from recent scandals and regain its status as the preferred platform for communication.
“Twitter still is the best game in town for so many different types of communications,” Cuban wrote. “If you look at Twitter on a 20 [year] horizon, the past [six months] are just the preseason and it’s not hard to recapture what was.”
As of right now, Twitter has not responded to Cuban’s remarks or addressed the issues the multibillionaire investor brought up. It is unclear whether Twitter will consider these suggestions and modify its current subscription model in light of an influential figure like Cuban expressing his opinions on the subject.
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan