Twitter paywalls ad campaigns

Twitter has pulled ad services for unverified accounts, with a new policy requiring accounts subscribe to either Twitter Blue or Verified Organizations to continue to run ads on Twitter. Twitter Blue subscriptions start at $8 USD a month which grants users a blue verified checkmark, whereas Verified Organisations costs $1000 USD per month for a gold check mark badge with the stipulation that prices vary by region and are subject to change.

According to an email sent out over the weekend by Twitter, “This change aligns with Twitter’s broader verification strategy: to elevate the quality of content on Twitter and enhance your experience as a user and advertiser. This approach also supports our ongoing efforts to reduce fraudulent accounts and bots.

Subscribing to either of these services means you have been verified by Twitter as a real person and/or business. Beyond access to continue advertising, you’ll have a more visible organic presence and a broader range of creation tools.”

The new Verified Organizations subscription enables affiliations, for an extra $50 USD per person each month, to receive verification (denoted by either a blue, gold, or grey checkmark) as well as an affiliate badge, a small image of their parent company’s profile picture, displayed next to their checkmark. Clicking or pressing this badge takes a user directly to the affiliated organisation’s profile. Affiliates can be anyone who represents or is associated with your organisation and must accept your invite to be affiliated with your organisation.

Twitter Blue users have access to a variety of features. Subscribers can edit tweets within a 30 minute window, see 50 percent less ads in their feeds, aren’t restricted by 280 characters and get 10,000 characters per tweet, can bold and italicise text, bookmark tweets, customise their app icon and theme, use NFT profile pictures, and two-factor authentication among other features of varying useful

Last week. Twitter revoked legacy verified blue check marks, a feature that was previously free for users, who could apply to be manually verified as a public figure or personality by the Twitter team. CEO Elon Musk admitted to personally paying for some celebrity user’s verification after author Stephen King found himself verified on Friday and tweeted out that he did not pay for it after publicly boycotting the subscription model previously.

The Guardian reported on an independent analysis from Travis Brown, a Berlin-based developer of software for tracking social media, who found fewer than 5 percent of legacy verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue after their verification was removed last week.

This is just one of many updates to the platform since Elon Musk acquired it in 2022.

Another feature, announced this month, enables content creators to monetise content in the app. The Subscriptions feature allows users to subscribe directly to a Twitter user that can provide subscribers with exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Twitter Spaces, and other paywalled content. While announcement bought new attention to the feature, the feature has been avaible for years and has thus far failed to take off.

Last month Musk said Twitter’s ad revenue had dropped as much as 50 percent since he acquired the social media company. Similarweb identified that Traffic to Twitter’s ads portal in March declined 18.7 percent YoY and worldwide visits to the site dropped 7.3 percent.

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