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New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Buzzfeed say they won't pay for Twitter verification [1]
['Mark Frauenfelder']
Date: 2023-03-30
Elon Musk's master plan to make billions of dollars selling cringeworthy "Twitter Blue" checkmark subscriptions has backfired. According to Natasha Lomas' brutal Twitter takedown in TechCrunch, Twitter Blue has generated barely $11 million in subscription revenue since it started three months ago. This figure amounts to only one percent of the annual interest on the debt Musk incurred from the suckers who backed his acquisition of Twitter, a purchase made at over double the platform's current value.
Subscribers who opt for the paid checkmarks have faced ridicule and mockery, leading Musk to direct his engineers to create a feature allowing Twitter Blue users to conceal their checkmarks. In light of these developments, major publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Buzzfeed have chosen not to invest $8 a month in Twitter Blue subscriptions.
According to Twitter, tweets from unpaid Twitter accounts will show up below paid accounts, if at all. If reputable news sites like the NY Times refuse to participate Twitter Blue, then Musk's beloved Nazis, trolls, anti-vaxxers, and QAoners will reign supreme on the platform.
New: The New York Times says it is not planning to pay for Twitter verification:
"We aren't planning to pay the monthly fee for verification of our institutional Twitter accounts," a spokesperson tells me. — Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) March 30, 2023
From Lomas' TechCrunch piece:
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