Elon Musk finally bought Twitter, Inc. for $44 billion. In a very short time since the acquisition, he’s already been making a slew of sweeping changes. After kicking out the previous CEO and CFO, his main objective has been to combat spam.
Currently, the blue check mark next to an individual or business’s username is free. At the moment, the basic requirements for verification remain the same.
An account must follow the principles of Authentic, Notable, and Active as described under the official guidelines. However, Elon has stressed that to keep paying the bills for the platform, Twitter must find other monetization models that extend past ad revenue.
His strategy? Charge users monthly for maintaining verification status. While he was initially demanding an aggressive paywall of $20/month, he has since reduced this figure to a more accommodating $8/month.
Aside from fighting bots that post and retweet constantly, he’s also been considering the resurrection of Vine. This was a short-lived, though incredibly successful social media platform that debuted in 2012, which allowed users to share looping video clips with a maximum run-time of 6 seconds. Back then, Twitter quickly acquired it and launched it in early January 2013.
- Read more: Elon Musk Is Finally Buying Twitter
Although Vine reached a peak active userbase of more than 200 million, Twitter archived every video ever uploaded and then discontinued it.
Given the incredible success of TikTok and the manner in which competing social networking platforms have tried to adapt the video-clip sharing features in the form of YouTube Shorts, Facebook Watch, and Instagram Live, it comes as no surprise that Twitter will try to assume a presence in this growing field as well.