New York Times says it won't pay for Twitter verified check mark

There’s conflicting info flying around. Elon said somewhere that the “Top 10,000 organizations will be grandfathered in.” [1] Lots of publishers — Vox, Buzzfeed, Washington Post, CNN — now have a gold checkmark, which denotes an organization. I question whether they all signed up for the $1,000/month plan. I think Elon stripped the NY Times and kept them out of organizational status out of spite, because they publicly tweeted that they wouldn’t sign up.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/31/23664923/twitter-verifica...

They control engagement and they can make it higher for the checkmark. Hell, they can push engagement to zero for anyone who doesn't pay, and it looks like that might be the plan. The problem is that the set of people with the checkmark is small and (in aggregate) fairly terrible, and is mostly disjoint from the valuable content creators on the platform.

Twitter has lost a lot of good users and communities, but it's still relatively usable and stable. It's not going to survive another artificial engagement squelch targeted at non-paying posters. So either Musk will do that and there's no reason to pay for a dead platform, or he won't do it and it's better not to pay him. But the real argument is that enough people refuse to pay, perhaps it will speed up the process of forcing Musk to back off from his current approach and instead focus on making the platform better for all users (and hence bringing back high-paying advertisers) rather than doubling down on this failing subscription idea.

> I would expect that more people would be interested on how a company like Twitter can monetize its services.

People are interested, this submission has many votes.

It may not be a result that someone like a shareholder would like to see, but a result none the less.

Are they actually verifying identity when you subscribe?

If not, a little vamity badge doesn't represent much as a value proposition.

Typically you charge for something that has value for your users.

A blue checkmark that verifies that you are in fact the organization you say you are has value. But that's not what a paid checkmark is - @NewYorkT1mes can get a blue checkmark too. It's simply an indicator that you paid for Twitter, which in and of itself has very little value.

(It's also some other stuff like boosting your tweets which has value, but the idea that the paid checkmark is anything like the old verified checkmark is a bait and switch).