Formerly Verified Users Aren’t Buying The Twitter Blue Elon Musk Is Selling

As you likely know, Elon Musk has been shilling Twitter Blue as his plan to save Twitter since basically four hours after he took over the company. In theory, pushing Twitter Blue was a good idea. Twitter Blue was the plan to offer a premium service to loyal Twitter users by upselling them on some useful premium features. It existed pre-Musk, but the company had never done a particularly good job marketing it (you can say that about many of old Twitter’s services).

The problem was that Musk somehow mentally merged Twitter Blue (cool, useful premium services to upsell) with Twitter Verified (a trust and safety tool to protect users on the site and make more high profile accounts feel like they can trust the site). The end result then is the worst of all worlds. Rather than upselling cool, useful services… you’re upselling “not having a shit experience” on the site. That means you’re basically screaming “if you don’t pay us, you’re going to have a shit experience.”

And, sure, some people will pay, but many others will say, “wait, this is a shit experience, maybe I should go elsewhere.”

One thing that definitely doesn’t seem to be happening is getting very many people to pay. We already covered how the Twitter Blue sales numbers were basically inconsequential and barely a blip (especially when compared to all the advertisers bailing).

Of course, some thought that maybe the high profile users, the ones who already had been verified, weren’t buying because they “didn’t need to,” since apparently there’s basically no automated system for Twitter to remove the old “legacy” verified users in any systematic way. That had been rumored late last year, when Musk first launched this ridiculous plan. But I had assumed that he’d assigned some random poor sob of an engineer to write some code to fix this, and once that was done, that was why Twitter publicly announced that “legacy” verified users would lose their checks on April 1st.

This was announced in combination with a push to get people to start paying, especially organizations, which would be charged $1,000 or more per month. Many companies made it pretty damn clear that there was no way in hell they’d be paying.

April 1st came and went and… nothing. Like nearly everything Musk promises, it appears this product upgrade will be shipping late. My assumption that the timing was based on a remaining engineer having completed a task he was assigned proved incorrect. Apparently, Twitter still can’t easily remove blue checks from legacy accounts.

Removal of verification badges is a largely manual process powered by a system prone to breaking, which draws on a large internal database — similar to an Excel spreadsheet — in which verification data is stored, according to the former employees. Sometimes, an employee would try to remove a badge but the change wouldn’t take, one of the former employees said, prompting workers to explore workarounds. In the past, there was no way to reliably remove badges at a bulk scale — prompting workers tackling spam, for example, to have to remove check marks one-by-one.

“It was all held together with duct tape,” the former employee added.

Musk did remove the NY Times checkmark, but only because he’s petty and they were public in announcing their total lack of interest in paying. Seriously, the man seems incapable of not lashing out if anyone even remotely suggesting his ideas are bad. It’s pathetic. Musk has also now claimed that the legacy blue checks will be gone on April 20th, continuing his infatuation with a weed joke that was never funny.

Anyway, the only change that Twitter did make was no longer publicly distinguishing the text that showed up when you clicked on the checkmark. It used to have an oddly worded message about how people were “legacy” blue checks and “may or may not be notable” (text that apparently Elon wrote himself). But that resulted in the people who were actually gullible enough to pay Musk to constantly get mocked in the replies with this common meme.

Now, however, you can’t tell who paid and who’s a legacy, except if you’re using the API where it’s still distinguished. But regular users can’t tell, thus allowing Musk and Twitter to play ignorant and pretend that more people are actually paying. This is kind of funny, because Musk was so proud of the different language between paying blue checks and legacy blue checks because he thought it would lead to the legacy ones being mocked… but he bet wrong, so now has to merge the two to confuse people.

Also, it turns out that for all the talk of getting companies to pay upwards of $1,000 to retain their own checkmarks, Musk must have realized that this wasn’t going to fly, so they’ve quietly given the checkmark free to the 10,000 most followed companies and the top 500 advertisers.

So… all of that is hiding who is actually paying.

And the fact is, not many people who were (are?) legacy blue checks seem to have any interest in paying. According to reporter Matt Binder, it appears that it’s basically a rounding error:

Only 12,305 of roughly 420,000 legacy verified accounts have subscribed to a paid Twitter Blue plan as of Tuesday. That’s just above 3 percent of the celebrities, pro athletes, influencers, and media personalities who make up the platform’s power users.

Now, sure, it’s likely that many of the 420,000 (you’d think Musk would have liked that number…) legacy verified accounts aren’t all that special or important, but some of them clearly are, and many of them are key drivers of traffic to the site. And Musk’s plan to make them pay has completely backfired to the point that around 3% were interested in paying. That’s astoundingly bad.

As for the media accounts, Musk seems mad that they won’t pay, complaining that “It’s a small amount of money, so I don’t know what their problem is.” The world’s richest man (surprise surprise) doesn’t realize that $1,000 per month is not, at all, “a small amount of money” to pay for something with not just no clear value, but mostly negative value.

Generally, when free services put up some sort of premium offering, the bare minimum they hope to convert is 5%, with many organizations hoping for 7 to 10%. And that’s when you’re talking about just straight up charging everyone who’s using your free service. Here, we’re talking about something that Elon (falsely) believes is some sort of premium offering, targeting many of those who were already deemed relatively important on the site, meaning any estimate would have to assume a higher than normal conversion rate. And here, he’s at 3%.

That’s… pathetic.

And, because of the way this has been done, he’s making the entire platform less trustworthy and less welcoming for many of the users who make the platform worthwhile. Truly a visionary genius at work.