Social media: A premium tier for those who pay
Facebook and Instagram are “becoming payto-play,” said Laura Forman in The Wall Street Journal. The social media platforms’ parent company, Meta, last week announced a new, paid user tier, Meta Verified. Betatested in Australia and New Zealand, the feature will soon roll out worldwide at $11.99 a month. For that fee, Facebook and Instagram users are promised identity protection and greater visibility in “search, comments, and recommendations,” which implies that the company is aiming its new product specifically at influencers and business accounts. Given that Twitter relaunched its own paid tier, Twitter Blue, three months ago at $8 a month, Meta looks to be once again “lip-syncing a smaller rival.” The company has added “copycat features” pioneered by competitors before—such as short-form video and disappearing posts—but this time it’s incorporating “something that thus far has been a dud.” A month into the new Twitter Blue, only 0.2 percent of the platform’s total monthly active users, about 290,000 people worldwide, had ponied up. Snapchat, which launched its $3.99 a month Snapchat+ back in June, has a similarly woeful percentage of paid subscribers.
Meta, though, has billions of users, and even a tiny fraction of a billion is still a significant sum, said Dan Milmo in The Guardian. Meta’s “business model is under pressure on several fronts.” The digital advertising market is tightening, and Meta, like Snap, has seen a drop in ad revenue following Apple’s 2021 privacy policy changes, which limited the platform’s ability to target users with personalized ads. In addition, European regulators have grown increasingly unfriendly to data-oriented advertising. Bank of America estimates that Meta could attract about 12 million paying users in the first year—out of nearly 3 billion total daily users across the platforms of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger— for subscriber revenue of approximately $1.7 billion. Meta had revenue of $116.6 billion last year. As financial analyst Dan Ives put it, “This is a low-hanging-fruit way to potentially pick up some incremental revenue.”
Still, “most Facebook copycats have fallen flat,” said Max Chafkin in Bloomberg Businessweek. Twitter owner Elon Musk may be gloating—he replied to a meme showing Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg “copying off of Musk’s schoolwork”—but Twitter Blue is no success story. It’s had trouble with users impersonating famous people: Just last week, the BBC had to pull an item about actor Will Ferrell after being fooled by an impostor’s Blue account. Meta says it will require government ID to get a Verified account, and maybe that will work. If it doesn’t, and its platforms end up pushing the paid content of “spammers and misinformation profiteers,” Meta will alienate users—and advertisers.