| I think we can't really have a guesstimate without knowing the rest of the story because the rest of the story is about what you get by paying $8. The blue tick as an ornament definitely doesn't bring 8USD of value but it can bring value as something else and IMHO that value would be much higher if they keep identity verification intact and much less if anyone can buy it. If it was "account maintenance fee" I suspect brands and politicians would have paid much more than the $8. If it is going to be anyone who pays gets in, then for example a politician with a few millions of backing can have hundreds of thousands paid accounts to run their campaign. There is already reporting about countries like Russia and Turkey running large scale social media operation which probably cost much more than $8 per account and Turkey's Erdogan already expressed interest in Twitter's new paid blue tick[0] and said it would talk with Musk for localised pricing. But in this case, the Twitter becomes much less interesting for the regular people and they might reduce or even stop using the service if all they see is paid propaganda. I would have paid monthly subscription fee just to use the site if the content was spam and bot free but that's not happening. It looks like the best Musk can do is to optimize monetisation up to a point that the site doesn't die, he needs to strike a point where the content is good enough to gather an audience when charging the content creators that want to do something to the audience(sell them something, convince them in something) because the model he seems to be creating is essentially native advertising for monthly fee. [0] https://onedio.com/haber/erdogan-mavi-tik-ucreti-icin-elon-m... |