Seems dumb of them. Cost is trivial and their competition that isn’t so politically motivated will have a much further reach.
The smart move would be silent on the policy change, pay, and support rival platforms as they can. Instead they will eventually pay and look like they lost.
> Seems dumb of them. Cost is trivial and their competition that isn’t so politically motivated will have a much further reach.
It's wild hubris for twitter to try to invoice/penalize the very users and organizations that make twitter anything but insolvent. There should be money exchanged here, but it should be flowing generously and most importantly in the other direction.
For the NYT to verify their official accounts plus those of their reporters (using the Twitter Blue Affiliations feature) would be $1m annually. This, for a budget line item that has heretofore been $0. In this economy, that's a reach.
LOL they are desperate for reach. Incredibly so; have you not listen to any podcast by them? They are begging people to go to their site. They get a fraction of the organic traffic they used to and nearly everything is driven from other site like Twitter, Google News, Facebook, etc. The internet age has not been kind to classic news orgs.
An affiliated account to a verified org is $50 per month per seat, so NYT would have to authenticate 1,647 affiliated accounts to reach 1 million dollars per year
Are all of these 1647 reporters (they have that many??) and posting on Twitter? That’s a lot of traffic generators or not.
Surely they could just do the bulk with 100 or so.
The smart move would be silent on the policy change, pay, and support rival platforms as they can. Instead they will eventually pay and look like they lost.