Mark Zuckerberg May Have Better Luck With Elon Musk’s ‘Green Tick’

Three months ago, Elon Musk announced a monthly subscription service of $11 (about Rs 910) to give Twitter users a blue verification check mark.

On Sunday, meta The platforms have announced much of the same thing: a $15 (about Rs 1,240) subscription service for users to receive a blue verified badge, as long as they provide a government-issued ID.

CEO Meta Mark Zuckerberg is a shameless imitator. I cloned Snapchat’s The Stories feature (even calling it “Facebook Stories”), launched a copy of TikTok called Reels and mimics the live video app Periscope with Facebook Living. Operation strategy. Many of these clones, like Stories and Stories, have been successful on Instagram.

This may be the case with Zuckerberg’s new subscription service, although it may seem very annoying at first glance. Who wants to pay to give their Facebook ID? The problem is, this isn’t really aimed at regular Facebook users and Instagram. It’s aimed at creators, especially on Instagram, and the real selling point is accessibility.

Creators typically make money by partnering with brands and posting sponsored content. For example, a fitness influencer might use a post praising a dedicated foam roller. But these creators live or die depending on how many people “like” their posts, a metric that often corresponds to views; so the more likes they get, the more money they can claim for sponsored content. And Meta’s new subscription service offers “increased visibility and reach” in search and recommendations. The company has positioned this as verification, but it’s really about giving certain posts a chance to go viral.

by Twitter subscription services have struggled, and only about 0.2 percent of Twitter users in the US have paid for subscriptions like Twitter Blue as of January 2023, according to Information. But this strategy has a much higher chance of success on Instagram thanks to the promise of reach. Many influencers will decide that paying $15 (about Rs 1,240) a month to help their content stand out is worth it.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh estimates the new service could add $2 billion (roughly Rs 16,500) to $3 billion (Rs 24,800 billion) to Meta’s annual revenue, just a fraction of that. against Meta’s $117 billion (about Rs 9,68,800). crore) in terms of revenue last year but perhaps more than what the company is making from the metaverse. Singh said in a note that the service will also help prevent creators from switching to TikTok.

Indeed, its more important impact will be to keep the most interesting creators on Meta’s platform and thus ensure millions more users watch Reels instead of TikTok. The subscription service will be rolling out first in New Zealand and Australia, but when it comes to Europe and the US, the creators will check to see where $15 (about Rs 1,240) really takes them in terms of money. audiences.

Creators are known for obsessively tracking their likes and retweets and will quickly find out if subscriptions are effectively amplifying their content. This is no easy task. Last week, Musk scrambled to his senior engineers to amplify his posts with Twitter users as a top priority – and they ended up going too far, according to a report. report in the Platformer technology newsletter. A day after Musk complained about his Super Bowl tweet getting less views than Joe Biden’s, regular Twitter users noticed their feeds were spammed with posts from the billionaire. They complained, and Musk propose he will return to this feature.

Meta needs to avoid the same mistake. If users start to feel like their feeds are filled with more promoted content, they will turn to TikTok.

Zuckerberg is very good at copying unprofitable ideas and then turning them into profits. He did so with Stories, which never gave Snap the financial success he did with Meta. And Meta was toying with ideas about getting users to pay for features for years — they simply never had the guts to try. Now that Musk has created a path that Zuckerberg can follow, it will be easier for Meta to roll out fees for other features, helping the company address the slowdown in online ad spend. online and offset the tens of billions of dollars the company is spending on the metaverse.

The new service is also a tacit admission by Zuckerberg that Facebook and Instagram aren’t really social networking platforms anymore. They are aiming to be places where people go to have fun. Meta’s AI is increasingly emulating TikTok to include viral posts from unknown individuals in people’s news feeds, rather than recommending posts from friends and family.

Now, Zuckerberg must strike a delicate balance between giving users what they want and giving creators the exposure they want. musk struggling to make that work for Twitter. Zuckerberg probably has a better chance.

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