Elon Musk threatens to implement talent subscriptions to Twitter Blue

Paul Tassi
Senior contributor
News and opinions on video games, TV, movies and the Internet.

A new report from Matt Bender at Mables says more than half of former Twitter Blue subscribers are no longer subscribed. 54% of the 150,000 users signed up when the new Twitter Blue was launched by Elon in November, but now they don’t.

Since the announcement, Musk’s plan has always been to increase subscriptions, by luring users with a « blue check », a subscription that checks for $8-11 per month. That blue check has been taken from everyone who got it for free under the old system, with the exception of celebrities and public figures with over a million followers, who are given a free subscription to maintain some semblance of validity to the system.

Now, a user has suggested to Musk to open Twitter Blue to allow gifted subscriptions, to which he has replied, « Okay. » It’s a short statement perhaps, but it seems somewhat unavoidable. If you can get people to sign up themselves, Super Fans can start selling gifted subscriptions to their friends if they want to.

Of course, this raises some obvious questions. A distinctive feature of the Twitter Blue system is the blue flag that distinguishes shared accounts. So, first, it destroys Musk’s argument that the new blue check is better for fighting bots, because it requires signing up with a credit card linked to the account. Now it’s easy to become friends with someone and get a subscription.

You can’t really disable the blue tick, because Musk wants to announce that many Twitter users subscribe to Blue (which isn’t necessarily true, despite what the top ten people point out in your responses). I feel the only solution here is to…allow people to decline gifted subscriptions. But this goes against the idea of talent pools that are universally seen as good on platforms like Twitch and Discord. All these circles are up to Musk to enforce the blue tick as a forced public subscriber indicator, as well as automatically show you your replies, when all you want is to see better videos, lists, and edit tweets. This is a talented affiliate that might be approachable if available, but I really don’t want to be the « Twitter blue guy » and I don’t think a lot of people would either.