In many people’s eyes the blue checkmark on Twitter has gone from a sign of prestige to an indicator someone is willing to pay tribute to Musk. The evidence suggests less than 0.2% of users were paying for it as of mid January 2023 while revenue from the top 10 advertised dropped 89% in six months. By end of April an estimated 640,000 to 680,000 users were subscribed to the service. In this podcast Matt Binder suggests these are disproportionately users with relatively few followers, in contrast to the 9000 with over one million followers who were gifted a free subscription.
The implications of this for the service are very interesting and academics ignore this at their peril.
Mark Carrigan 