What we know so far about Twitter’s $8 subscription model

Twitter’s new blue-tick-for-money era is close to being available in its full form. Earlier this week, Twitter rolled out an iOS app update in select countries that allowed users to sign up for the new Twitter Blue subscription at $7.99/month.

This comes less than a week after the first of Elon Musk’s many fired-up tweets hit the internet, where he promised that the ‘lords and peasants’ system of only verifying celebrities, politicians, companies and news outlets with blue ticks would be overhauled for a fee.

The latest Twitter Blue subscription model comes with a list of features named by Musk himself and – for the most part – no one knows if they’re actually coming or not.

Of course, there were also stories flying around about how the product and tech teams had been given one-week deadlines and 84-hour workdays to get all this out…in a week. This seemed far-fetched and, sure enough, the update rolled out with…not a lot actually being changed.

Surely it wouldn’t all materialize in a few days for a product of Twitter’s scale, but here are the expected new features with the $8/month Twitter Blue subscription:

• Half the ads: One of Musk’s first promises was that the ads would drop with the new Blue model…but only by half. This seemingly means that Twitter will still be sharing your data with advertisers even if you are paying a monthly fee.
• Blue ticks for everyone: This is the USP as far as Musk is concerned. The blue tick will no longer remain the method of verification as we’ve known it. If you cough up the money, you will be in line for a blue tick.
• Priority in replies: One of the benefits of getting the tick with the new system is content priority: your replies and notifications will rank higher than non-verified users. Musk’s thought behind this is that you will be ranked above bots and reduce spam on the site…unless bot farms also cough up $8, which seems all too easy at the moment.
• Longer videos: Twitter, as we know it, allows 2 minutes and 20 seconds of video footage to be uploaded at the moment. The new model is likely to allow significantly larger video clips than that.

The screengrab below is from the iOS release notes. None of these features has been implemented yet (barring actually signing up for it) but this is the broad overview of what is to come.