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Meta launch subscriptions.

 Meta will launch a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice that allows Face­book and Ins­tagram users to verify accounts

Meta

for up to $14.99 a month, chief Mark Zuck­er­berg said.—Meta will launch a paid sub­scrip­tion ser­vice that allows Face­book and Ins­tagram users to verify accounts for up to $14.99 a month, chief exec­ut­ive Mark Zuck­er­berg announced yes­ter­day.

The new fea­ture, called Meta Veri­fied, lets users «get a blue badge, get extra imper­son­a­tion pro­tec­tion against accounts claim­ing to be you, and get dir­ect access to cus­tomer sup­port», accord­ing to a Face­book post by Zuck­er­berg.

Meta rev­en­ues have been hammered by pri­vacy changes made by Apple in 2021 that restric­ted its abil­ity to track users’ inter­net activ­ity, a key source of data for tar­geted ads.

Meta said last Feb­ru­ary that the Apple change would cost it more than $10bn in lost advert­ising income for 2022, around 8 per cent of its total rev­enue in 2021.

Anshu Sharma, founder of data pri­vacy com­pany Sky­flow, said the sub­scrip­tion model was the latest sig­nal that social media users’ «devil’s bar­gain of exchan­ging our data pri­vacy for free apps» was com­ing to an end.

Meta’s new sub­scrip­tion ser­vice is sim­ilar to a plan by Elon Musk to launch Twit­ter Blue, which would allow users to verify their Twit­ter pro­files for around $8 a month since he bought the plat­form for $44bn last year. The full rol­lout of Twit­ter Blue, which first launched in Novem­ber, was post­poned after it was abused by accounts that imper­son­ated com­pan­ies and celebrit­ies.

Zuck­er­berg said Meta Veri­fied would allow users to verify their accounts with a gov­ern­ment ID.

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Comments

  1. Alma20 February 2023 at 10:22

    Having to pay $15 just to have a blue badge will not go well with users. I think we will see a major backlash towards these decisions. Mark is making all sorts of mistakes lately.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Andy20 February 2023 at 11:01

      And what about access to support? I mean it's not like that should have been free or anything. Facebook keeps trying to take, take, take without giving much in return.

      Delete
  2. Jamie20 February 2023 at 12:50

    Meta is hemorrhaging money from their Metaverse (another brilliant thing from Zuckenberg) and now they are trying to get some of that money back by offering these awesome blue badges. Who wouldn’t want one, no?

    ReplyDelete

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