Why Mark Zuckerberg might have better luck with Elon Musk’s “Blue Tick.”

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

On Sunday, Meta The platforms announced essentially the same thing: a $15 (about Rs.1,240) subscription service for users to receive a blue verified badge provided they present a government-issued ID.

Meta General Manager Mark Zuckerberg is a shameless imitator. He cloned Snapchats Stories feature (it’s even called “Facebook Stories”) launched a copy of tick tock called Reels and co-mimiced the live video app Periscope Facebook Live. The strategy works. Many of these clones, like Stories and Reels, launch successfully on Instagram.

That’s likely to be the case with Zuckerberg’s new subscription service, though it may seem incredibly off-putting at first. Who would want to pay to give Facebook their ID? Thing is, this isn’t really aimed at regular users of Facebook and Instagram. It’s aimed at creators, particularly on Instagram, and its real selling point is reach.

Creators usually make money by collaborating with brands and releasing sponsored content. For example, a fitness influencer could use a post to sing the praises of a specialized foam roller. But these creators live and die on how many people “like” their posts, a metric that usually aligns with views; So the more likes they get, the more money they can charge for sponsored content. And Meta’s new subscription service offers “increased visibility and reach” in search and recommendations. The company has positioned this as being about verification, but it’s really about giving certain posts a greater chance of going viral.

twitters The subscription service has faltered, and as of January 2023, only about 0.2 percent of Twitter’s US users had paid for subscriptions like Twitter Blue, according to data The information. But on Instagram, thanks to the promise of reach, the strategy has significantly better chances of success. Many influencers will decide it’s worth paying $15 (roughly Rs. 1,240) a month to make their content stand out.

Mandeep Singh, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, estimates that the new service could increase Meta’s annual revenue by $2 billion (approx. Rs. 16,500 billion) to $3 billion (approx. crore) in revenue last year, but probably more than what the company is making of the Metaverse. Singh said in a note that the service would also help discourage creators from switching to TikTok.

In fact, the more important impact will be to keep the most interesting creators on Meta’s platforms, thereby ensuring millions more users see Reels instead of TikTok. The subscription service will be launched first in New Zealand and Australia, but in Europe and the US developers will test how far they really get in terms of audiences with $15 (roughly Rs. 1,240).

Creators are notorious for obsessively tracking their likes and reposts and will quickly find out whether or not the subscription is effectively amplifying their content. This is not an easy task. Musk last week got his senior engineers to amplify his posts for Twitter users as a top priority — and they ended up going too far, according to a report in the tech newsletter Platformer. A day after Musk complained that his Super Bowl tweet was getting fewer views than Joe Biden’s, regular Twitter users found their feeds crammed with posts from the billionaire. They complained, and so did Musk recommended he would go back the feature.

Meta must avoid the same mistake. When users feel their feeds are being filled with more promoted content, they switch to TikTok.

Zuckerberg is adept at copying ideas that aren’t profitable and then making them profitable. He did this with Stories, which never brought Snap the financial success that Meta did. And Meta was play with the thought Getting users to pay for features for years – it just never had the guts to try. Now that Musk has forged a path for Zuckerberg to follow, it should be easier for Meta to roll out fees for other features, helping the company weather a slowdown in online ad spending and offsetting the tens of billions it’s making for the outputs metaverse.

The new service is also a tacit admission from Zuckerberg that Facebook and Instagram are no longer true social networking platforms. They are evolving into places where people are entertained. Meta’s AI is increasingly emulating TikTok to put viral posts from unknown people in people’s newsfeeds instead of recommending posts from friends and family.

Zuckerberg now has to strike a delicate balance of giving users what they want while also giving creators the exposure they want. musk is struggling to get this to work for twitter. Zuckerberg probably has a better chance.

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