San Francisco: Elon Musk-run Twitter (now X) is asking brands to spend at least $1,000 per month on ads in order to maintain their verified status — gold checkmark — on the microblogging platform.
Starting August 7, advertisers who haven’t met certain spending thresholds will lose their official brand account verification, reports The Verge.
The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
According to the report, to keep the gold checkmark indicating that the account belongs to a verified brand, brands must have spent at least $1,000 on ads in the previous 30 days or $6,000 in the previous 180 days.
In response to the report, Musk said the “moderately high” fee is a preventative measure to help reduce the number of scammers who create “millions of accounts” on the platform.
“The reason for the $1,000/month is to set a moderately high bar to be a verified org, so that an org must be of non-trivial size to qualify and to make it expensive for scammers to create millions of accounts,” he said.
Earlier this month, Musk said that Twitter is still in the red after a massive 50 per cent drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt from the past.
“We’re still negative cash flow, due to a 50 per cent drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load. Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” he had said.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO took over the micro-blogging platform in a $44 billion acquisition in October last year that included about $13 billion in debt.
In April, Musk told the BBC that “almost all” advertisers had resumed buying ads on Twitter.