The possibility of paid verification of the authenticity of accounts will appear on Facebook * and Instagram *, said the head of the Meta company (the company is recognized as extremist in Russia and banned) Mark Zuckerberg.
“This week we began rolling out the Meta Verified feature, a subscription service that will allow you to verify your account with a government-issued ID, earn a blue badge, added protection against accounts impersonating you, and direct access to customer support. customer,” he said. He.
“The subscription model is a growing trend of Western technology giants against the background of how the growth of advertising revenue is slowing down, and the load on service channels and data centers is only growing due to the ” weighting” of content. Power users do not We already do not have enough of the functionality that is available in conditionally free versions of certain services,” says media expert Georgy Lobushkin.
The first of the market participants in social networks and messengers to introduce a paid service was Pavel Durov. In the summer of 2022, Telegram, which it owns, launched a Telegram Premium subscription, which gave access to a number of additional services, such as voice message transcription and premium emoji.
Another company that jumped on the trend was Twitter after it was bought by Elon Musk. The Twitter Blue subscription has undergone several changes: if initially it was user verification (the same blue tick for famous people), which can be obtained for money, then in mid-February it was announced as a two-factor authorization via SMS messages . payment option.
It all depends on the “greed” of the owners of the company, Lobushkin believes.
“They have two options: make paid features that were shareware, but premium and inaccessible to the average user, like checkboxes (what Twitter *and Meta* want to do). Or leave the old features available, but add new features in access payment, as Telegram did”, says the expert.
Against this background, an attempt to monetize the protection of the profile and users looks especially strange.
“All of Instagram’s latest actions* give the impression that they are frantically trying to maintain an audience that has been gone for the past two years. We all understand why they initially introduced a checkmark. It highlighted profiles of famous people who passed verification with conditions beyond the power of ordinary people. Now everyone can put it on himself. The same thing happens with Twitter: there the check mark also loses its uniqueness and value, because as a result, even representatives of the Taliban movement (recognized as terrorist ) and banned in the Russian Federation) bought it, “recalls Anton Zinin, the founder of the NEAR agency.
Equally questionable is Mark Zuckerberg’s priority support initiative for paid subscribers. The fact is that user support on Facebook* and Instagram* has been criticized for a long time.
“She works very poorly, ignores requests for weeks and as a result practically does not help at all. This is actually a meme. And now they will be forced to provide this very help – the subscription is still not free,” Zinin notes.
Against this background, the strategy of Russian social networks seems more balanced. Vkontakte has introduced account verification for individuals through State Services and VK ID, and legal entities can do the same through the portal for SMEs.
*Facebook and Instagram are owned by Meta, which is recognized as an extremist in Russia and is banned.
