Meta To Start Paid Subscriptions For Facebook and Instagram
CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed on Sunday that Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, will establish a premium subscription service with a starting price of $11.99 per month that will allow users to validate their accounts. Elon Musk has already made a similar move at Twitter.
Users will be able to verify an “account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts pretending to be you, and get direct access to customer support,” according to Zuckerberg. Meta Verified will launch this week, starting in Australia and New Zealand.
In a message uploaded to his Facebook account, he said, “This new feature is about boosting authenticity and security across our services.”
The business added that verified Facebook and Instagram profiles will remain the same and that only people who are at least 18 years old would be permitted to subscribe. Businesses are not yet able to use the service.
In nations where users cannot manage to pay $12 a month or in cash-based nations where they may have limited chances for sending the money to Meta, Zuckerberg’s pricing plans for Meta Verified were not immediately evident.
Musk’s earlier attempts to introduce a comparable service at competitor social media site Twitter the year before completely backfired, scaring away advertisers and raising serious concerns about the site’s sustainability.
He had to temporarily halt the initiative before resuming it in December to a lukewarm response.
Facebook played a crucial role in establishing the dominant business model of the internet’s largest platforms, which rewards users with “free” services that collect and sell their private data to advertisers.
During the past 20 years, this approach has brought the corporation, along with other advertising powerhouses like Google, tens of billions of dollars annually.
Facebook’s main page has boldly proclaimed for years that the service is “free and always will be.” Yet the business gradually dropped the tagline in 2019. Experts at the time hypothesised that the site was never truly “free” due to the user’s personal data value.
Since the California-based company’s IPO in 2012, Meta experienced a drop in ad income in 2022.
Facebook’s daily users recently surpassed two billion, according to the company, but due to inflation cutting into advertisers’ budgets and tough competition from applications like TikTok, those users aren’t generating as much cash as they once did.
The corporation has also been harmed by legislative changes brought about by iPhone manufacturer Apple, which limit social networks’ capacity to collect data and monetize advertising.
Similar reasons have previously prompted the development of premium subscriptions on other networks, including Reddit, Snapchat, and of course, Twitter.
Meanwhile, Meta is facing criticism for taking a big chance on the metaverse, a virtual reality environment that Zuckerberg thinks will be the online space’s next frontier.
Investors penalised Meta last year, pushing the stock down an astounding two-thirds in just one year, but in 2023, the price has somewhat recovered.
The biggest employment decrease in business history, 11,000 layoffs at Meta, or 13% of the workforce, were announced in November.
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