Is this blue tick verification program by Meta really that attractive? What is the point of paying $8 a month for a blue tick and doesn’t this devalue the point of its leverage and status? Currently, Meta advertises the subscription as a way to “grow your presence on Instagram and Facebook” and creators can currently join a waitlist for Meta Verify. 

“Obviously there’s a lot of concerns and questions right now,” head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to his Instagram stories on Friday. “We’ll iterate on it and when we get into a good place — if and when we get it to a good place — we’ll then expand it to other countries, including the US.”

Currently, the test is limited to Australia and New Zealand, but the program will span both Facebook and Instagram and charge users monthly fees of about $12 via the web or $15 on iOS and Android devices (more expensive than Twitter’s Twitter Blue, which costs $8 per month). Meta advertises the subscription as a way to “grow your presence on Instagram and Facebook” and creators can currently join a waitlist for Meta Verify. 

Mosseri hosted one of his weekly Q&A on the topic on his Instagram. One of the questions Mosseri answered addressed the Meta Verified program and, specifically, whether the program was charging creators for broader reach on their content. “I wanted to start with this question because it gets at the heart of a really common misconception, which is that people think Instagram suppresses creator reach in order to get people to pay for more reach,” Mosseri said in the video. “But it’s not in our business interest to do anything like that.”

Mosseri went on to say how the Meta Verification subscription could potentially impact content reach via comments, search, or in-app recommendations — but only marginally. So our question still is, I guess, what’s the point? 

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Curious Creator