We are now firmly in the age of paid social media, Twitter Blue has been working for over a year and Snap is launching Snapchat +. How long can Meta stop providing a Facebook + or Facebook VIP experience?
Snapchat Plus isn’t actually that So many offers, Actually. It will cost $ 4 / month in the United States, Canada, a few European countries, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. For this, the features are somewhat irresistible:
- Exclusive, experimental, pre-release feature (to be unveiled in future)
- Change the app icon
- See who saw your story
- Pin the best friends in your chat history
- And it’s about …
It’s like a simple snap announcement, I guess. Depending on what those experimental and pre-release features might be, Snapchat + could be a great bargain or a complete waste of money. Significantly, blocking ads is not something you can pay Snapchat to do
Twitter Blue has been around a bit long, so you’ll expect a few more features. And it certainly provides the ad-free status you can expect from a paid product. Here Twitter currently offers for $ 3 / month:
- No ads
- Bookmark folder
- Custom app icons
- Theme
- On custom
- Top article
- Reader
- Undo the tweet
It’s a bit more extensive list, but it’s not something that blows you away every voluntarily. Without any ads for payment accounts, this is a very simple list of customizations and personalizations that you can expect to offer any mature product.
The question is: if offering a “plus” product for an extra charge is literally so easy, then why isn’t Facebook / Meta jumping on the bandwagon? Why not look at Reddit, or Pinterest, or any other social app, such as TikTok?
The reality is they probably are. And they’ve been thinking about it for a while.
“A version of Facebook will always be free,” Zuckerberg said Says During the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Trade Hearings four years ago.
This does not preclude, however, that the company offers a version that costs and offers additional features, an extended version for the general public or an admin version with additional powers for leaders of companies or large groups or pages.
With the ongoing economic downturn, any source of income that looks secure and regular – like subscription income – looks good on platforms. Which means we’ll see more “plus” versions in the next 12 months.
The question will be, however, will anyone put enough premium functionality behind their given version to make it compelling enough to be widely accepted? At the moment Snapchat + and Twitter Blue seem to be primarily vanity versions for those who want the latest and greatest and have the resources to pay for them.
These certainly don’t seem to be the things that make a particular person’s life better or easier.