Facebook and Instagram kicked off a week-long rollout of their first paid subscription service on Friday, testing users’ willingness to pay for features that were previously free on social media.
Faced with declining advertising revenue, parent company Meta is experimenting with subscription in Australia and New Zealand before introducing it to larger markets. The service will cost 11.99 dollars (11.30 euros) per month for users who subscribe to it on the Internet and 14.99 dollars for those who use mobile applications.
From Friday, Australian subscribers who provide government-issued ID will be able to apply for a Blue Authenticity Badge that will give them protection against identity theft, direct access to customer service and more. visibility, according to the company.
“We will gradually roll out access to Meta Verified on Facebook and Instagram and expect to achieve 100% availability within the first seven days of rollout,” a Meta spokesperson told AFP.
“This new feature is intended to strengthen the authenticity and security of our services,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a statement posted to Facebook and Instagram.
Crucially, this move also provides Meta with a way to extract more revenue from its two billion users.
The growing army of creators and influencers making a living online could be the first customer base for its paid services, experts say.
Many of them complain about the difficulty in solving technical and administrative problems, which leads to delays and loss of income.
Jonathon Hutchinson, senior lecturer in online communications at the University of Sydney, noted that some kind of “VIP service” could be “a very attractive proposition for a content creator”.
Meta has often wanted to test new, sometimes risky models, only to then abandon what doesn’t work, Hutchinson noted.
“It’s part of a strategy to move smoothly to a model that isn’t free, where more and more services and features will be paid or subscription-based,” he told AFP.
But before the launch, ordinary users didn’t seem too enthusiastic about donating money to a company that already makes huge sums from their data.