Starting August 7th, advertisers that haven’t reached certain spending thresholds will lose their official brand account verification. According to emails obtained by the WSJ, brands need to have spent at least $1,000 on ads within the prior 30 days or $6,000 in the previous 180 days to retain the gold checkmark identifying that the account belongs to a verified brand.
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Threatening to remove verified checkmarks is a risky move given how many ‘Twitter alternative’ services like Threads and Bluesky are cropping up and how willing consumers appear to be to jump ship, with Threads rocketing to 100 million registrations in just five days. That said, it’s not like other efforts to drum up some additional cash, like increasing API pricing, have gone down especially well, either. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton — let’s see if it pays off for him.
We do need to think about how to keep the Fediverse running, but advertising shouldn’t be federated. If an instance wants to run ads that’s fine, but that shouldn’t be distributed to any other instances, not even if the posts and users engage with other instances. Who is going to want to see or redistribute ads for a different instance?
Like I said, controversial but it’s quite reasonable for the operators of these servers to want to raise money somehow. Even if the activity pub feed describes elements with a “this is an ad” tag and allows the recipient to choose whether to serve it or not.