Why Would Anyone Pay for Facebook?
It’s been a rough few months for the technology industry. Stock prices have plummeted. Meta, Amazon, Google, Spotify, and Twitter have all laid off a sizable chunk of their workforce (the list goes on, too). Everybody is talking about how ChatGPT and other generative-AI chatbots are role-playing as Skynet, and the older tech giants are feeling out of step. But whereas Google and Microsoft are deep into the chatbot arms race, Meta looks like a late-aughts tech dinosaur.
It’s time to shake things up, to turn the ship around. To innovate. Meta’s big, new idea: Charge people for basic support features and … a blue check mark.
On Sunday, Facebook and Instagram Meta Verified, a subscription service that will give benefits to people who pay a fee and confirm its own paid verification plan, which was initially meant as a joke mocking Musk’s ham-fisted business strategy but ended up the company’s revenue. Netflix is also looking to out of its viewers with its plan to end password sharing across different households.
