Mark Zuckerberg announces paid services for Facebook and Instagram users

Facebook and Instagram users on Sunday received news from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Users of the social media services will now also have the option for its paid services that will allow them to have a hallowed blue check for  a monthly fee. The service is called as Meta Verified and the users will have to pay $11.99 per month on the web while the iOS users will have to shell out $14.99 per month. The company is currently launching the service in Australia and New Zealand.

With the help of the subscription, the users will be able to verify their account with  a government ID to get a blue badge  apart from getting extra impersonation protection against the accounts that claim to be them. The service will also allow the users to get direct access to the customer support. Mark Zuckerberg has also noted that providing a direct access for the users towards customer support costs a significant amount of money but will be made up  with the subscription revenue. The latest service has been launched shortly after Twitter recently launched its paid service called as Twitter Blue. The new service by Twitter allows the users to have a verified profile along with other benefits.

Twitter Blue was launched soon after Elon Musk had closed his deal to purchase the company in 2022 which was valued at $44 billion. Musk at that time had explained that the company was noticing a huge drop in revenue as the advertisers had left the platform. Meta too has had its own problems in the past year as the company shares had gone down about 54 percent since September 2021. The company has so far laid off 11,000 workers in recent times.

The decision was taken over fears of a possible recession in the upcoming days. The laying off process was followed by a number of companies for the same reason as the fears of recession had loomed.

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