Paytoplay

David Gewirtz/ZDNETAs you can see: boom! There's no doubt my impression numbers blossomed in June. Remember, you're seeing the Twitter Blue effect active for just 18 of the 30 days, because I got the checkmark part way through June, on June 12. Now, in July, I have almost as many impressions as I got for entire months before Twitter Blue, but we're only 11 days into the month. I should note that my tweeting behavior and pattern didn't differ between the months. I have a pretty reliable daily social media practice,…

If you want to vote in a poll on Twitter, you’re going to need to pony up money for Elon Musk. On Monday night, Musk took to the social media platform to announce that, starting on April 15th, users will need to be paying Twitter Blue subscribers in order to have the privilege of voting in any poll that is run by an account on the platform. If you’re a free user, you’re out of luck — no voting for you. It’s also unclear if free users will even be able to see the results of a poll, but I imagine that will still…

Elon Musk plan to distinguish users along financial lines will weaken Twitter and increase the divide between between the haves and the have nots. Twitter Inc. is set to charge users $8 per month for the privilege of having the blue-tick honorific put on their account. We know this because Elon Musk said so, one of of many proposals the world's richest man has put forth over the past year aimed at improving the social media platform and its profitability.The key difference is that Musk is now the owner, chairman, and…

Well, it's certainly been an exciting weekend. In the initial 48 hours Elon Musk took over Twitter, we saw multiple executives, including the CEO, Parag Agarwal, terminated "for cause" (presumably, to avoid payment of golden parachutes) but also, the leak of some news by The Verge that Twitter's software engineering team has been told to roll out a new "pay to play" verified account feature in the next ten days, or also lose their jobs as well.Look, mergers and acquisitions are always full of a lot of drama, and as a…