Meta Verified to allow Facebook & Instagram subscriptions, but keep verifying notable accounts

According to the new support pages and prompts published by the company Meta has officially opened up its waitlist(Opens in a new tab) for users looking to sign up for the paid verification service. Facebook and Instagram users can sign up now in order to be notified when the feature goes live in their country.

But digging further into these pages, there’s a few more interesting tidbits about the service that we now know. For example, when Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg broke the news about its paid Facebook and Instagram verification service over the weekend, he mentioned that it would cost $11.99 per month if signing up via the web and $14.99 per month if subscribing on an iOS device. (Subscribers will also receive other bonuses such as access to human support, increased visibility, and account impersonation protection.)

Something Zuckerberg didn’t mention at the time is that a separate subscription would be required for your profile on each platform. If a user is looking to sign up for Meta Verified on their Facebook and Instagram accounts, it’s going to cost them $23.99 per month on the web or $29.99 per month on iOS.

Meta is also setting Meta Verified apart from Twitter’s own version of a paid verification service, Twitter Blue, in a pretty noteworthy way. Facebook and Instagram support pages make it clear that the plan, at least for now, is not only to let currently verified users keep their verification badges, but also to allow “notable” users to continue(Opens in a new tab) to apply(Opens in a new tab) for verification the old cost-free way.

A new prompt has also made its way to Facebook. Profiles that are already verified now display a message when a verification badge is clicked letting users know that these checkmarks now have a different meaning on the platform.

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“We’ve updated our verified badge,” reads the message. “A verified message now means an account has been verified with a government ID, and may not be well known.”

In addition, verification badge support pages make the update even clearer.

“The verified badge is a tool to help people find the real accounts of people and brands,” reads the new Instagram help page(Opens in a new tab). “If an account has the verified badge, we’ve confirmed that it represents who it says it does. A verified badge is not a symbol to show importance, authority or subject matter expertise. We don’t use the verified badge to endorse or recognize public figures or brands.”

From the language on these pages, Meta is clearly experimenting with the implementation of Meta Verified. The idea of offering a subscription for a verification badge on social media is fairly new. And, frankly, such an offering hasn’t found much success quite yet. Of the hundreds of millions of Twitter users, for example, only around 300,000 have signed up for a paid verification subscription.

On top of that, the redefining of verification badges has caused trouble on the platform regarding fake accounts. Fake accounts have spurred the exodus of brands, and the revenue the platform derived from their ads was significantly greater than revenue from the company’s subscription service so far.

Will Meta find the sweet spot for such a service? It seems we will soon find out as Meta Verified starts rolling out this week. In fact, users in Australia and New Zealand can sign up(Opens in a new tab) for Meta Verified right now.