X threatens brands with lost verification if they don't cough up $1,000 a month

Another day, another messy news story to come out of X, or Twitter, or whatever we're supposed to be calling it nowadays.

Following a chaotic rebranding week in which Elon Musk abruptly announced that Twitter would be rebranded as X, the company is now reportedly demanding that brands pay $1,000 per month in ads in order to avoid losing their verification status, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Musk appeared to confirm the report in a tweet responding to the news.

"Or they can just pay $1000/month for a verified organization subscription with the ability to convey that organizational authority to affiliates," he wrote. "This more than pays for itself in organic reach. The reason for the $1000/month is to set a moderately high bar to be a verified org, so that an org must be of non-trivial size to qualify and to make it expensive for scammers to create millions of accounts."

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Musk is referring to the $1,000 brands can pay for a gold checkmark, which marks them as a Verified Organization.

This latest ultimatum is reminiscent of the way Musk overhauled the blue badge verification system, first offering users a badge for $8 a month and then removing legacy blue badges for anyone who didn't pay.

Given that Musk tweeted earlier in the month that Twitter is down in ad revenue by around 50 percent, it's not hard to see why the company is scrambling for ways to make the money back.