Twitter failed to scare legacy verified accounts into paying for Twitter Blue

On April 1, Twitter owner Elon Musk was supposed to strip all legacy verified accounts of their blue checkmark badges. However, that didn’t happen. It’s unclear as to why Musk backtracked on this date. But, maybe this has something to do with it.Only 12,305 of roughly 420,000 legacy verified accounts have subscribed to a paid Twitter Blue plan as of Tuesday. That’s just above 3 percent of the celebrities, pro athletes, influencers, and media personalities who make up the platform’s power users.While Twitter Blue does provide some additional features such as being able to edit tweets and write longer posts, the major selling point promoted to users is the ability to simply get a checkmark next to your username by paying $8 per month (or $11 on mobile devices.) The latest Twitter Blue data comes from independent researcher Travis Brown, who has been tracking Twitter data since January. Brown’s data accounts for roughly 90 percent of all Twitter Blue subscribers. Previous internal Twitter Blue data leaks have matched with Brown’s estimates.If one adds government accounts with grey verified badges and business accounts which appear alongside a gold checkmark to the pool of legacy verified Twitter Blue subscribers, those numbers go up just slightly to around 15,000 users (or 3 and a half percent of these accounts in total).Again, this is after Elon Musk threatened to take away approximately 420,000 users’ verified blue checkmark badges. And this is also following Musk’s announcement that only Twitter Blue subscribers would be promoted in Twitter’s default…Twitter failed to scare legacy verified accounts into paying for Twitter Blue