I’m not sure how valuable this is, or will be moving forward, but X has rolled out a new search filter that’ll enable you to refine your results to posts from Verified profiles only in the app.
As you can see in this example, posted by X engineer @iuliabaltoi, you can now use the “Verified accounts” filter in the “From” field on X Search, which will enable you to hone in your results to only those profiles that are paying to use the app.
Or the ones that X decided to “gift” Verification to shortly after taking it away from all “legacy verified” accounts, after realizing that a key value proposition of the blue tick was that celebrities had it. X then expanded that gifting to all accounts with over 2,500 verified followers.
At the end of that, what the blue check now represents is that the user is either paying for X Premium, or they’re a relatively high profile account, at least among other paying users.
Which means… I don’t know, but now, you can filter your search results to only those users. If you want.
X’s Premium subscription offering hasn’t been the hit that Elon and Co. had hoped, with Musk originally aiming to have 50% of the platform’s revenue coming from subscriptions shortly after taking over at the app.
But thus far, only a tiny fraction of X users are paying, and newer incentives like access to its Grok AI chatbot don’t appear to be moving the needle on overall subscription take up.
That means that X is still reliant on ad dollars for revenue, something Musk had hoped to avoid, with the intended reduced reliance on ad spend also, ideally, enabling Musk and Co. to set new parameters on moderation in the app, without having to bow to the brand safety demands of its ad partner.
But with fewer than 1% of X users paying to use the app, that’s not going to work, which also begs the question of what value a verified-only search filter truly provides.
But clearly, X is still hoping to entice broader X Premium take-up, and if that happens, maybe a verified-only filter will be of benefit.
X probably needs a bigger incentive to get more people to consider paying, but if it can, then sure, this could be a handy filter in future.