It’s unclear how valuable this will be or how much it will develop in the future, but X has introduced a new search filter that allows you to narrow your results to only posts from verified profiles within the app.
As you can see from this example, engineer X posted Followyou can now use the “Verified Accounts” filter in the “From” field in X Search, which allows you to narrow your results to only profiles that have paid to use the app.
Or accounts who, after realizing that a key value proposition of the blue checkmark is that celebrities have it, decided to “gift” verification shortly after X removed verification from all “traditional verified” accounts, after which X expanded the gift to all accounts with over 2,500 verified followers.
Finally, a blue checkmark indicates that the user is either paying for X Premium or at least has a relatively high profile account among other paying users.
So… I don’t know, but now you can filter your search results to just those users, if you want.
X’s premium subscription service hasn’t been the hit Elon and co. had hoped for, with Musk initially aiming for 50% of the platform’s revenue to come from subscriptions shortly after taking over the reins of the app.
But so far, only a small percentage of X users have paid the fee, and new incentives such as access to the Grok AI chatbot don’t seem to have affected overall subscription adoption.
That means X is still dependent on ad dollars for revenue, something Musk hoped to avoid, and less reliance on ad dollars would ideally also allow Musk and others to set new parameters around app moderation without having to cave in to brand-safety demands from advertising partners.
But this doesn’t work because less than 1% of X’s users pay to use the app, and it also raises the question of what value a search filter that is only for authenticated users actually provides.
But clearly, X is still hoping to attract wider adoption of X Premium, and if that happens, a certified-only filter might help.
X would probably need a bigger incentive to get more people to consider paying, but if that’s possible, certainly this could be a useful filter in the future.
