Twitter launches its Blue subscription service in Japan

After launching Elon Musk’s version of the Twitter Blue subscription service last month in five countries, the company has expanded the paid plan to users in Japan. Both the old (launched in 2021) and revamped Twitter Blue subscriptions were available in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

Twitter noted on its support page that users in Japan will be able to buy the subscription for ¥980 ($7.40) per month on the web and ¥1,380 ($10.42) per month on iOS. These prices are marginally lower than the US prices of $8 per month on the web and $11 per month on iOS.

At the moment, Twitter Blue offers features like the blue verification badge, longer video uploads, priority ranking in conversation replies, a thread reader, and an edit tweet feature along with custom icons and themes. While some of these features were already present in the legacy version of the paid subscription, the verification mark, higher limit on video uploads, and a boost in rankings are newly introduced features.

After taking over Twitter, Musk has had lofty plans of reducing reliance on ad revenue by adding more subscribers. He launched a new version of Twitter Blue initially in November but had to quickly shut it down because of people impersonating celebrities and brands.

Twitter Blue’s expansion in Japan is not surprising. In his first all-hands meeting as Twitter boss, Musk reportedly boasted about the social network’s market share in the country. Estimates noted that Japan has more than 50 million Twitter users.

Since then the company has tried to put guardrails around the new verification system by mandating users to have a phone number to buy the Blue subscription and putting a 90-day cool-off period for newly created accounts. However, Twitter’s manual verification system of reviewing names and bio are not working as intended. Last week, a Washington Post reporter successfully created a fake account of Senator Edward J. Markey.