Facebook: Now Available at an Introductory Price of $11.99

We once quipped that all anyone ever wanted to do over the internet was to sell you stuff. Didn't matter whether that was something you actually wanted or needed or even if it was something useful — as long as you were on the internet, you were a potential customer.

And nothing proves that point more than an announcement by Meta this past week to begin charging users for a so-called subscription bundle. Yes, Papa Zuck wants to ride the subscription-as-a-service train by asking users to pay at least $11.99 per month to receive the coveted (?) verified badge on Facebook and Instagram that indicates you are who you say you are and not somebody pretending to be George W. Bush.

$11.99 also gets you a slew of other benefits, including "help when you need it" with "access to a real person for common account issues," which presumably means that non-paying users will be relegated to a merry-go-round of automated messages that leaves them more confused than ever.

So why now? Well, 2022 really wasn't kind to Meta or its founder Mark Zuckerberg, with both losing billions in their worth because of an insistence on a technology (aka the "metaverse") that is yet to gain widespread appeal. Despite laying off 11,000 employees (with more expected in the near future), Meta — which owns Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram (among others) — is on the hook for improving profitability and sales after it burned through billions in getting people to give a damn about VR (and by extension the metaverse) with nothing to show for it.

Whether this experiment — which will initially be rolled out in Australia and New Zealand later this week — will bear fruit is yet to be seen. Though the last time a billionaire offered users the ability to purchase the verified check mark on their social media website, it turned out as well as you'd expect. 🙄

Instagram ranked #1 in this week's Tech Company Rankings while Facebook was trending on the #2 spot.

Microsoft Seeks Dominance in AI, But Also Gaming.. 🏌️

Microsoft's latest plan to monetize the internet has less to do with selling subscriptions and more with monopolizing its new-found relevance in artificial intelligence (though we wouldn't rule out subscriptions just yet.)

Ever since ChatGPT was released to the public at large, users have been going nuts with what the chatbot can do — prompting Microsoft to bake that technology within its search engine Bing. Well, sadly for the more freaky ones out there, Microsoft has now decided to limit the number of times users can interact with the Bing chatbot because it simply wasn't capable of prolonged conversations and spewed nonsense like wanting to steal nuclear secrets.

In the background, however, Microsoft is already selling the idea of AI-powered Bing to advertisers so that when users ask something like "what are the best hotels in Mexico?", the chatbot could display hotel ads, Reuters reports.

Meanwhile, the company is hard at work, trying to convince antitrust regulators in the EU to please, please, please let them acquire Activision-Blizzard — the producer of hits such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft — so that the video game industry becomes more "competitive." (lol)

Sony is having none of it and wants regulators to block the deal.

Microsoft was trending on the #46 spot this week.

Amazon Asks Employees to Return to the Office 🏃

Amazon, one of the largest employers in the U.S., issued an advisory to employees asking that they commute to the office at least three times a week. In a note explaining the decision, the e-commerce giant's CEO, Andy Jassy, said that learning and collaborating were a lot easier when employees worked in person, and teams bonded a lot better when they were face-to-face with each other.

More power to Amazon, I guess..

The company was trending on the #38 spot this week.

In Other News.. 📰

• China's Tencent Holdings has taken heed of Meta's failures and decided it wants nothing to do with VR and the metaverse.
• Investors are pulling out of Binance in droves due to regulatory scrutiny.
• Elon Musk's Tesla fired some employees that happened to be unionizing at its Buffalo, New York facility. It said its decision was not prompted by the unionizing efforts.
• An Indian firm is taking work-life balance seriously, taking steps to ensure that employees leave the office after their shifts are over.

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends!

See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon