In the first few years, twitter had a hard cap on the number of followers (I think it was like 10,000), and people with large audiences were forced to manage their followers.

I wondered if they could have started charging 'brands' and celebrities to break that barrier, but keep it free flowing for the hoipoloi like us.

Initially, it made sense, but nowadays I see loads of people that aren't really all that notable with verified status, namely people that work for the press in some way, or have had something notable happen to them. I know two people with verified status on Twitter. One is a writer for a trashy celebrity mag, and one is basically a Twitter loudmouth that was in the news recently. In my opinion, these people don't really need verification, as they're using Twitter as a medium to have conversations with everyone, whereas some notable people might want to manage who they speak to.

You could always have multiple paid levels. $10 a year if you're a business and you want to use Twitter as a customer service portal. $100 a year for the badge if you have over 10,000 followers. $1,000 a year if you want to filter who can tweet you.

I think Google's contributor program strikes an equitable balance. Twitter could probably take the same approach.