It's not just a status symbol, it also boosts your posts. If I had to guess, the people likely to pay for this are power users in wealthy countries, aka the hig

It's not just a status symbol, it also boosts your posts. If I had to guess, the people likely to pay for this are power users in wealthy countries, aka the highest value users an ad platform has. Seems unlikely that they're monetized at less than $8 a month.