Coinspeaker
Elon Musk: X Moving toward Charging Small Fee for Using Platform
On Monday, tech billionaire Elon Musk had a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The discussion was mostly about the theoretical risks of artificial intelligence technology and AI regulation. During the talks, Elon Musk also shared his plans for the upcoming future and revealed that the X platform (formerly Twitter) is “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of its services. As Elon Musk has explained, the move to take a fee will allow X to reduce the number of bots.
Musk stated:
“The single most important reason we’re moving to have a small monthly payment for use of the X system is It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots. Because a bot costs a fraction of a penny – call it a tenth of a penny – but even if it has to pay…a few dollars or something, the effective cost of bots is very high.”
The fee to be charged by X has not been revealed. Currently, the X platform has 550 million monthly users who generate 100 to 200 million posts every day. It is not clear if this figure includes automated accounts. Besides, it does not allow for a direct comparison with Twitter’s user base pre-Musk, which was calculated using a specific metric called the “average monetizable daily active user”, or mDAU. This older metric indicated the number of the platform’s users who could be monetized by viewing its ads. During its last public earnings of Q1 2022, Twitter had 229 million mDAUs.
The online meeting of Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu comes at a time when Musk is facing accusations of tolerating antisemitic messages on his social media platform. During the conversation, Benjamin Netanyahu noted that Musk has to “find a balance” when rolling back antisemitism and other forms of hatred on his social media platform.
Musk’s Experiments with Subscription
Since acquiring Twitter in October 2022, Musk has made a few attempts to introduce subscription fees on the social media platform.
Earlier, X introduced X Premium (formerly known as Twitter Blue) – a subscription service that allows you access to premium features and benefits on the app. It starts at $8 a month and gives members a blue checkmark previously reserved for those who met certain credibility requirements. Approximately 619,858 Twitter users were subscribed to Twitter Blue as of the end of April, which made around $5 million per month or $60 million per year.
Currently, X Premium offers a range of features to improve users’ experience, including the ability to edit posts and create longer tweets, reduce the number of ads by 50%, custom navigation to choose what appears in your navigation bar, hide your checkmark, share more content due to a longer video upload, and more.
Elon Musk: X Moving toward Charging Small Fee for Using Platform
