Image credits: TechCrunch
X owner Elon Musk today floated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter might no longer be a free site. In a live broadcast conversation On Monday, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for using System X. He suggested such a change would be necessary to solve the problem of robots on the platform.
“IIt is THE only path I can think of has fight vast armies of robots,” Musk explained. “Because A robot costs A fraction of A penny – call him A tenth of A penny – bUtah even if he has has pay…A little dollars Or something, the effective cost of the robots East very high,” he said. Additionally, every time a bot creator wanted to create another bot, they needed another new payment method.
Musk did not say how much the new subscription would cost, but described it as a “small amount of money.”
During the conversation, Musk also shared new stats for X, noting that the site now has 550 million monthly users, who generate 100 to 200 million posts every day. However, it was unclear whether Musk counted automated accounts among these numbers, meaning either good bots like News Feeds or bad bots like spammers.
This figure also did not allow for a direct comparison with Twitter’s pre-Musk user base, which was calculated using a specific metric invented by Twitter called “monetizable average daily active user” or mDAU. This old metric indicated which Twitter users could be monetized by viewing its ads. During its latest public results for the first quarter of 2022, Twitter had 229 million mDAU.
Musk did not specify his plans to charge X or when such a change would occur. But since Musk took over the platform last year, the company has been pushing its users to subscribe to its paid subscription product, XPremium (formerly Twitter Bleu). This $8 per month or $84 per year subscription service offers a variety of features such as the ability to edit posts, half the advertising load, priority rankings in search and conversations, the ability to write longer articles, and much more.
X does not disclose the number of paid subscribers, but independent research indicates that X Premium has not attracted a majority of X users. One analysis determined that only 827,615 users currently subscribe to
The idea of charging everyone X is not a new idea for Musk. Last year, Platformer reported that Musk was mulling the idea of putting all of Twitter behind a paywall, in effect.
The broader conversation between Musk and Netanyahu today focused on AI technology and its regulation, although the topic of hate speech about X came up. Here, Musk claimed he was “against anti-Semitism” and “anything that promotes hatred and conflict.” Of course, Musk’s latest row saw him threaten to file a defamation suit against the Anti-Defamation League, which accused Musk and X of being anti-Semitic.
