October 1, 2023

Elon Musk is planning to make X (previously often called Twitter) a paid-for platform for all customers.

In a bid to sort out the problem of rampant bot exercise, he unveiled proposals to roll out small month-to-month subscriptions throughout a dwell dialog with Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Musk didn’t specify how a lot the plans would value or what options could be included on the lowest tier.

Nevertheless, he did declare that X now has 550 million month-to-month customers that usually submit 100 million to 200 million posts a day – though it’s not but recognized what quantity of this information is bots versus genuine customers.

This marks a 140% enhance on the “common monetizable each day energetic utilization” of 229 million reported by Twitter in Could 2022, earlier than Musk’s takeover.

Why we care. Transitioning X to a paid platform could possibly be excellent news for advertisers as a result of it’d imply they get a better-quality viewers and fewer issues with bots. That might result in extra conversions and the next ROI. However there’s a draw back: some customers may ditch X totally free options like Threads, which might shrink the platform’s consumer base and, in flip, scale back the attain of X advertisers.


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What has X mentioned? Musk advised Prime Minister, Netanyahu:

  • “The only most essential cause that we’re transferring to having a small month-to-month fee to be used of the X system is that it’s the one manner I can consider to fight huge armies of bots.”
  • “As a result of a bot prices a fraction of a penny, or a tenth of a penny, but when any person even has to pay just a few {dollars} or one thing, some minor quantity, the efficient value of bots may be very excessive, and then you definately additionally must get a brand new fee methodology each time you might have a brand new bot.”
  • “We’re really going to return out with decrease tier pricing. We wish it to be only a small sum of money [and] for my part, that is really the one protection in opposition to huge armies of bots.”

Deep dive. Learn the X blog for extra details about the platform’s newest updates.


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Concerning the creator

Nicola Agius

Nicola Agius is Paid Media Editor of Search Engine Land after becoming a member of in 2023. She covers paid search, paid social, retail media and extra. Previous to this, she was web optimization Director at Jungle Creations (2020-2023), overseeing the corporate’s editorial technique for a number of web sites. She has over 15 years of expertise in journalism and has beforehand labored at OK! Journal (2010-2014), Mail On-line (2014-2015), Mirror (2015-2017), Digital Spy (2017-2018) and The Solar (2018-2020). She additionally beforehand teamed up with web optimization company Blue Array to co-author Amazon bestselling e book ‘Mastering In-Home web optimization’.