Oct 20 (Portal) – Elon Musk said on Friday that social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, will soon introduce two new tiers of premium subscriptions.
“One is more cost-effective with all the features but no reduction in advertising, and the other is more expensive but has no advertising,” Musk said in a post on X.
Musk, who took over the platform in October 2022, is trying to boost revenue by charging users and wooing back advertisers who stopped buying ads after Musk laid off most employees and dismantled content moderation teams.
Musk has acknowledged that the platform has suffered a loss in sales and accused activists of putting pressure on advertisers.
While he didn’t provide any further details about the subscription plans, a test case from X earlier this week suggested several restrictions for users who don’t want to pay for the service.
As a test case for access to the platform, X began charging $1 to new users in New Zealand and the Philippines.
In this image from July 24, 2023 is the logo of the social media platform
New users who have unsubscribed will only be able to perform “read-only” actions, such as: reading posts, watching videos and following accounts, the company said on its website website.
The platform’s “Not A Bot” subscription method aims to reduce spam, platform manipulation and bot activity.
Other major tech companies have also experimented with a mix of ad-supported and subscription plans. While Alphabet’s (gogetL.O) YouTube has both paid and free ad-supported plans, Netflix’s (NFLX.O) ad-supported plans are also paid, albeit at a lower price.
YouTube, which, like X, is populated with user-created content, shares a portion of its subscription revenue with creators. X, which also shares some of its advertising revenue with content creators, did not disclose whether content creators will be paid in ad-free subscription models.
To generate revenue, Musk began charging $8 per month for the Blue Check subscription service and offered discounts to companies for advertising on the platform.
However, as the company faced criticism for lax content moderation, advertisers didn’t want their ads appearing next to inappropriate content.
Last week, the European Commission opened an investigation into X to see whether the company was complying with new technical rules on illegal and harmful content after disinformation was spread on its platform following the Hamas attack on Israel.
Reporting by Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru and Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm; Editing by Savio D’Souza, Jason Neely and Susan Fenton
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