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 Following a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for use of System X. He suggested such a change would be necessary to address the problem of bots on the platform. .
"It's the only way we can think of to combat the vast army of bots," Musk explained. “Because a bot costs a fraction of a cent but even if you have to pay… a few dollars or something, the effective cost of bots is very high,” he said. Additionally, every time a bot creator wanted to create another bot, he would need another new payment method.
Musk did not say how much the new subscription payment would cost, but described it as a "small amount of money."
During the conversation, Musk also shared new metrics for X, noting that the site now has 550 million monthly users, who generate between 100 and 200 million posts each day. However, it was unclear whether Musk is counting automated accounts (i.e. good bots like news bots or bad bots like spammers) among those numbers.
This figure also did not allow for a direct comparison to Twitter's pre-Musk user base, which was calculated using a specific metric Twitter had invented called "average monetizable daily active user" or mDAU. This older metric indicated Twitter users that could be monetized by viewing your ads. During its last public results for the first quarter of 2022, Twitter had 229 million mDAU.
Musk did not expand on his plan to charge for 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 sign up for its subscription product. X Premium (formerly Twitter Azul). This $8 per month or $84 per year subscription service offers a variety of features such as the ability to edit posts, half the load of ads, priority rankings in searches and conversations, the ability to write longer posts among others.
X does not reveal how many subscribers it has, but independent research indicates that X Premium has not attracted the majority of X users. An analysis determines that only 827.615 users They currently subscribe to X Premium, for example.
The idea of charging everyone for X is not a new idea for Musk. Platformer reported last year that Musk was weighing the idea of putting all of Twitter behind a paywall, in fact.
The broader conversation between Musk and Netanyahu today focused on artificial intelligence technology and its regulation, although the topic of hate speech towards hate and conflict. Of course, in Musk's latest dispute he threatened to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League, which accused both Musk and X of being anti-Semitic.
