Billionaire also says platform has 550 million monthly users generating up to 200m posts a day

Elon Musk has indicated that X, formerly known as Twitter, is preparing to charge all users for accessing the platform.

The X owner said erecting a paywall around the business would ward off the bots, or automated accounts, that have become a bugbear for Musk.

Speaking in a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, the Tesla CEO and world’s richest person suggested that X was going to charge its user base. Currently, Twitter only charges users for its subscription service X Premium, which offers perks such as a verified account checkmark and costs $11 a month in the US for iPhones and £11 in the UK.

  • @Gradually_AdjustingEnglish
    41•1 year ago

    If all 330 MAUs paid this, Twitter would net gross $3.6bn/month.

    Crucially, they absolutely will not.

    • Ertebolle
      32•1 year ago

      Not only that, it’ll create a vicious cycle where engagement drops to the point where the people who still post on Twitter (politicians, reporters, celebrities, etc) no longer bother with it, thus leaving much less content for paying users, with the end game being that Twitter is the place where shithead tech bros and neo-Nazis talk to each other and pretty much nobody else.

      • blargerer
        19•1 year ago

        Obviously it depends on the price, but maybe 10% of a free userbase will be willing to pay. The problem is, that userbase is coming to the platform mostly for rapid news and celebs. Will it still be the best place for rapid news with a 1/10th of the userbase? Will celebs want to stay on the platform when their reach is reduced to 1/10th? I think this likely just starts a death spiral that substantially shrinks the userbase.

      • BolexForSoup
        4•1 year ago

        I mean I’m deleting it. I only have it because articles/friends/etc. have a link with something relevant. I only look at it out of convenience, not because it’s the only source. I am more than happy to take the extra step to Google whatever people were trying to show me moving forward. Though I imagine this will also have a chilling effect on the amount of Twitter links I am sent any given month.

      • @Gradually_AdjustingEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Well, for the sake of context let’s note that we are two people talking about it on Lemmy, for free, with no corporations involved.

        Whatever is next for Musk, I think if centralised social media needs to turn a profit then it’s probably not going to remain a central fixture of online society forever.