Users May Soon Need To Pay To Be On X

Date: September 19, 2023

Elon Musk recently declared his plans to introduce a small payment amount to enable access to the X platform.

Twitter, now known as X, may soon ask you for a small amount of money to have your account on. Elon Musk has been contemplating the idea of creating a paywall to give general access to users using his social media platform X.

If you’ve been an age-old Twitter user or someone who came to the platform after it transformed into X, you might have encountered the huge bot army spamming the entire forum. Elon Musk is gravely concerned about the disruption caused by these bots and feels that adding a payment wall is the best foot forward to curb it.

To Fight The Bot Army

Elon Musk, in a recent live-streamed conversation with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that making payment mandatory has become a necessity to curb the action of bots. From automated spam bots to fake accounts, X is facing a surge in both numbers since 2022 Q1. Nearly 15% of the activity on X can be attributed to either good or bad bots. 

It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots. Because a bot costs a fraction of a penny — call it a tenth of a penny — but even if it has to pay…a few dollars or something, the effective cost of bots is very high.

 - Elon Musk

While good bots are good for the platform and help the account owners enhance user interactions, differentiating between the good and bad is nearly impossible. That’s why a payment mandate will remove the need to differentiate between them in the first place. Bots cost a fraction of a dollar, but each one of them requires a separate account which makes the usage of multiple spam bots, extremely loss-making for the spammers.

A Reasonable Pricing

Elon Musk did not declare an estimation of what the pricing will be but said that to the users for whom the platform matters, it will be completely profitable. He cleared that the intent of this payment amount is not to grow the revenue of X. As per the public earning report of Q1 2022, X had 229 Million mDAUs, abbreviated as monetizable Daily Active Users.

The pricing he may introduce will only act as a security measure that enhances their experience on the platform by essentially eliminating the majority of spam accounts. It will also give a much clearer picture in terms of mDAUs, which Twitter had overcounted due to the fake and spam bot accounts earlier.

X Premium, previously known as Twitter Blue, will continue to be the lead premium service of $8/month or $84 annual package with all the features to grow a business on X. It comes with exclusive features to edit posts, higher word length, half the ad load, better visibility, and rankings, among others. One independent analysis revealed that X has ~827,615 active X-Premium users.