X owner Elon Musk revealed plans for 2 recent paid subscription plans for users – whilst his embattled social media site reportedly contends with a big decline in web traffic.
Musk, who has led a controversial overhaul at the corporate formerly generally known as Twitter since buying it for $44 billion last fall, said Friday that there are “two recent tiers of X Premium subscriptions launching soon.”
“One is lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads, and the opposite is costlier, but has no ads,” Musk wrote on X.
Musk didn’t provide any additional specifics in regards to the plans or their expected prices. The brand new money grab comes a day after X said it has begun charging recent users $1 per 12 months in Recent Zealand and The Philippines to unlock basic features corresponding to posting and interacting with other users.
Musk described the annual fee because the “only strategy to fight bots without blocking real users.” It’s unclear if the $1-per-year plan is one in every of the 2 that Musk mentioned.
Under the billionaire’s leadership, X has loosened content moderation standards, implemented a head-scratching rebrand that included ditching Twitter’s iconic “blue bird” logo and removed headlines and text from news article posts.
It has also shifted toward a subscription model as corporate advertisers fled the platform in droves in response to Musk’s changes.
At present, X has one subscription tier. Users will pay $8 monthly in exchange for premium features corresponding to “blue checkmark” account verification, the flexibility to edit their posts and the flexibility to post longer tweets and videos.
Users also look like skeptical of Musk’s approach. Global web traffic to Twitter.com plunged 14% in September in comparison with the identical month one 12 months ago, in accordance with a report released this week by data analytics firm SimilarWeb. Moreover, traffic to X’s promoting platform, ads.twitter.com, was down 16.5%.
By comparison, traffic to the highest 100 social media networks and communities fell 3.7% year-over-over in September. TikTok, one in every of X’s foremost competitors, saw a 22.8% surge in global web traffic.
Meanwhile, traffic to Musk’s personal account page has skyrocketed by 96% year-over-year. The billionaire uses the page to interact with users, share necessary updates for his various corporations and weigh in on topics starting from geopolitics to his favorite memes.
The Post has reached out to X for further comment.
Despite signs of falling traffic, Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino have claimed in recent months that usage is at record levels.
“Our usage is at an all-time high and we’ll proceed to please our entire community with recent experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking — creating a worldwide marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino said in a memo to staffers in July.
