- Elon Musk has commented all X users will face a monthly fee in the future
- He claims it’s to tackle bots signing up, but the move would make X less reliant on advertising
- Rival Bluesky saw record sign-ups 24 hours after the comments
Elon Musk is up to his old tricks. The latest headlines are filled with talk of Elon Musk potentially charging all users for access to X, formerly known as Twitter, which prompted record sign-up rates to rivals like Bluesky.
The controversial move makes business sense, given Big Tech’s reliance on advertising to make money, which proved to be perilous last year as the economy tanked. But is it something users are actually interested in paying for? Let’s get into it.
In an AI talk with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, Musk breezily said his social media platform X would start charging all its users for site access in the future. “We’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system,” Musk told Netanyahu, claiming it was the “only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.”
There wasn’t further elaboration on what kind of timescale X users might face or exactly how much the price would be other than an off-hand comment about “a few dollars a month or something”.
Bluesky, the X rival started by former Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, saw a record amount of sign-ups after Musk’s comments. The decentralized social media platform confirmed it had seen a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19.
According to Musk, who bought Twitter in October last year and promptly gutted the company and changed its name to X, the platform has 550 million monthly active users who share 100–200 million posts a day.
Assuming every user stays (which is extremely unlikely, but humor us here), that’s a considerable chunk of change for X — and goes some way in cutting X’s reliance on advertising to survive. Musk has previously confirmed X’s ad sales have plummeted by 50% since he took over.
X has already introduced the X Blue program, which charges $8 a month for special perks like editing posts, a longer character length and priority in the algorithm. Soon after, Meta jumped on the bandwagon and released its own version, Meta Verified, charging $14.99 a month on the app for Facebook and Instagram.
It’s not out of the question for Big Tech to want to move away from an advertising model, but the real question is whether users who have enjoyed the platforms for free over the years would stick around.
If Bluesky’s sign-up rate is to be believed, then chances are the average user really isn’t interested in paying — especially during a cost of living crisis. That leaves Musk in a bit of a bind — and maybe an echo chamber.
