News @lemmy.world MicroWave @lemmy.world 1y ago

Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is to charge all users subscription fees

www.theguardian.com Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is to charge all users subscription fees

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.

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131 comments

Let me guess. Paying a subscription will not mean the end of ads.

I have been wondering for a while what he would have to do to finally crash twitter, I think this may be it.
- It won't be the end of bots either, it means less users overall, and conversations can be influenced with 100 bots rather than 100,000.
  
  Small timers won't pay that, but corporation, PACs, and the wealthy won't flinch at that kind of advertising budget.
  
  And now Musk gets paid for them, he'll never mention bots again.
- No, but it will be the end of his advertising revenue. Does that count?
I'm convinced he's ruining Twitter on purpose. He's still pissed he was forced into buying it.
- I like the theory that he's killing it to prevent us peons from organizing politically.
  
  I think you’re right but I don’t like it.
  
  It'll only work if you kill Facebook, c'mon Elon I don't think you have the balls
Haha, no one is gonna pay to use social media. I don't use Twitter but you would never get me to pay for absolute garbage brain rot. I'm already on lemmy for that and it's free.
- They want me to pay to be advertised at.
  
  Lol.
  
  to be advertised at & have nazi propaganda pushed on you.
  
  Cable TV...
- Don't some people already pay a subscription fee to Twitter?
  
  Yes, they are called idiots. It's another idiot tax, like gambling.
I think it’s one of his best ideas he’s ever had. I fully support this move and everyone else should as well.

What a wonderful, genius, innovative idea. Such brilliance. I think he should also keep ads on there as well.
If all 330 MAUs paid this, Twitter would ~~net~~ gross $3.6bn/month.

Crucially, they absolutely will not.
- 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.
  
  Just as nature intended.
Over on Mastodon: brace for impact!
- I'll stick with lemmy and kbin. Mastodon sucks.
  
  I have to say it didn't work for me, Calckey is much better but I may just not be a microblogging person as I prefer it over here.
  
  @sentient_loom #kbin for the win!
  
  @MicroWave @Emperor
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.

Idiot manchild proudly breaks something he knows nothing about, complains when it doesn't work as expected, news at eleven.
what is this clickbait bullshit??? I've seen multiple articles yet the wording is always 'floated the idea', but from the headline you could infer it's an official announcement.

fuck modern 'journalism'
It's an interesting thought, but he misses the #1 problem with online subscriptions- sign-up friction.

If you could just push a button and instantly be charged something, an awful lot of people would do it.
But when you go from $0 to $0.01, you will lose 99% of people, because most people can't be bothered to fill out a form, put in their credit card number, etc. Even if the amount of money involved is absurdly small, it's not the price, it's the friction.

Now if he integrates the app with Apple Pay or Google Wallet that will help, a little. But only a little.
- PayPal? Venmo? Just as ubiquitous and already part of his vertical integration.
  
  Assuming the cost is stupid low like a $1/year, low enough that almost nobody will think 'is this really worth it?'-- every required click or tap after hitting 'subscribe now' costs you 25-50% of the people who are still there.
  
  Make it 1 penny for a lifetime subscription. Just having to thumbprint for Google Pay will still cost you 25-50% of the people who hit subscribe. Make it a credit card form with card/exp/cvv/address/tel# and your purchase rate is down to maybe 1% of the people who hit subscribe.
The movie about Twitter's downfall will be absolutely fascinating.
- you spelled hilarious wrong
- InternetHistorian is hopefully on the case!
Well, if that doesn’t kill the site, I genuinely don’t know what will.
- It'll be the final nail. Traffic to the site will plummet because the vast majority of users will not want to pay and search engines like Google will no longer be able to index links to tweets, which of course will drive away the remaining advertisers. This is another disastrous move in a relentless string of bad moves by big brain musk. I have to admit that it really starts to look like he's doing this on purpose. Anyone with more than 2 brain cells should see this coming, even an idiot like musk.
  
  You're putting a lot of faith in the idea that the guy's brain isn't prokaryotic.
Oh boy, now I get to pay to give Elon my dumb thoughts. Sign me right the fuck up!
Looks like Elon Musk and John Riccitiello are trying to see who can run their company into the ground the quickest.
I think it's bigger news that that fuck is meeting with that other fuck Netanyahu. What the fuck business do those two fascist scum have with each other?
- Asking the real questions here.
Literally every single day we have idiots doing Musk’s PR work for free.

Downvote Musk spam. The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring his businesses stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
- It’s really working against him at this point. A lot more people that were looking to buy his products and services aren’t anymore.
It’s surprising that in all these years, nobody came up with this innovation to make Twitter more profitable but in just a short time period, Musk was able to figure it out. Goes to show why he’s the richest man in the world!
Yep, this is the final nail in the coffin. Most people will just stop. Good job boosting the Mastodon community, Moron Musk.
- Honestly, my hot take is that Mastodon is already better than X. Less toxic, more feature rich, more flexible, and built to be decentralized.
Would be cool if he did. One last flurry of articles about Twitter folding and then nothing. That would be great.
Oh hell yeah
- ngl I totally support this decision
Mastodon.World stock is increasing
- Sadly people want their corporate daddy and Bluesky will get most of them
When Elon realizes nobody wants to pay to listen to Elon, will he rollback the changes or start posting on Threads?
Well muskrat, you'd have to pay me to go back on Twitter so good luck with that.
I’ve managed to stay away from Twitter while it was free.

Pretty sure I’ll manage when it’s blocked behind the paper curtain.

In fact, they’d have to pay me to join. And with all the new paying subscriptions they’ll have, maybe they’ll have enough.
Long live mastodon. And bluesky too, when they finally open up and stop with the invite codes.
We all know he's too big of a pussy to actually do this. Stupid claim just to stay in the media
- Yeah, this claim falls under "I'll believe it when I see it." I've never used Twitter in my life, couldn't care less if it dies, but this would truly just be suiciding the site. Musk is a megalomaniac, I can't see him just straight giving up his platform.
  
  Elon is an idiot who fcked around and found out with all his Twitter shenanigans, I enjoy watching him make a fool out of himself infront of the whole world now.
Do it. Mastodon will be ready.

You gonna catch this one, Mozilla?
That's a great idea! Can't wait for the end of biweekly news about how Twitter is changing, since it will die immediately.
I hope that this really starts to be the downfall of Twitter/X.

But knowing how loyal Musk’s fanbase can be, I have a feeling many will be happy to pay.
I knew he was going to run Twitter into the ground, but I'm impressed at the speed and efficiency of it.
Who gives a shit
I never thought there was any point to using Twitter in the first place, but now really, why would anyone stay on there?

Legacy audiences for entertainers?
He needs revenue and this is a high risk, medium reward way to get it if he sees no end in sight on the advertising front.

And it's not like there's no way to make a subscription model work online, the NYT is doing it well. Lots of substacks and patreons are doing it.

But it's essentially launching a new company, with all the risk that entails. Subscription model flatly does not work with the network effects necessary for Twitter.

A Twitter where everyone has to pay, will not be worth paying for.
Fine by me. Accelerates the process of putting that dumpster fire out of its misery.
Right up front here, Musk is an absolute idiot, and wrong about almost everything. I am not defending him as a person, and I am not defending his specific plan here to have people pay monthly for their account.

However -- charging a small one-time fee for an actual account with the ability to post is a legitimate avenue to reduce bots. SomethingAwful forums have done this for a long time: an SA account is $10. Doing something like that (maybe not as high as $10), and grandfathering in existing accounts - that could work, because the main thrust would be using the fee as a bot-blocker.

Musk, however, just wants the money, and he's hiding that behind the idea of preventing bots with it.
- I’d pay for social media. But not from any of the current giants.
  
  These websites cost a lot to run. They make that money via ads and selling your info. If a new social media came along with a month subscription, no ads, and protected my data then I’d be fine with it. I don’t trust Twitter to do that though. I’d see them collecting the monthly fee, still giving me ads and still selling my data.
- It doesn’t work at scale.
  
  $1, $10, or even $100 is nothing to me or possibly you, but to someone else that is grocery money, and most of us won’t pay a dime just out of principle.
  
  I pay around $50/mo to my favorite sites for content. I wouldn’t give Twitter a dime. If this gets the few stragglers off Twitter and onto mastodon I am all for it.
- you dont charge your product to exist. its clear elon doesnt understand what he purchased
Do it. The titans must die before the internet can blossom once more.
Poor Elon, the man is probably losing sleep over twitter, or x, or whatever the fuck he wants to call this far-right nazi sympathizing website
LoL
I am a hundred percent certain you could seriously damage twitter by seeing of the sprinklers(assuming they ate still installed) because there's no way musk's penny pinching didn't lead him to sell or not set up the special non conductive fire removedant
- You're assuming the sprinklers are hooked to anything in the first place.
  
  But really, that would have been handled long before he bought Twitter
  
  That's why I was talking about him selling it off but he did migrate some servers so I doubt they have any fancy fire setup
DEITY$ help anyone I know that starts paying for Twitter. I was ridicule them mercilessly.
$11 for iPhones. L M A O

131 comments