Will All Users Have To Pay For Platform Access? Is Elon Musk’s Plan To Monetize X a Good Idea?

Elon Musk’s famous microblogging service X, previously known as Twitter, will now levy a modest fee from each user. With this, the sources also imply that the site won’t be totally free to use in the next months and would instead turn into a paid platform. This comes after the owner of X said during a live-streamed meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the social network would no longer be a free site in an effort to solve the problem of bots on the platform.

Why Does Elon Musk Plan to Charge for X?
In the late hours of Monday, Musk said, “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.” Because a bot just costs a fraction of a cent, like a tenth, even if it has to pay a few dollars or whatever, the billionaire said, “Bots have a high effective cost.

All X users being charged is not a novel idea; Musk first broached the subject last year. Currently, the firm charges its X Premium subscribers $8 a month for the ability to modify postings, see fewer advertisements, write longer messages, and rank better in searches and discussions.

The decision is still quite dubious, however, since users have already criticized the website for launching the Twitter Blue membership. And because the platform won’t be free after this change, it’s feasible that users may go to other platforms. As of the time the article was being written, neither the price nor the release date of the new paid edition were known.

During the meeting, Musk said that X now has 550 million monthly users and generates 100–200 million posts every day. Musk withheld the number of active paying subscribers from the public. In its most recent quarterly financial report for Q1 2022, Twitter said that it has 229 million mDAUs (monetizable daily active users).