X CEO Elon Musk has announced plans to launch two new tiers of premium subscription on the microblogging platform soon.
He announced that one tier will be lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads, while the other is more expensive, but has no ads.
On his X handle, he wrote,
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“Two new tiers of X Premium subscriptions launching soon. One is lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads, and the other is more expensive but has no ads”.
This announcement is coming after Musk earlier this week announced that X will begin to charge new unverified users in New Zealand and the Philippines $1 per year for subscription.
He disclosed that the move was necessitated to bolster the platform’s already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation, and bot activity while balancing accessibility with the small fee amount.
It is however unclear if the $1 annual subscription for unverified users is one of the two new subscription tiers that Musk is referencing in his recent announcement.
Since taking over the company in October 2022, Musk has continued to introduce a slew of changes. One of them is turning to premium subscriptions as a tactic to boost the revenue of the financially struggling platform.
Musk’s made significant change on the platform by introducing an $8 per month fee for the Blue Check subscription service which was initially free.
Users who wanted to keep their blue check mark or add one to their account began paying $8 a month, or $84 a year to do so. After Musk rebranded X from Twitter, the subscription model became known as premium.
X has however not disclosed how many paid subscribers it has, but independent research last month revealed that X premium hasn’t attracted a majority of X users. One analysis revealed that only 827,615 users currently subscribe to X premium.
Meanwhile, last month during a livestream, Musk divulged some new metrics from X saying it now has 550 million monthly users who generate 100 million to 200 million posts per day. However, Musk did not disclose how many of the company’s monthly users are authentic and bots.
It is also worth noting that other big tech companies have also experimented with a mix of ad-supported and subscription plans. While Alphabet’s YouTube has both paid and free, ad-supported ones, Netflix’s ad-supported plans are also chargeable, though at a lower price.
YouTube, which like X is populated by content from users, shares a part of its subscription revenue with creators.