In a cryptic and oh-so-Musk-style tweet, he teased that X will be rolling out two new membership levels for the X Premium Service – formerly the catchy Twitter Blue. According to his tweet, the first option is cheaper and has all the fun features, but sadly, it still gives you a noisy ad parade. The second one, a pricier ticket, allows you to bask in an ad-free paradise. He’s kept us all hanging and has yet to spill the beans on the pricing. Hallelujah for suspense, right? Currently, for a mere $8 per month, you can enjoy your X Premium service.
Fresh off the press this month, Bloomberg mentioned X is toying with a three-tier subscription beast: Basic, Standard, and Plus. Sounds fancy. In this system, Basic subscribers get the usual ad load. Standard grants you a 50% ad discount, while Plus offers a flawless, ad-free experience. As if the circus wasn’t vibrant enough, X also provides a tantalizingly cheap $1-a-year subscription model for your tweeting and retweeting pleasure, exclusively for its non-X Premium subscribers. Currently on trial in the archipelagos of New Zealand and the Philippines, it’s designed to scare off those annoying bots. (Psych! Bots don’t use credit cards, right?)
Since Musk’s ascension to X’s throne, the platform’s revenue hasn’t hit the stratosphere. According to the matriarch of X, CEO Linda Yaccarino, the platform’s profitability (ignoring its cybernetic debt) is in the green, and 90% of its previous advertisers are back in the game. All said and done – with the strenuous pace of change – it still needs to be raking in the dough it used to.
Contrary to its counterparts in the social network space, X is playing a divergent tune by confidently striding into a tiered subscription routine. As if things weren’t already interesting enough, they are now boldly going where few have ventured. But what can we say? It’s all in a day’s work at X!
So let’s hang tight and watch this glorious circus unfold because X (and Musk) will keep throwing us some surprising banana peels.
