From BZ/dpa
Elon Musk continues to experiment – now with far-reaching restrictions for free users of his online platform X (formerly Twitter).
Initially in New Zealand and the Philippines, new users of the service can only publish posts and quote or redistribute posts from others for a fee of one US dollar per year. You can only use X passively for free: read posts, watch videos, follow other users.
The program is an attempt to protect the platform against automated bot accounts and spreaders of spam messages, X announced on Wednesday night. The results will be announced soon. Observers were skeptical: IT security expert Marcus Hutchins noted that he could not think of any bot activity that could be stopped with the fee of one dollar per year. The step is more likely to cost the platform money. “Spammers will use stolen credit cards – and the cost of chargebacks will be higher than subscription revenue,” Hutchins wrote at rival service Threads.
Slump in advertising revenue
Tech billionaire Musk bought Twitter almost a year ago for around $44 billion. Since then, the platform has suffered from a slump in advertising revenue because companies fear a negative environment for their brands. Musk confirmed several times that the service, renamed X, only generates about half as much money from advertising as Twitter did before the purchase. He is trying to rely more on subscription fees. He has already limited how many posts users can see per day without paying a fee of around 9.50 euros per month.
The tech billionaire had already said a few weeks ago that X was moving in the direction of charging a small fee for use. This is the only way to take action against bots and spam. After that, nothing came initially, so it remained unclear whether the announcement would be implemented.
Leaving the services free and financing them with advertising was the successful model with which Facebook, for example, gained several billion users. Twitter has always been smaller.
According to media reports, the Facebook group Meta is now also considering launching a paid version without advertising in Europe. However, the reason for this should not be the pursuit of more money, but rather an attempt to eliminate controversies surrounding compliance with European data protection rules.