X Considers Charging All New Users to Sign-up to the App

UPDATE: X owner Elon Musk says that X is not planning to charge all users.

With X set to post a significant financial loss for 2024, the company is exploring new ways to boost its revenue intake, which could include charging everybody to create a new account in the app.

According to Fortune, X is considering charging all new users $8 to sign up to the platform.

As per Fortune:

“Under the plan, which could be implemented as soon as February, new users would pay $8 to sign-up for X, and would also receive one free month of X Premium, a $7 per month subscription offering which gives users a “verified” checkmark badge.”

Fortune additionally reports that X owner Elon Musk has told staff that forcing more users to pay for the platform is “the only way” that X will become profitable.

The push would effectively be an extension of the experiment that X ran in selected regions in 2023, where it charged all new sign-ups $1 to create a profile in the app. At the time, X said that this was a means to tackle bots in the app, not make money, with the sole focus being to make the creation of bot profiles more cost-prohibitive.

This revised version, however, would actually be intended to drive revenue, by both gaining direct income from initial sign-ups, while also increasing X Premium take-up, by enticing new users with its array of add-on features.

If they are, indeed, enticed by such.

X Premium hasn’t been the hit that Elon had hoped when he first took over the app, and outlined his radical plan to reduce the platform’s reliance on ad dollars, and thus, advertiser demands around moderation.

Elon had initially forecast that subscription revenue would rise to more than 50% of X’s overall cash intake, with more than 69 million users to have signed-up to X Premium by 2025.

Thus far, however, fewer than 2 million users have signed up to the program, and it remains a marginal revenue source, with X still generating some 90% of its income from ads.

X had further hoped that its AI chatbot “Grok” would also lure more people to pay for its Premium package. But that also hasn’t played out, and with Meta offering its own AI chatbot for free within its apps, there doesn’t seem to be a heap of value in X’s own offering.

Which is likely why X made Grok available for free to all users last month, essentially conceding that it isn’t driving increased take-up of X Premium (though you still need to pay to get access to Grok’s full feature set).

So without any major drawcards to spark more interest in its paid subscription offerings, X is apparently now exploring other avenues, which would force people to try out its Premium tools, while also bringing in additional revenue.

It would also work as a disincentive for bot peddlers, but the growth impacts could be significant, as fewer users opt-in to even trying out the app.

And with X’s growth already flat lining (X has been sitting on 250 million daily actives since November 2022), and even declining in some regions, that seems like a risky proposition.

Still, if X is truly convinced that X Premium is a valuable, and marketable proposition, then maybe pushing more people to try it out will be a path, not so much to user growth, but at least to revenue expansion.

And there are signs that X Premium does have some allure, at least in some contexts.

In the lead up to Christmas, X offered big discounts on X Premium, which led to a significant increase in take-up.

More people using its add-on elements could help the offering gain momentum. Though at the same time, the initial core pitch of the offering, in getting your own checkmark, is now virtually meaningless, as the blue tick no longer represents notoriety or importance.  

Maybe the other elements will be enough to win over more users if they’re forced to try them out, and maybe X will eventually look to make everyone pay to use the app.

A lot of people would simply switch off, but maybe, X would only need a fraction of its audience to stick around to make it a cash-positive move.  

Either way, X is still working out what to do to make money, as advertisers remain wary of the app.