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

With an X placed on the post significant financial loss for 2024the company is exploring new ways to increase its revenue stream, which could include charging everyone to create a new account on the app.

According to WealthX is considering charging all new users $8 to sign up to the platform.

According to Wealth:

“Under the plan, which could be implemented as early as February, new users would pay $8 to sign up for X and also get one free month of X Premium, a $7/month subscription offer that gives users a “verified” checkmark badge.

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

The push would actually be an extension of the experiment that is X launched in selected regions in 2023where it charged all new signups $1 to create a profile on the app. At the time, X said it was a means of solving the bot problem in the app, not making money, with the sole focus on making profile creation prohibitive for bots.

This revised version, however, should actually increase revenue, by earning direct revenue from initial sign-ups, while also increasing X Premium downloads, attracting new users with its array of additional features.

If, indeed, they are lured as such.

X Premium wasn’t the hit Elon had hoped for when he first took over the app and laid out his radical plan to reduce the platform’s reliance on advertising dollars and therefore advertisers’ demands for moderation.

Elon originally predicted that subscription revenue would grow to more than 50% of X’s total revenue, with more than 69 million users who will sign up for X Premium by 2025.

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

X further hoped that its AI chatbot “Grok” would also entice more people to pay for its Premium package. But that didn’t pan out either, and with Meta offering its own AI chatbot for free within its apps, X’s own offering doesn’t seem to hold much value.

Which is likely and why X made Grok available for free to all users last monthessentially admitting that it doesn’t encourage increased use of X Premium (although you still have to pay to get access to Grok’s full feature set).

So, without any major moves to drive more interest in its paid subscription offering, X is apparently now exploring other ways to get people to try its Premium tools while also bringing in additional revenue.

This would also act as a disincentive for bot marketers, but the impacts on growth could be significant, as fewer users decide to try the app in the first place.

And with X’s growth already stalling (X was sitting at 250 million daily actives from November 2022), and even declining in some regionsthat seems like a risky proposition.

Still, if X is truly convinced that X Premium is a valuable and marketable proposition, then getting more people to try it may be the way, not so much to grow users, but at least to increase revenue.

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

Before Christmas, X offered big discounts on X Premiumwhich led to a significant increase in downloads.

More people using its add-ons could help the offering gain momentum. Although at the same time, the initial core of the offer, getting your own tick, is now almost meaningless, as the blue tick no longer represents notoriety or importance.

Maybe the other elements will be enough to attract more users if they are forced to try them, and maybe X will eventually push for everyone to pay to use the app.

A lot of people would just tune out, but maybe X only needs a fraction of his audience to stick around for it to be a positive move.

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