Elon Musk’s X, previously known as Twitter, is now charging a annual fee to new users in New Zealand and the Philippines.
Fortune’s Kylie Robinson first reported the new policy on Tuesday. X confirmed it shortly after when it said that it was testing its new “Not A Bot” program in those two countries. There was no indication that the trial would eventually be extended to other countries by the company
According to the platform, X former twitter the trial will require “new, unverified accounts” to pay a annual subscription fee” by users to be able to post and interact with other posts.” Existing users will not be affected.
Instead of driving profits, the new policy aims to minimize the influence of bots.
The Support Team (@Support) October 17, 2023
A change to the platform’s payment plan has long been considered by Musk and his company.
Musk told Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, during a livestream last month that X may implement a paywall.
“We are actually going to come up with a lower-tier pricing. It should only be a small sum of money, the billionaire explained. “This is actually the only defense against bot armies.”
Bloomberg reported on October 5 that X planned to trial three premium service tiers based on the number of ads shown to users.
A number of changes have been made to the platform since Musk acquired it in October 2022.
After replacing Twitter’s legacy verification program – the blue ticks that verified famous personalities’ authenticity – with Twitter Blue, Musk renamed the platform from Twitter to X in July.
Amid declining advertising revenues, Musk has been focused on putting X on a path to profitability. Musk said in a July post that the company was facing financial challenges.
“We’re still negative cash flow, due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt loads,” Musk wrote. “Need to hit positive cash flow before we can do anything else.”
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