Will X Really Charge Every User? Its Revenue Growth May Hold the Answer
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Growing Fast. Check out the full article for more insights.
Elon Musk almost confirmed that soon, X will require a paid subscription in order to post on the platform. This is something he talked about last year and even tried in (New Zealand).
The reasoning behind this move is to stop bots, but given X's active user base and X's money troubles, there could be more to this.
The subscription is expected to cost just $1/mo. but even at that, if only 10% of its 120M active users subscribe, it'll already more than double its current monthly revenue from its mobile apps.
According to our estimates, X ended April with $8M of net revenue from the App Store and Google Play - but mostly from the App Store. That's a tad lower than March's haul. Not by enough to notice, but as the saying goes, not moving forward is moving back, and that's a problem for the company after losing many advertisers.
Since the beginning of 2023, 16 months ago, X's mobile revenue generally rose month over month with only 5 months of drops scattered around.
Some may look at the trend and consider X's revenue to have peaked, and that could explain why it'd want another way to earn revenue from its active users.
As a user, I think stopping bots should be a top priority for the platform, but gating posting will really hurt its usage and send people looking for an alternative. And there are alternatives now.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
