Elon Musk announced two new subscription tiers for people who want the premium experience. This, as some users in some countries may have to pay a very small fee to access the platform for more. Cheddar News' senior reporter Michelle Castillo explains.

<div class="block">Elon Musk announced two new subscription tiers for people who want the premium experience. This, as some users in some countries may have to pay a very small fee to access the platform for more. Cheddar News&#39; senior reporter Michelle Castillo explains.</div>

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The New Subscription Plan for X

Will you pay to use X CEO Elon Musk announced two new subscription tiers today for people who want the premium experience. This is on top of news that some users in certain countries may have to pay a very small fee to access the platform for more. We're bringing in shutter new senior reporter Michelle Castillo. So Michelle walk us through the new Twitter subscription plans. Well, on top of X premium, which costs about $8 a month, used to be called Twitter Blue. Musk has announced plans for two new subscription plans. So the first one will have a lower cost with premium features, but you're going to still see the same amount of ads as a non paying user. Um The second one will be a little bit more expensive but you're going to get rid of all the ads. No other details were released at this time. Uh He just put it out in a tweet earlier today. It's clear X has a revenue problem. Musk said earlier this year that X is cash flow negative because of an almost 50% drop in advertising, which is the company's main source of income. He also added that X has quote heavy debt in August. A third party researcher estimated that 827,000 users have signed up for X premium must claim in July that X has 540 million users globally. And the company also announced it will begin charging users in New Zealand and the Philippines a dollar a year to use the platform Michelle dollar doesn't seem like that much money. But why do this? And what is it of a sign of things to come? Well, when X was known as Twitter, it prided itself on being a place where anyone could rapidly share their thoughts. And Musk wanted it to be a free exchange of ideas, but by adding the $1 fee, it seems it won't be free for everyone. So the company announced earlier this week, it was trying out a new system called not a bot by charging accounts $1 a year in New Zealand and the Philippines. It can verify that those accounts are actually tied to people. This fee will only be charged to new accounts trying to access X on the web. So existing users you're not gonna have to pay X said quote. This new test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam manipulation of our platform and bot activity. This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount so the system could actually combat bots and make sense and it doesn't seem like a direct revenue play because it's such a small amount of money. But it's also known that Musk has had plans to try make X A payments platform. He's filed several governmental filings plus must by getting financial information from users could make it easier for X to make uh for X to allow users to fund an online payment account. So maybe he's making steps towards that. I haven't been spending as much time on X. I've heard a few friends who said the same thing, but you're the expert here is X still as popular as it was. Well, in the US X users have declined slightly according to insider intelligence declines are happening this year and last year and they're still projected in 2024 and 2025 as well. About 55.8 million Americans use X at least once a month or about a quarter of social media users in this country. So that being said, the rest of the social media user base is growing. So take reddit, for example, expected to grow 10.9% this year per insider intelligence, Tik Tok, 6.7 percent growth and linked in 6.3% growth. We know it's getting popular with Gen Z because it doesn't have that partisan feel that a lot of other platforms have. But it's only Facebook and X. That's expected to have a decline in users. Facebook's user base is projected to decline 0.2% and X Well, it's expected to lose 4.6% of its US users this year. So in comparison, big loser of the year. Yeah, Michelle Casilio. Thank you so much.