Are you trying to make money off being sensational on X? Those days might be over.
One of the benefits of X Premium, the company’s subscription service, is the ability to actually make money off of your posts on the platform. While the revenue share figures are still unclear and it seems that most of the money is going to top accounts on the platform, it is still a good feature for those who want to make some money off their content.
Of course, some people on the platform have gamed this system and looked to make as much money as they possibly can by posting things that get the most engagement — accuracy of the content be damned. You can imagine the kinds of content these people posted in order to get engagement — a lot of it was not positive.
X owner Elon Musk seems to want to curb the incentive to post inaccurate content for the sake of engagement (and money). In a post on the platform over the weekend, Musk announced that the company would be making a change on which posts will be eligible for monetization for those who pay for X Premium.
According to Musk, posts that are flagged by Community Notes, the group of users who are tasked with flagging inaccurate content with context or straight-up fact checks, will no longer be eligible for monetization. Musk says that the purpose of the change is to “maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.”
On the face of it, this is actually a great move. The platform is under a ton of scrutiny lately for the amount of inaccurate information that is posted by its users — some of whom are surely doing so for the sake of engagement and the promise of making money off of that engagement. And, since X Premium users’ content is getting boosted by the algorithm, theirs is the content that most people are seeing.
The challenge here, of course, will be the trust that will be required by those who are part of Community Notes. That group will now have even more pressure on them since flagging a post won’t only have a trust impact, but a monetary one as well. I’m very curious to see how this plays out if there is a top creator on the platform trying to turn their audience against X and Musk due to Community Notes flagging their content.
The change comes a week after the company also rolled out two new tiers of service to X Premium: X Premium Basic and X Premium Plus. The Basic plan will not get rid of ads or include the blue verification checkmark, but subscribers will get a “small” boost to their replies. It is unclear exactly how much that is, however. The Basic plan costs $3 per month.
X Premium Plus, in comparison, costs a whopping $16 per month. That plan will give subscribers a larger boost to their replies, access to all of the company’s creator tools, and the removal of ads from the For You and Following feeds. Both plans are available now through the web, but they will likely show up soon through the Apple and Google app stores soon enough — for even more money, of course.
As X looks to curb misinformation on the platform, Threads is still working to catch the app — most recently adding support for GIFs and polls. Meta also just announced its own ad-free plans for Facebook and Instagram, but so far they are only available in Europe.
