With these functions, Elon Musk wants to make the new payment model attractive to you

Elon is serious: Some functions are now only available for money in his subscription model. (Photo by Julian Christ on Unsplash)

Twitter has been going through a bit of a bumpy ride over the last few months. After a legal tug of war, Elon Musk took over the company exactly one year ago in 2022 and initially laid off a large part of the workforce.

Since then, the short message service has lost half of its market value because many advertising customers found the new boss’s insecurities and behavior too great.

In order to compensate for the high losses caused by advertising customers, Musk now wants to establish an alternative source of money. His latest stroke of genius:

A basic subscription and Premium+, in addition to the previous Premium subscription.

Which Features hidden X now behind the paywall?

Basis-Abo: Here you currently pay 3 dollars a month, which is the equivalent of around 2.86 euros. An overview of the most important functions:

• Edit posts
• Longer posts are possible
• Posts can be undone
• Upload longer videos
• »Best articles« function
• Reading mode
• Play videos in the background
• Download videos
• Minor boost for answers

In the basic model you don’t get a verification hook or an ad-free environment. You have to pay significantly more for the premium models.

Premium+-Abo: This model costs you either 16 euros per month or – 12 percent cheaper – 168 euros per year. It adds some features to the premium model.

These two differences exist in contrast to the existing standard Premium:

• No advertising in To you and I follow
• Biggest boost for answers

In the normal standard premium you only have half as much advertising and a medium-sized boost. A boost increases your range. This means more people will see your post.

Standard still costs you 8 euros per month or 84 euros per year. The remaining features of the Premium+ are the same as the standard Premium model. For example, content creators get some bonuses here:

• Money for posts (percentage of advertising revenue)
• Creator subscriptions (monthly share of X income from your followers)

There are also some additional features. This makes it possible, for example, to better decipher your reach and derive information about your users (analytics):

• X Pro (web browser only)
• Media Studio (web browser only)
• Analytics (nur Web-Browser)

X also sells you its security features behind the premium paywall, such as the famous hook:

• Blue check mark (Premium only)
• Identity verification (also included in the basic model)
• Encrypted direct messages (also included in the basic model)
• SMS two-factor authentication (Premium only)

In all three models you can customize your X “experience” with functions such as hiding likes, checkmarks or subscriptions. But these are only cosmetic changes.

Current controversy surrounding X

By laying off many employees, especially those who were previously responsible for security and checking posts, there is currently a lot of unfiltered hate and disinformation on X that the EU wants to curb.

Under Musk, X withdrew from the EU pact against disinformation in the middle of the year. There was then an exchange of blows with some politicians, as a result of which Musk threatened to completely shut down X in Europe.

Musk’s handling of false or hateful news recently became too much for the German Anti-Discrimination Agency (ADS), which then vacated its post and left Twitter in a highly publicized manner:

What do you think of the new X/Twitter subscription model? Will you pay for the basic features or even use the premium model? Do you think the price of 168 euros per year for 2 new functions in addition to the standard Premium is reasonable? Can Musk use this to save X financially? How many users do you think will be willing to pay that price? Feel free to write your opinion in the comments.