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Despite X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue) failing to catch on the way that Elon Musk had hoped, the platform’s keen to find new ways to boost its revenue intake, as it looks to integrate more AI elements, which come at a significant cost, while also offsetting its ad revenue losses.
Along that line, just before Christmas, X announced that the price of its X Premium+ subscription tier, the most expensive X subscription option, would be increasing by 30%, in order to fund the ongoing expansion of its offerings.
As per X:
“We’re updating the X Premium+ subscription price on December 21, 2024. New subscribers will pay the updated price starting that day. If you’re an existing subscriber and your next billing cycle starts before January 20, 2025, you’ll be charged at your current rate; otherwise, the new rate will begin with your first billing cycle after that date.”
The new price adds an additional $6 per month to the X Premium+ price, rising from $16 to $22 per month, or $229 annually.
X says that the higher price point will enable it to offer a completely ad-free experience for its top paying users, while also enabling higher usage limits for its Grok AI models.
It’ll also give X more capacity to pay creators via its updated revenue share model:
“We’ve shifted our revenue share model to reward content quality and engagement rather than ad views alone. Your Premium+ subscription fee contributes to this new, more equitable system where creator earnings are tied to the overall value they bring to X, not impressions of ads.”
X announced this change back in October, with the program shifting from providing creators with a cut of ad revenue for the ads displayed in their post replies (and seen by X Premium subscribing users), to paying creators based on engagement from paying users.
The added cost of X Premium+ will now contribute to this, by giving X a little extra income to share, while also, as noted, funding its ongoing AI development.
Though, technically, that’s conducted via xAI, which is a separate company to X itself. xAI, which is in charge of the models and systems that power its Grok AI chatbot, just closed a Series C funding round of $6 billion, adding to the $6 billion that it also raised back in May, enabling it to expand its operations.
xAI has used the majority of that funding to build its “Colossus” AI data center in Memphis, which incorporates 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs into the xAI operation. That puts it on par with the AI systems currently being operated by Meta and Google, though both of them have significantly more capacity, and capability, to expand further at this stage.