Musk adds yet more complexity to X with new paid tiers

• X owner Elon Musk says the site will introduce two new premium tiers.
• He said that the new X Premium would include a more expensive ad-free version.
• It comes after the site started charging some new users a $1 annual fee in order to fight bots.

Elon Musk has announced that X is launching two new tiers of its premium subscription service.

The X owner confirmed reports that the social media site is planning to overhaul its X Premium subscription, adding a cheaper tier and a more expensive ad-free version as it seeks to bring in more paying subscribers.

"Two new tiers of X Premium subscriptions launching soon," said Musk in a post on X.

"One is lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads, and the other is more expensive, but has no ads," Musk wrote.

Bloomberg reported earlier this month that X was testing a triple-tiered premium model, with cheaper versions of the current $7.99 subscription.

X Premium, formerly Twitter Blue, was one of Musk's first major overhauls following his takeover of Twitter last year, allowing users to buy a verified checkmark for $8 a month.

The initial launch backfired spectacularly when the site was quickly overrun with impersonations of major celebrities and brands, including a fake Eli Lilly account that sent the pharmaceutical company's stock price plunging when it tweeted: "Insulin is free now."

The subscription service has since been overhauled and expanded, with subscribers getting an edit button and fewer ads.

However, the number of people paying for it remains small, with researchers estimating only 900,000 of X's 245 million daily active users are subscribed, suggesting that it is unlikely to make up for the company's lost advertising revenue.

The latest changes to the service come as X starts charging new users in the Philippines and New Zealand an annual fee of $1 to use the platform through its "Not a Bot" trial program. The company has said that the fee is not a profit driver but is instead meant to make it unaffordable for bots to operate on the platform.

Musk has often floated the idea of charging users, and suggested in a livestream last month that he could put X behind a paywall, calling it "the only defense against an army of bots."

Social media's free-with-ads model has been the key driver of its enormous success, but amid a global advertising recession and changes to Apple's app-tracking rules which make it harder for these platforms to target ads to customers, many are now looking at alternative solutions.

Meta is reportedly considering charging users in Europe $14 a month to access ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram, as it grapples with new EU rules that would allow users to opt out of personalized ad-tracking. TikTok, meanwhile, is testing a $4.99-a-month ad-free subscription tier.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.