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After reports that X’s valuation has plunged, the platform is offering a cheaper tier for organisations to become verified.
X – the platform formerly known as Twitter – has revealed a cheaper ‘basic’ version of its subscription service for organisations.
The site launched a subscription offering for organisations last year, but the $1000 a month charge was viewed as expensive by critics. Now, X has released a basic version of this service for $200 a month or $2000 a year, with the original offering becoming the ‘full’ subscription tier.
X said this cheaper tier is designed for smaller businesses and gives benefits such as advertising credits and priority support to “enable faster growth” on the platform. X employee Adrian Carbone said this basic tier also offers “full hiring capabilities”.
“Still in beta but you’ll get unlimited job posts, ATS [applicant tracking system] integrations and your jobs become automatically discoverable in job search on X,” Carbone said on X.
The decision to give organisations a verified offering was part of a broader push by X’s owner Elon Musk to shake up the site’s legacy verification system, which he had criticised heavily after he bought the platform for $44bn in 2022.
But Musk’s attempts to change the site’s verification policy to a subscription model was met with condemnation by various high-profile users and brands on the platform. An earlier attempt to change the verification policy led to users impersonating brands and people.
X’s cheaper offering for businesses comes after a recent plunge in the site’s valuation. A report by Axios claimed that Fidelity – which helped fund Musk’s $44bn takeover of the site – has marked down the value of its shares in X. Based on this report, Fidelity believes X is now worth 71.5pc less than what Musk bought it for in 2022.
A report by The Information towards the end of 2023 claimed X’s advertising revenue has taken a severe hit – an issue X has been struggling with since Musk took over the platform.
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