X will soon make live streaming a premium-only feature

X is charging for yet another feature, with live streaming set to become a premium-only element in the coming weeks.

Yes, if you want to live stream on X you’ll have to pay, which will inevitably reduce the amount of local footage uploaded to the app, which was a key value proposition for the live streaming option.

So why is X only making this a paid option?

Well, apparently X is There are copyright or piracy issues within the appMany users are streaming illegal content through the live option, and X says that by moving live streaming to a premium-only feature it will both address this issue and help improve it. The overall quality of the content within the app.

But as mentioned above, this also means that people witnessing an ongoing news event won’t be able to immediately turn on their X live stream and broadcast it to the world, which seems to go against Elon’s own “citizen journalism” idea for the app, where real-world witnesses provide actual perspectives on news events.

But X also hopes the change will encourage more users to sign up for X Premium, which still seems to be struggling to gain mass acceptance and so far hasn’t become the revenue stream for the app that Musk originally predicted.

When Elon acquired X in 2022, his original turnaround plan included a focus on paid subscriptions as a way to reduce reliance on advertising dollars. Allowing X to essentially self-fund itself, with users paying for the app directly, would mean it wouldn’t have to bow to the demands of advertising partners and would be more in line with Elon’s ideological “free speech” vision for the app.

Elon’s original plan was for X to eventually generate half of its revenue from subscriptions, which would equate to roughly $2.5 billion in subscription revenue in 2023 based on Twitter’s 2022 revenue.

But we’re still a long way from that.

By estimates, X Premium adoption is currently less than 1% of X’s active user base, or less than 2 million paid subscribers in total. 2 million subscribers, at an average monthly cost of $8 (X currently has tiered pricing starting at $3 per month for basic features), equates to roughly $48 million per quarter and $192 million per year.

While this is certainly not a small amount, it’s far from the primary revenue stream Musk initially expected when he began selling the blue checkmark.

Musk and co. are apparently hoping that the Grok AI chatbot, another Premium-exclusive feature, will be another way to attract paying users, but it’s hard to imagine X Premium being used as a big revenue generator, at least in the way that Musk initially hoped.

According to reports, Musk’s original business plan for the X included the company Annual Revenues will grow to $26.4 billion by 2028, with $10 billion of that coming from subscriptions.

X reportedly generated total sales of about $2.5 billion in 2023, and is not expected to see any significant revenue growth beyond that this year.

The company’s financial woes are now reportedly causing tension between Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino, with Musk urging her to make further cost-cutting moves to improve profits after Yaccarino has reportedly failed to put the company back on a path to positive revenue growth.

Essentially, user subscriptions will never be as successful as Elon hoped, no matter how many features they move to paid-only.

So why continue to do that? Why continue to limit features to paying subscribers, which only reduces the amount of content in the app?

Copyright issues aside, this seems like a counterintuitive move by an increasingly beleaguered company.

But Elon has a vision, no matter how vague it may be to others.