X owner Elon Musk announced this week that many popular accounts will now have free access to X Premium features.
In a public post on Wednesday, Mr. Musk said that all accounts with significant subscriber counts will have access to X’s premium features, and some will even have access to Premium+.
“Going forward, all X accounts with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with over 5000 will get Premium+ for free,” he posted.
Subscribers on X are a different metric than followers. Popular X accounts can set up a subscription program that allows their fans to pay a monthly fee to see exclusive content early. However, they must be a Premium user and apply for the program to have access.
Since the numbers are not public, it is unclear how many accounts have a sizeable enough subscriber base on X for the program to apply to them.
The subscription program was introduced by Mr. Musk when he took over what was then known as Twitter in late 2022. It came after he introduced the tiered subscription feature, which remains divisive on the platform.
While it has become more popular since it first launched last year, only a small portion of X’s hundreds of millions of daily users pay the $8 monthly subscription for X Premium. The new policy could be a way to drive subscriptions and bring in new X Premium users.
Responses to Mr. Musk’s announcement were mostly positive, with many of his devoted fans hoping to get access to premium features for free.
The features currently available for Premium X users include access to longer posts, post-editing, ad-revenue sharing, subscriptions, reduced/eliminated advertising, reply priority and access to X’s fledgling AI program Grok.