Ever since Elon Musk purchased what was previously known as Twitter, it has been the subject of many controversies. With that on top of platform changes that no one wanted, the social media site continues to die a slow death.
Declining Web Traffic
People are starting to spend less time on the platform, likely because of all the changes that Elon Musk has implemented. The microblogging site is getting farther and farther away from the Twitter that everyone came and stayed for.
Based on the year-over-year global web traffic estimates, X is down 14% this September 2023. It has taken a slightly bigger hit with its advertisement with a 16.5% decline, which can spell trouble since it's a huge source of revenue for the company.
X's biggest contributor in web traffic is the US, and Similarweb estimates show that it's down by 19% since September 2022. In the UK, there is an 11.6% decrease, 13.4% in France, 17.9% in Germany, and 17.5% in Australia.
It might also have something to do with Musk's ongoing battle with mainstream media outlets, specifically his distrust of the publications. Given that X is one of the platforms that people go to for news, the tech billionaire's issue with news companies raises huge problems.
Not only that, Musk is also actively making it difficult for news providers to operate within the social networking site. Just recently, X no longer displayed headlines in news article links, only the photos and the caption that the user types in.
Prior to that, It was also reported that the links to sites that Elon Musk disliked were slowed down on purpose. Affected websites were The New York Times, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, Substack, and more, as per The Stateman.
The delay was only five seconds long, but it could be enough for users to grow impatient and not visit the sites altogether. This, in turn, would affect the revenue that is usually based on web traffic. Other sites like YouTube and Fox News remain unaffected.
X's former Head of Trust and safety even expressed that it was "one of those things that seems too crazy to be true, even for Twitter, until you see it inexplicably take 5 seconds for Chrome to receive 650 bytes of data."
X Will Soon Be Behind a Paywall
As if things were not bad enough, Elon Musk is going through with his plan to put the platform behind a paywall. It has already started in the Philippines and New Zealand, where new users are required to pay $1 a year to access the majority of X's features.
Without the subscription, users will be limited to just reading posts. They will not be able to publish, reply, repost, quote, or bookmark posts on the platform. The program which was named "Not-a-Bot" is a way for the company to get rid of bot accounts.
It's no secret that X has a bot problem even after Musk implemented the X Blue verification system. By putting account creation behind a paywall, the Tesla CEO hopes that it would be too expensive to create bot accounts and that users will no longer create them.
