Elon Musk says Twitter will introduce charging per article in May

Twitter can give publishers a new way to monetize their content outside of the typical recurring subscription option. According to the company’s CEO Elon Musk, Twitter will allow media publishers to charge users for access to individual articles they post on the site as soon as next month. Users will end up paying a higher price per article than what the cost of accessing each article would be if they had a subscription instead. But Musk said it̵[ads1]7;s for those who want to read the occasional story from a particular outlet, so each article probably won’t cost as much as a monthly subscription.

However, at this point, details about the upcoming feature are vague. Musk said only that it will begin rolling out next month — it’s unclear what kinds of accounts and media outlets will be able to offer per-article charging. In addition, Twitter’s owner did not say how much the site would take in commission. When the company officially replaced Super Follows with subscriptions, Musk announced that it will not take money from creators for the next 12 months. After the year is over, Twitter will cut 10 percent of subscriptions.

Engadget has reached out to the site for clarification, but it no longer has a press team. We will have to wait for more information to know if Twitter will implement the same rule for payments per article. Ultimately, the company will take a cut — Twitter, under Musk, has introduced more and more paid features to boost revenue. It’s pretty common at this point that the verification badge now comes as a benefit of its $8 a month Blue plan. Twitter also shut down its free API to launch a new one for which users had to pay. It would cost business customers nearly $50,000 a month to access the new API, so some organizations and companies like NYC’s transit authority had opted to end the Twitter integration or to abandon the site instead.