Elon Musk reveals that Twitter allows publishers to charge per article

Elon Musk has teased a new Twitter feature that says media publishers can charge readers per article for paywall articles they access through the platform.

“Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users with one click per article,” Musk tweeted Saturday.

This allows users who do not take out a monthly subscription to pay a higher price per article for reading an occasional article. Should be a big win-win for media organizations and the public alike,” he added.

A number of major news publishers charge monthly subscription fees to access their online articles, and the new feature would presumably give them the alternative option of charging Twitter users per article through an integrated payment feature.

Many details about the plan remained unclear, including the amount of fees per article and how much the cut would cost Twitter.

Since Musk took control of Twitter in October, Musk has announced — and implemented — a slew of new features and product changes — many of which are aimed at boosting revenue for the strapped social media company.

Earlier in April, Musk announced plans to let Twitter users offer their followers paid subscriptions to content, including long text and hours of video.

Users who offer the subscription, a feature they can access through the “Monetization” tab in the settings, will initially get all the money paid by subscribers, apart from the fee platforms like Android and iOS levy.

Twitter won’t cut for the first 12 months, but 10 percent after that, Musk revealed earlier this week.

Musk has made changes to boost revenue at Twitter after the social media platform saw ad revenue decline last year leading up to its $44 billion acquisition.

Since the acquisition, Musk has quickly implemented a number of product and organizational changes.

The company rolled out its Twitter-verified blue tick as a paid service and shrunk its workforce by about 80 percent.

The social media company was now “roughly even,” Musk said in a recent Twitter Spaces interview.

The New York Times is one of the news publishers that charges a monthly subscription fee to access their online articles

However, not all of Musk’s monetization moves have been smooth sailing with institutional Twitter users.

Earlier this week, New York’s transit system said it would no longer post service alerts on Twitter because the company wanted $50,000 a month for access to the interface that would allow it to automatically publish its alerts.

Last month, Twitter announced a new pricing system that would charge for access to its application programming interface, or API, used by accounts that regularly post alerts, such as transit and weather bureaus.

“The amount being posed is astronomical,” Shanifah Rieara, the MTA’s acting chief customer officer, told the Associated Press. “We are all about bringing back ridership. We shouldn’t be paying to pass on service alerts to our customers.”