Strong Majority of X Users Aren’t Willing To Pay Up, Still Call It Twitter

by | Sep 20, 2023

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During a recent conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk mentioned that he’s considered charging all users of X, the site formerly known as Twitter, a “small monthly payment” to use it. Beyond these comments, there’s no timetable on when he might make the change or how steep the monthly cost for users might be.

But CivicScience gauged initial interest among X/Twitter users to pay for the website, and a vast majority would not be sticking around to see the paid era of the site. Nearly 4-in-5 users are ‘not at all likely’ to pay a small monthly fee to use X, while 10% are ‘very likely’ to do so. Payment is much more popular with daily X users, with 26% claiming they’re ‘very likely’ to pay up. Roughly 2-in-5 daily and weekly users are at least ‘somewhat likely’ to pay monthly – but majorities of all user frequency are ‘not at all likely’ to pay. It remains to be seen if Musk finds the benefits of mandatory paid membership to outweigh losing a strong majority of the site’s purported 550 million monthly users.

Given how some of Musk’s discussed changes, like his stated intent to eliminate the block feature on X, haven’t taken effect yet, there’s reason to wonder if this will come to fruition. However, one of the site’s most significant changes – the rebranding and name switch-up to X – has stuck thus far. But has it changed the way users refer to the site?

According to the latest CivicScience data, a similarly large majority of U.S. adults who discuss or think about the social media site still refer to it as Twitter (72%). Just 15% call it by the official name of X, and 13% call it by both interchangeably. Among daily and weekly users, the X representation jumps to right around 25% – but similarly strong majorities of all user types still call the site Twitter. Prior CivicScience reporting showed daily and weekly users were most positive about the name change, but by and large, they don’t appear to be using the new name in daily conversation.

Curious to know how your company might be impacted by the latest changes to X and which brands current users of the site view most favorably? Book a meeting with CivicScience today for a closer look at how our InsightStore can guide decision-making.