Social network X has made it more expensive to post links through its API. The change is designed to prevent spam and “misuse carriers,” the company said. The new pricing increased the cost from $0.01 per link to $0.20
Last week, the X developer account posted changes to its API values. The two most notable increases were the link post price increase and the post price increase, which increased from $0.01 to $0.15 per post.
This move may discourage many publications from posting links. For example, technology news aggregator Techmeme he stopped adding links to the original articles in his X posts this week. Instead, the posts say “Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!”
Earlier this week, Techmeme said the price increase was one of the reasons for removing the links, which it said may return later. The publication also reported a Nieman laboratory study, which noted that including links to X posts resulted in a drop in engagement.
X’s head of product Nikita Bier disputed the study’s results and said the accounts covered in the study were “regular headline + link posters” that didn’t post any additional context. He too he answered to Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, that there is “no code that detonates links.”
He added that Techmeme should post a screenshot of the reactions to the news along with the link.
Earlier in the week, Rivera hit back at the API price changes and said it would force news sites to pay hundreds of dollars or publish manually.
“I think they’re saying if you have a news site that sends links to Twitter and you don’t manually send them, now you have to pay X hundreds of dollars a month?” he he argued.
X’s discussion of reducing the reach of link posts is not new. A few years ago, the company cut titles from link previews on the platform, but reverted the change after a few weeks.
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