Yesterday, X began rolling out Grok, the “revolutionary” AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s startup xAI, to Premium+ subscribers on the X platform. Today, Musk says the rollout of Grok to all Premium+ subscribers of USA is now complete, but he warned that the beta will face many problems, although it will steadily improve. He also offered a time frame for Grok to reach other markets beyond the US, noting that all English-language users (who subscribe to Premium+) will get access to Grok in “about a week.”
Japanese users, X’s second-largest user base, will follow next with the goal of bringing Grok to all languages ”hopefully” by “early 2024,” the X owner said.
Of course, Musk’s time frames for when things will happen don’t always happen — just ask any longtime Tesla watcher who’s spent time waiting in full self-driving (FSD). However, with Grok, Musk was only a a little bit is lagging behind in its launch estimates. On November 22, for example, Musk said that xAI’s Grok would be released to Premium+ subscribers “next week,” but the chatbot actually went live this week, on December 7.
Whether or not the chatbot is successful in driving subscription revenue for X remains to be seen. For now, Grok is only part of X’s top-tier subscription offering — the $16 per month Premium+. That’s much more expensive than X’s Basic ($3/month) and Premium ($8/month) options, and it’s not clear that it will appeal to casual AI enthusiasts who can use competing chatbots like ChatGPT or Bard of Google for free.
Premium+ membership comes with access to other features to widen its reach, including the benefit of not showing ads on the For You and Following timelines on X. Their responses to Premium+ users have also been enhanced more, in addition to all Premium features , such as ads Monetization for creators, identity verification, verified checkmark, access to Media Studio and more.
So far, though, subscriptions haven’t driven the majority of X, formerly Twitter’s, revenue — advertising has.
But now, it’s unclear what X’s ad-supported future might look like, as Musk alienates X’s advertisers — even telling them to “screw themselves” for dropping X over concerns about anti-Semitic content on the site. For X to be viable, it may need more users to sign up for Premium+ for Grok to help shore up the loss of ad dollars as brands like Apple, Disney, IBM, Paramount, Walmart and others leave the platform.
Notably, X had its biggest month for subscription revenue in November, pulling in $6.2 million in net revenue, after app store fees, according to an estimate from App Insights Apptopia. But that’s still less than a third of what Snapchat made for its own in-app subscription, which topped $20 million for the first time last month.
In other words, there’s still plenty of room for X to grow its subscribers, given that it reportedly has more than 500 million monthly active users. Either it is or it isn’t canOf course, that’s another story.
