Social network X has made it more expensive to post links through its API. The change is designed to thwart spam and “vectors of misuse,” the company said. The new pricing increased costs from $0.01 per link to $0.20
Last week, the X developer account posted changes to its API rates. The two most notable hikes were an increase in link posting price and an increase in posting price, which went up from $0.01 to $0.15 per post.
This move might discourage many publications from posting links. For instance, tech news aggregator Techmeme stopped adding links to the original articles in its posts on X this week. Instead, the posts say “Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!”
Earlier this week, Techmeme said that the price increase was one of the reasons to remove links, which it said may return later. The publication also cited a Nieman Lab study, which noted that including links with posts on X resulted in dropped engagement.
X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, refuted the study’s results and said that accounts covered in the study were “habitual headline+link posters” that posted no additional context. He also replied to the Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, that there is “no there is no code that is deboosting links.”
He added that Techmeme should post a screenshot of reactions to the news along with the link.
Earlier in the week, Rivera reacted to API price changes and said that this would force news sites to pay hundreds of dollars or post manually.
“I think they’re saying if you have a news site that tweets links, and you don’t tweet them manually, you now have to pay X hundreds of dollars per month?” he argued.
The debate of X reducing the reach of posts with links is not new. A few years ago, the company cut headlines from the link previews on the platform but reverted the change after a few weeks.
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