The social network X has made it more expensive to publish links through its API. The change is designed to thwart spam and “vectors of misuse,” the company said. The new price increased costs from $0.01 per link to $0.20.
Last week, developer account aware changes to your API rates. The two most notable increases were an increase in the link post price and an increase in the post price, which increased from $0.01 to $0.15 per post.
This measure could discourage many publications from posting links. For example, technology 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 link and full context!”
Earlier this week, Techmeme said the price increase was one of the reasons for removing links, which it said could return later. The publication also cited a Nieman laboratory study, which noted that including links to posts on X resulted in decreased engagement.
X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, refuted the study’s results, saying that the accounts covered in the study were “regular headline and link posters” that did not post any additional context. he too responded to Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera that “no, there is no code that drives the links.”
He added that Techmeme should post a screenshot of the reactions to the news along with the link.
Earlier in the week, Rivera reacted to API pricing changes, saying this would force news sites to pay hundreds of dollars or publish manually.
“I think they’re saying that if you have a news site that tweets links and you don’t tweet them manually, now you have to pay X hundreds of dollars a month?” he argument.
The debate that X reduces the reach of linked posts is not new. A few years ago, the company cut link preview holders on the platform but reverted the change after a few weeks.
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