Posting a link to X just became a significantly more premium experience. On Monday, the platform formerly known as Twitter decided that using its API to share a URL should cost $0.20, a modest increase from the previous rate of $0.01. This 1,900% price hike for third-party tools makes linking to the outside world a luxury good.
This move is likely to make X even less appealing to publishers, a group already operating under the widespread suspicion that linking to news articles gets their posts quietly buried by the algorithm. This very issue was the subject of a recent public disagreement between statistician Nate Silver and X's head of product, Nikita Bier, who insisted links are "not deboosted." Their claims are contradicted by a recent Nieman Lab study, which analyzed posts from 18 large media outlets and found links "do seem to hurt news publishers" on the platform.
The new economics have already claimed a high-profile victim. The tech news aggregator Techmeme, which until Sunday posted short headlines with links, has now replaced those links with a helpful suggestion to "Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!" This, as one might imagine, renders their X posts somewhat less than instantly useful.
Techmeme's account explained the change bluntly: "The cost for posting links using X’s API increased today by 1900%," and pointed to the Nieman Lab study. Bier fired back, arguing the study's flaw was that the referenced accounts were "habitual headline+link posters with no additional content," and that posts need something for users to react to for the algorithm to "get signal." He directly told Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, "there is no code that is deboosting links," and even offered to "pay personally for the API price bump," which he said was aimed at "reducing search spam attacks."
Rivera remained skeptical, telling The Verge, "I really doubt this API price hike will fix X’s spam problem long term, but hey, not my call!" He then proceeded to list all the other, presumably more affordable, places to find Techmeme, including its website, RSS feed, newsletter, and rival platforms Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, where links are presumably still welcome.