Elon Musk continues to change things at a breakneck pace at Twitter, and on Saturday the still-CEO (I guess he hasn’t found anyone willing to take over yet?) seemed to address user complaints that ads are getting worse on the platform. Musk said that the social network would be “taking steps” to address what he acknowledged was too much frequency for ads displayed on Twitter, and also the ads themselves taking up too much space. Finally, Musk reiterated that there will also be a new, higher-priced subscription tier coming that will entirely remove ads.
An option to pay to get rid of ads altogether has been something Twitter users have been expressing a desire for since at least the introduction of the original Twitter paid subscription, which provided a number of features to users but did nothing to change the rate at which they saw ads on the site. Musk previously tipped (in December) that there would be a fully ad-free higher tier subscription coming in 2023. At the time, Musk also said Blue subcribers at the existing rate would see half the ads of free users.
Ads are too frequent on Twitter and too big. Taking steps to address both in coming weeks.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2023
Musk’s acknowledgement of the sorry state of ads on Twitter comes just after he oversaw the death of the network’s support for third-party clients. Twitter cut off API access for those clients beginning last week, starting by suddenly revoking access for the largest clients, including Tweetbot and Twitterific, and then updated its developer guidelines earlier this week to fully cut off access for all such clients.
Twitter officially bans third-party clients after cutting off prominent devs
