Meanwhile, X focuses on SMBs in 2024, with the platform eyeing a slew of many more smaller ad partners in hopes to offset its losses coming from the bigger players, who owner Elon Musk was telling to "go f***" themselves over concerns around brand safety in the app late last year.

Poking at the egos of high-profile executives doesn't tend to endear them a whole lot, and rather than trying to win them back, X has focused on getting more SMBs to pay up instead, which it's kicking off with its new, lower-cost Verification for Organizations package.
Or at the least, whereas X just went out to market with the $1,000 a month gold checkmark in the app that hasn't gotten huge take-up, today X is offering a slimmed-down version of that package, available for a mere $200 a month for you, which will include a gold checkmark for your brand profile, priority support from X, all the benefits of X Premium+, plus job listings through X Hiring, among other things.

So you get a lot of the X Verification for Organizations benefits for a fifth of the price.

So why would anyone continue paying $1,000 per month?

Well, you also get extra reach boosts for your posts with the paid package, whereas you also get access to "Affiliates", which lets you associate blue checkmarks with your staff in the app.

Which, probably isn't all that valuable now that X has effectively devalued what those blue checkmarks actually mean, but theoretically, paying $1,000 will still confer many more advantages for big brands.

You also get more ad credits, though you do also get some ad credits with the cheaper version too. So, I don't know, maybe it's worth paying $1,000 a month if you're looking to run a heap of ads? The economics will obviously vary by business.

Seriously though, though, $200 a month is a far more reasonable package for business verification and X should have begun on that instead of the utterly laughable $1,000 monthly gold checkmarks. Seriously though, who cares what color the checkmark is if you can buy it? It really doesn't matter as a marker of trust or authority; you're just paying for it to, what, be cool?

But certainly, there's a better deal for $200 and one can quite imagine that some businesses will indeed take it up, though it is going to be tough going for X to replace its ad revenue losses with smaller players.

For example, X's biggest clients - its top 50 advertisers - spent on average about $1 billion annually in in-app ads. So far this year, X is poised to rake in around $2 billion for the full year. That is a wide chasm of revenues to bridge.

Of course, this all assumes big brands come back to the app, which is something that could still happen, depending on what they see in X in terms of its worth as a brand awareness and promotion vehicle. For many, I would think it's declining in this way, either way, but it's still a highly used, high-exposure surface which can definitely keep your brand in the latest conversations.

Much, then, depends on Elon, and what he brings to the app. Continue to promote divisive, offensive, offensive content and dismiss concerned advertisers raising such concerns?

I suspect he will, and that being so, X will need to get a lot of SMBs to sign up for gold ticks.