X Invented a New Category of Social Media Distribution

I’d never paid for X (Twitter). For years, I didn’t see the point. Editing posts and blue checkmarks didn’t feel worth $8/month.

Then I looked at the data on what Premium actually does to reach and engagement, and I realised something: X has invented an entirely new category of social media distribution — one that sits between organic and paid, and that no other platform offers.

The data that changed my mind

Buffer analysed 18.8 million posts from 71,000 X accounts over 12 months (August 2024 to August 2025). The findings are stark.

Read that again: free accounts now have a median engagement rate of 0%. That means half of all posts from non-paying accounts get literally zero interactions. Link posts for free accounts dropped to absolute zero engagement after March 2025.

As Buffer’s Tamilore Oladipo wrote: “Premium now appears to influence not just access to features, but also how content is distributed in the feed.”

This isn’t a marginal advantage. It’s a fundamentally different experience of the platform depending on whether you pay.

It’s not organic. It’s not paid. It’s something new.

X Premium doesn’t fit neatly into either category marketers are used to thinking in.

When your Premium reply appears at the top of someone’s thread, it looks like a good reply that earned its spot. There’s no “Promoted” tag. No “Sponsored” label. The audience has no way to distinguish between “this surfaced because it’s great content” and “this surfaced because the poster pays $40/month.”

No other paid distribution method in social media works this way. The moment you pay on any other platform, the content gets labelled as advertising.

The algorithm advantage is hard-coded

This isn’t speculation. When X open-sourced its algorithm in 2023, the code revealed explicit visibility multipliers for Premium subscribers:

• 4x boost for in-network content (shown to your followers)
• 2x boost for out-of-network content (shown to non-followers)

On top of this, X offers three distinct levels of reply prioritisation — Basic gets a minor boost, Premium gets “larger” prioritisation, and Premium+ gets “largest” prioritisation, with replies placed at the top of conversations.

For anyone using a reply-based growth strategy (engaging with larger accounts to borrow their audience), that top-of-thread positioning is distribution you literally cannot buy through X’s ad platform.

The CPM comparison makes the value obvious

This is where it clicks for anyone who’s managed an ad budget. Using Buffer’s median impressions data and assuming daily posting:

Now compare that to actual paid advertising CPMs across platforms:

Premium+ at $0.86 CPM is 5–10x cheaper than TikTok (the cheapest paid ad platform) and 40–75x cheaper than LinkedIn. Even regular Premium at $0.44 CPM is in a different universe to any ad buy.

And the comparison understates the value, because:

1. These are organic-looking impressions. No ad fatigue, no “Sponsored” label, no skip behaviour. They carry more trust than any paid placement.
2. The boost applies to everything. Every post, every reply, every interaction — 24/7 for a flat monthly fee. Ads only work when you’re actively spending.
3. It compounds with content quality. A good post with a Premium boost can break out in ways an ad placement never will.
4. Zero operational overhead. No campaign setup, no creative approval, no bid management. You just post.

At $40/month — $480/year — Premium+ costs less than a single day’s ad spend for most businesses.

No other platform does this

I checked. On every other major platform, paying for a subscription does not boost your organic reach:

LinkedIn Premium explicitly does not give you any algorithmic advantage. As one analysis put it: “LinkedIn doesn’t give Premium users any extra reach — both Free and Premium posts follow the same algorithm.”

On every other platform, if you want more reach you either make better content or buy ads. On X, there’s a third option: a flat-fee subscription that bakes distribution into everything you post and arrives in people’s feeds looking indistinguishable from organic content.

The caveats

The data has limits. Buffer’s study is observational, not experimental. Premium+ users might simply be more active or skilled posters who would get more reach anyway. Nobody has run a controlled A/B test with identical content from matched Premium and Premium+ accounts.

The platform has issues. Only 4% of marketers consider X brand-safe according to Kantar’s research, trust has dropped from 22% to 12% since 2022, and a net 26% of marketers plan to cut spend — the largest pullback on any major platform. Content moderation has shifted from platform-led to community-led, making the environment less predictable.

There’s a cynical reading. X may have deliberately throttled free accounts to force upgrades. The Buffer data showing free accounts hitting 0% median engagement is consistent with that interpretation. As Jeff Bullas noted, Premium “has become almost a necessity” for anyone serious about building an audience — which is a polite way of saying the free experience has been degraded to the point of being unusable.

Organic reach is declining overall. Even for Premium users, median reach on X dropped from ~1,000 impressions in August 2024 to under 750 by August 2025. Premium gives you a larger share of a shrinking pie.

What I’m doing

I’m going with Premium+ at $40/month.

Not for the Grok AI access, not for the ad-free experience, not for editing posts. For the distribution.

$40/month for a sub-$1 CPM distribution layer that looks organic, boosts every post, and puts your replies at the top of threads. I can’t find better value in social media right now.

You don’t have to like the model to exploit it.