X, formally known as Twitter, recently invited users to publish posts significantly longer than 280 characters with a new feature called Articles.
But, there’s a catch. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about X Articles, including what they are, how they work, who can post them and who can read them.
What are X Articles?
Articles is a feature that allows users to publish long-form written content on X. The feature launched on March 7th 2024, when X shared the news in an article of its own via its @Write account.
Articles reportedly support up to 100,000 characters and users can spice up posts by including images, videos, GIFs, posts and links. There are also plenty of formatting options available to guide readers through each article, including headings, subheadings, bold, italics, strikethrough, indentation, numerical lists and bulleted lists.
Articles will appear on your timeline the same way a regular tweet would but are relegated to a new Articles tab on the author’s profile.
X has also launched a Premium feature called Top Articles that directs paying users to the most-shared articles in their network, both from people they follow and the people those users follow.
Who can post an article on X?
Anyone can find and read Articles on X, but only a select few are able to publish them at the moment.
This is because Articles is exclusive to verified organisations and users subscribed to X’s highest (and most expensive) Premium tier, Premium+. This means you’ll need to shell out $16/£16 a month or $168/£168 a year for the privilege of sharing long-form content on the social platform.
Upgrading to Premium+ also removes all ads in the For You and Following timelines and includes reply prioritization and access to Grok, X’s own AI chatbot. This is on top of other X Basic and Premium features.
If that isn’t enough to sell you on Premium+, don’t worry. You can still create threads and link to other long-form sites like Tumblr and Medium without putting money into Musk’s pocket.
