Creepin’ It Real

Today's News

• Instagram’s New Halloween Features

• X Adds Another Fee for Third-Party Apps

• Bluesky’s New Blue-Checkless Premium Subscription

  • Funding and User Growth

• TikTok Reports European Moderation Stats

• Your Web Site Favicons Should Be Bigger: Google

• Adobe to Use More AI — Whether Customers Like It o …

Instagram’s New Halloween Features

Instagram has some new Halloween features.

First, a set of secret keywords that when used in DMs will activate some seasonal animations like flying bats.

Those keywords include Halloween and Trick-or-treat, and even a couple of related emojis should trigger the new effects.

They’re also also adding 5 custom “Add Yours” prompts — these are fill-in-the-blank templates that people often screenshot and then complete with their own text.

Some brands use this as a way to increase engagement and collect informal information from their users.

There’s also a new Halloween font and font animation.

These new features are available starting today.

X Adds Another Fee for Third-Party Apps

Mashable reported this week that X is planning to charge third-party app developers another fee. These developers make tools that many social media managers use, like Hootsuite or Sprout Social or Buffer.

New Fees Pile Up

These app developers already pay $42,000 per month to access X's API. (Why $42k by the way? Apparently Elon thought it was funny, since ‘420’ is shorthand for marijuana.)

Now, in addition to that, X plans to charge $1 per month for each account that connects to X's API.

Impact on Developers

The social media management tool Publer was the first to leak the news, saying it is giving up and will no longer support X for free due to the added cost.

To put the fees into perspective, Publer makes around $125,000 to $140,000 per month. X takes over a third of that in API costs.

With the new fee, Publer could pay an extra $14,000 per month if each of its 14,000 paying customers connects one X account.

X's API Fees Are Unusual

Most other social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube don't charge for API access. But some do; Reddit also started charging large fees with very little notice to developers.

X's decision to charge these high fees has already led to many third-party apps shutting down.

And the platform's once-lively app ecosystem is now barely existent.