Twitter is now paying content producers a portion of the advertising revenue generated by the ads displayed in the responses to their posts. Users that have had more than 5 million tweet impressions per month over the last three months and are subscribers to Twitter Blue are eligible to enrol. As per Elon Musk, the head of Twitter, these payments will be worth a total of $5 million and will be aggregated from the month of February onward. Through Stripe, these payouts will be made available.
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These payouts are considerable, based on what some well-known producers are tweeting. According to a report by Tech Crunch, Twitter allegedly paid writer Brian Krassenstein, who has roughly 750,000 followers, $24,305. Another creator, who goes by the name of SK, has almost 230,000 followers. The creator has asserted that they should be paid $2,236. Meanwhile, a political commentator, Benny Johnson, who has a following of about 1.7 million, has asserted that he will be paid $9,546.
Tweet impressions determine Twitter’s compensation. Ashley St. Clair, a writer for the Babylon Bee, claimed to have made $7,153 based on her “napkin math.” She had 840 million impressions from February to July. Accordingly, her cost per mille (CPM) would be roughly $0.0085, or $8.52 per million impressions. Whether or not individual CPMs vary from user to user is still unclear.
As it would be challenging to decide which creators to compensate for advertisements served in the feed, the same issue short-form video platforms like TikTok are encountering with revenue sharing, Twitter is monetizing the advertising shown in tweet replies.
It follows that artists will naturally want to lure people to respond to their tweets. The ideal case scenario would be that this would spark dialogue, however, as we are aware from sites like Facebook, strong emotions are what generate the greatest interest. According to a tweet by Farzad Mesbahi, “The more haters you have in your replies, the more money you’ll make on Twitter.” Musk retorted, “Poetic justice.”
There are restrictions on the kinds of creators who can profit from this programme. Sexual content is prohibited from being commercialised under Twitter’s guidelines for monetizing content. Twitter is one of the only popular social media sites that allows pornographic content. This step will affect the community of sex workers. Additionally, Twitter will not let the creators monetize on “pyramid schemes or get-rich-quick schemes,” violence, criminal activity, gambling, or drugs. The platform has also set the record straight that there will be repercussions when a creator tries to make money off of copyrighted material that they do not control.
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While Twitter gives creators $5 million, it was recently sued for $500 million in unpaid severance payments to workers who lost their jobs as a result of Musk’s purchase. What’s more, Twitter has also failed to pay rent for its office spaces.
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