Earn While You Tweet: Twitter Now Pays Content Creators for Ad Revenue.

Image: The Atlantic

Twitter has introduced a new initiative to reward content creators by sharing a portion of the advertising revenue generated from ads displayed in response to their posts. Eligible users must have accumulated over 5 million tweet impressions per month for the past three months and be subscribers to Twitter Blue. Elon Musk, the head of Twitter, has confirmed that these payments will amount to a total of $5 million, starting in February. Stripe will facilitate the distribution of these payouts.

Notably, the payments made to content producers have garnered attention due to the amounts received by some well-known individuals. For instance, writer Brian Krassenstein, with approximately 750,000 followers, reportedly received $24,305 from Twitter. Similarly, SK, an influential creator boasting nearly 230,000 followers, claims entitlement to $2,236. Furthermore, political commentator Benny Johnson, who enjoys a following of approximately 1.7 million, stated that he will be paid $9,546.

The compensation from Twitter is determined based on tweet impressions. Ashley St. Clair, a writer for the Babylon Bee, estimated her earnings to be $7,153 using a rough calculation. She accumulated 840 million impressions from February to July. Consequently, her cost per mille (CPM) would be approximately $0.0085, equating to $8.52 per million impressions. It remains uncertain whether individual CPMs differ among users.

Twitter faces a challenge in determining which creators should be compensated for advertisements displayed in users’ feeds, similar to the revenue-sharing issues faced by short-form video platforms like TikTok. Consequently, Twitter has chosen to monetize the advertising shown in tweet replies.

Consequently, content creators will likely seek to attract responses to their tweets. While the ideal outcome would be sparking meaningful dialogue, platforms like Facebook have shown that strong emotions tend to generate the most 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 responded with a remark about “poetic justice.”

Certain restrictions exist regarding the types of creators who can benefit from this program. Twitter’s guidelines prohibit the commercialization of sexual content, although it remains one of the few popular social media platforms that allows such content. This decision will have an impact on the community of sex workers. Additionally, creators cannot monetize “pyramid schemes or get-rich-quick schemes,” violence, criminal activity, gambling, or drugs. Twitter has also made it clear that attempting to profit from copyrighted material that creators do not control will result in repercussions.

While Twitter allocates $5 million to content creators, it recently faced a lawsuit seeking $500 million in unpaid severance payments to workers who lost their jobs due to Musk’s acquisition. Furthermore, Twitter has encountered issues with unpaid rent for its office spaces.