Twitter’s new owners are making moves to build more revenue streams for creators. At least he tweets about it.
Elon Musk announced on Friday that the company will begin sharing ad revenue with creators for the first time on the platform. Eligible users must sign up for Twitter Blue, which starts at $8/month.
The other side of the coin is that Twitter plans to start serving ads in replies. This is a change that could clog the platform with sponsored content and lead to even more reply spam.
Twitter was a latecomer to the creator economy, but mostly text-based social apps that eventually joined. The company has introduced several features in recent years to help content his creators make money, including Super Follows, Spaces with Tickets, and a special monetization dashboard.
While Twitter’s features for creators are focused on connecting creators and their followers directly with monthly paid subscriptions and ticketing, Musk is clearly not interested in adding a share of ad revenue to the mix. increase.
YouTube has long shared revenue with its creator community. It is generally considered the best place to make sure you earn money from your videos. The company pays him 55% of the revenue he earns through on-channel advertising and a revenue share for his recently introduced short-form TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts.
Other companies, especially Meta, have lagged behind in adopting this monetization model. TikTok only announced its own ad revenue sharing program with TikTok Pulse mid-last year, but the offer only extended to accounts with at least 100,000 followers. Ad revenue sharing models are even less common on platforms that value text over video.
A recent tweet suggests that Musk wants to position Twitter as a haven for creators who can compete with YouTube, but the platform has far fewer footholds in video and has the most resources on the platform. It’s not clear if you can build a video feature that requires a . Basic functionality is already degraded.
In a reply to YouTube’s most followed user, MrBeast, Musk wrote, “Let’s see what happens when Twitter delivers great videos and rewards creators better.
This week alone, many Twitter users switched their accounts to private after anecdotal reports suggested some people were seeing a drop in engagement after a change to their recommendation algorithm. Other bugs, such as retweets incorrectly showing as deleted, occur regularly and are mostly lingering.
It’s also not clear if Twitter actually has a means of sharing ad revenue with creators. This change presents a whole new set of monetization options. You’ll probably have to do quite a bit of building on the backend to track, calculate and pay for some of the ad revenue from user reply threads. So far, Twitter’s monetization options for creators have stuck with tickets and relatively simple direct payments to subscribers.
We haven’t yet found any evidence that this ad revenue sharing program is active on Twitter, but we’re looking at the changes, the implications for creators, and the consequences of Musk’s bizarre plan to turn Twitter into a YouTube competitor. I will keep track.
