Elon Musk says Twitter is now sharing revenue with creators. How does that work? No one knows.

By 02/03/2023
Elon Musk says Twitter is now sharing revenue with creators. How does that work? No one knows.

According to Elon Musk, Twitter is now sharing ad revenue with users who pay for Twitter Blue.

“Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads,” he tweeted this morning, followed by another tweet clarifying that revenue-sharing is only open to people willing to fork over eight bucks a month (or $11/month if you’re paying on iOS) for the blue check club.

You’d think an announcement like this would be followed up by even the slightest scrap of information about how it’s going to work, but nope! We have no idea if this policy is fully functional and rolled out or if the idea of it is just something Musk decided to tweet.

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We also have no idea about any of the usual revenue split practicalities offered by platforms like YouTube and Twitch. There’s no word on what percentage of revenue creators will receive, what cut Twitter will take, how people will be informed if their tweets have earned money, or if Twitter is going to do any kind of brand safety work to make sure ads aren’t running in the replies of tweets promoting, you know, Nazism.

Will tweeters have to meet any other requirements (age, number of followers, frequency of tweet, etcetera) to start earning money, or do they literally just have to be willing to pay $8 a month? We have no clue!

Will creators be able to track their earnings and see information on which tweets/which threads are earning them the most money? Who knows!

Will revenue sharing be available in all the countries where Twitter Blue is active? No idea!

How will creators be able to cash out their earnings? Surprise: we don’t know. (But we’re betting there’s a good chance it’ll have something to do with Stripe, the payment platform Musk invested $2 million in back in 2011.)

Overall, this is a…bold…move for a company whose functionality seems to be struggling on the best of days and whose favor with users is tenuous to say the least.

It’s also worth mentioning that just yesterday, Twitter announced it would start charging users for access to its API, something that will affect thousands of creators, coders, botmakers, and researchers.

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