Twitter says its first creator payouts total $5 million

Under Elon Musk, Twitter is apparently not fond of paying for things like Google services or the $500 million in severance it reportedly owes to thousands of ex-employees, but hey–it’s got the cash to pay out $5 million to Twitter Blue users like Andrew Tate and Ian Miles Cheong.

Musk announced in February that Twitter would start splitting ad revenue with blue checks. This first payment is everything qualifying Blue users have earned since then.

We still have no idea what cut of ad revenue Twitter takes for itself, but we do know people like Tate, Cheong, Babylon Bee writer Ashley St. Clair, and an anonymous account called “End Wokeness” have publicly posted earnings of thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars.

MrBeast is also raking it in: he’s earned $25,801.

The largest payout we’ve seen reported so far goes to reposting account Internet Hall of Fame, which apparently is getting $107,247.

St. Clair did “napkin math

” to work out how much she’s being paid per impression, and found it equals out to $8.52 per million. (FYI, that’s a CPM of $0.0085, compared to YouTube‘s CPM of around seven bucks.)

It’s worth noting, though, that a former Twitter executive reportedly told the Washington Post that the numbers these payouts are based on are “totally and completely bogus.”

“It’s all completely made up,” she said. “It really feels like they’re arbitrarily writing checks to people they like, which is not a sustainable creator strategy.”

What’s also worth noting is that Twitter did not announce the distribution date for these payouts until this week. (The notice for blue checks actually said “Surprise!”) Convenient, then, that they’re being handed out right as Meta‘s Twitter challenger Threads is beginning to gain steam. Meta dropped it last week, ahead of schedule, and according to Mark Zuckerberg, it’s already gotten over 100 million signups.