Twitter is Paying Its Creators for Impressions Instead of Quality
Surely you’ve noticed over the past few days “X” (formerly Twitter) users have been sharing screenshots of their first advertising payouts from the platform, ranging from $50 to as much as $12,000 and higher. The platform’s monetization mechanism kicked off in July, offering creators an ad revenue share (similar to YouTube) for those that meet X’s requirements.
To be eligible for X’s Subscriptions, which enables users subscribed to Twitter Blue (now known as “X Premium”) to earn monthly income from the content they create, users must meet certain criteria – even with their paid verification checkmark.
What Creators Need to Know
You Must Be a ‘Premium’ User
Before the conversation of monetizing from X even begins, users 18 years or older must be an active Twitter Blue (“X” Premium) user or have a Verified Organizations subscription that maintains a minimum follower count of 500 people.
Impressions > Quality
Forget quality control, eligible creators are required to have garnered (and maintained) 15 million+ tweet impressions in the past three months.
How You Get Paid
When setting up the Subscription offering, X Premium users are eligible to get paid up to 97% of the revenue that X has earned from selling access to that user’s Subscriptions, after in-app purchase fees – until that user reaches $50,000 in lifetime earnings from X across all of the platform’s monetization products.
When withdrawing payments from Stripe, creators must withdraw an amount greater than $50. However, X says that it will be providing additional withdrawal options in the future.
Shouldn’t Quality Be a Factor?
Always.
While impressions are a major indicator of the type of content that seems to resonate with users, it’s not everything – and shouldn’t be treated as such. Even though a piece of content may receive 15 million impressions (or more), doesn’t mean that content is actually valuable to the targeted audience.
The decision by X to prioritize impressions over quality shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the platform’s “mission” to hold itself out as a “free speech platform” that has facilitated and allowed harmful speech and impersonation to control the nature of how the platform operates.
Since Elon Musk introduced the paid verification mechanism, it has completely diminished the name, image, and likeness of public figures and established brands and media publishers at the expense of wanting everyone to be afforded the same resources, which ironically, are only available through X’s pay-to-play model.
Earlier this month, X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit group that openly targets companies through their published reports highlighting conduct that embraces hate speech and disinformation.
According to the lawsuit, X accused CCDH of intentional interference with its business relationships by allegedly driving advertisers away and encouraging an unnamed individual to collect proprietary information by unlawful access to X’s systems.
“The truth is that he’s [Elon Musk] been casting around for a reason to blame us for his own failings as a CEO,” CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed said in an interview with CNN, “because we all know that when he took over, he put up the bat signal to racists and misogynists, to homophobes, to antisemites, saying ‘Twitter is now a free-speech platform.’ … And now he’s surprised when people are able to quantify that there has been a resulting increase in hate and disinformation.”
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