At the very least, Twitter’s new owner is tweeting about taking that Twitter will start sharing ad revenue with creators.
Elon Musk revealed on Friday that the business would soon start paying creators on the platform a portion of the advertising income. The problem? Users must have Twitter Blue subscriptions, which start at $8 per month, in order to be eligible.
On the other hand,Twitter will start sharing ad revenue with creators, a shift that may overwhelm the site with sponsored content and encourage more spammy answers.
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Although Twitter, a social media platform mostly centred on text, took a while to warm up to the creator economy, it eventually did. In recent years, the company added a few features to help content producers monetize their work, such as Super Follows, Ticketed Spaces, and a unique monetization dashboard.
Musk appears to be interested in incorporating an advertising income share into the mix, contrary to Twitter’s creator features, which place an emphasis on connecting creators and their followers directly through monthly paid subscriptions and tickets.
YouTube is often recognised as the finest platform for consistently making money from videos since it has long shared revenue with its creative community. In addition to recently introducing revenue sharing for YouTube Shorts, a competitor to TikTok in the short form, the firm pays out 55% of money obtained from on-channel advertisements.
Other businesses have been sluggish to adopt this monetization model, most notably Meta. With TikTok Pulse, which was only made available to accounts with at least 100,000 followers—a high cutoff—TikTok only recently unveiled its own ad income sharing arrangement. On services that place a greater emphasis on text than on video, the ad revenue sharing model is even less frequent.
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Recent tweets indicate that Musk wants to position Twitter as a haven for creators that can compete with YouTube, but the platform has a much smaller presence in video, and it’s not entirely clear that the company can develop resource-intensive video features while the platform’s most fundamental features are already degrading.
Other businesses have been sluggish to adopt this monetization model, most notably Meta. Only TikTok’s own ad revenue share was disclosed. Musk responded to MrBeast, who has the most followers on YouTube, by saying, “Let’s see what happens when Twitter delivers good content with more remuneration for artists.”
Several Twitter users have made their accounts private just this week after anecdotal reports revealed that some users were seeing less interaction as a result of changes to the recommendation system. Retweets mistakenly showing as removed have been one of the more frequent and persistent problems.
Furthermore, it’s unclear whether Twitter has the resources necessary to start paying authors a portion of its ad revenue. That modification would open up a completely new monetization possibility, one that probably calls for significant back-end development in order to manage, compute, and distribute a user’s share of the ad money from their comment threads. As of now, Twitter has only offered very straightforward direct payments for tickets and subscribers as monetization possibilities for creators.
We haven’t yet seen any proof that this ad income sharing model is in use on Twitter, but we’ll be watching the changes, how they affect creators, and what happens with Musk’s crazy intentions to turn Twitter into a YouTube rival.