Twitter’s “Creator Ads Revenue Sharing program” has issued notices regarding its first round of payments to enrolled users.
Some of these users have expressed shock and satisfaction at the size of the sums granted. For example, @BillyM2k (aka Billy Markus, cofounder of cryptocurrency Dogecoin) tweeted “i like Twitter” in response to receiving a note from Twitter that the account was earning over $37,000 in revenue share gains. To note, Twitter owner Elon Musk has a personal relationship with Dogecoin, having even used the coin’s iconic dog as Twitter’s logo for a brief period.
That aforementioned payment is a chunk of the first-round $5 million allotment being dispersed amongst eligible Twitter creators.
The revenue-sharing program was announced in February by Musk, with the stipulation being that only Twitter Blue subscribers would be eligible to participate. Furthermore, only creators with something of an audience are able to get in on the program, as it requires the Twitter user to have over five million tweet impressions per month, thereby ensuring the ads in their tweet reply threads get attention.
As such, the accounts posting up about their surprise paydays are on the larger side. Popular political commentator and podcast host Tim Pool revealed he was netting nearly $6,000 from the program, saying “@elonmusk thank you, wow.”
Writer and author Katherine Brodsky (who has bylines in Newsweek, Wired and more) also posted on Twitter to discuss the news, saying she expected something in the neighborhood of $20 from the ad revenue program and instead earned nearly $1,500 with the first round of payments.
“For the sake of transparency, I haven’t made nearly as much as many others, but I thought it would be in the vicinity of $20 & this was a wonderful surprise. In some sense, this gives us all partial ownership of Twitter & its successes. So, communism?” she said, finishing her tweet with a winking emoji.
Entrepreneur and social media personality Brian Krassenstein shared his gains on Twitter as well, revealing that he earned over $24,000 from the shared revenue plan.
All four of the aforementioned creators are followed by Elon Musk on Twitter.
This revenue sharing system comes even as, in recent months, Twitter has suffered from year-over-year lows in revenue intake. Coupled with the added threat of Meta’s Threads now daring to chip away at Twitter’s reign as live-reaction social media king, and Musk has a lot of financial obstacles to tackle. It seems Twitter’s banking on maintaining relevancy, at least in part, by keeping popular people on their platform via monetary rewards.
Twitter replied to TheWrap’s request for comment with its customary poop emoji as well as a link to Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino’s recent tweet on the revenue-sharing scheme.
“It makes a lot of cents to create here!” Yaccarino said in her tweet on the subject.
