Twitter Starts Paying Creators Tens Of Thousands — Amid Intensifying Competition With Threads

Topline

Twitter finally began paying up for its long-planned revenue sharing program for creators on the platform with large audiences, netting one creator more than $37,000 already, as Elon Musk ramps up competition against Mark Zuckerberg’s rival Threads platform.

Key Facts

Twitter owner Elon Musk noted the first payouts—which pay creators for the ads that appear in their reply threads—would be cumulative from when he first announced the program in February.

Users must be subscribed to Twitter Blue, own a Stripe account for payment and have more than 5 million tweet impressions in each month for the last 3 months to be eligible for ad revenue sharing.

Musk said last month that the first block of payments for creators would total $5 million.

Billy Markus, the co-creator of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, shared his payout Thursday, which amounted to a whopping $37,050.

The platform sent out emails to select users on Thursday, stating eligible creators would receive their share of ad revenue within the next three days.

What We Don’t Know

It is unclear how Twitter calculates its payouts to creators or how it splits the revenue that is shared with eligible users. However, Benny Johnson, a conservative commentator and YouTuber that secured a nearly $10,000 payment, shared his Twitter analytics from the last 28 days, showing his impressions clocked in at 433 million for that time period, meeting eligibility requirements for the revenue sharing program.

Key Background

The ad revenue payouts from Twitter arrive at a challenging time for Twitter, which was recently introduced to its rival in the form of Meta’s new Threads app—what many have considered to be a “Twitter killer.” Threads secured its first 100 million users earlier this week, making it the fastest growing app in history—an accolade supported by the app’s easy sign-up process that allows users to log in through their Instagram account. Twitter responded to the rise of the app, with attorneys framing it as a “copycat” of the Musk-owned platform and threatening to sue Meta for an alleged misuse of Twitter’s “trade secrets and other intellectual property.” Twitter has struggled in the advertising front, with the platform’s U.S. advertising sales clocking $88 million in April—a 59% decrease from April 2022.