Twitter's new owner is making moves to create more revenue streams for creators or at least what he's tweeting about.
Elon Musk announced Friday that the company will soon begin sharing advertising revenue with creators on the platform for the first time. reward? Eligible users must sign up for Twitter Blue, which starts at $8 per month.
The flip side of the coin is Twitter's plan to start running ads in replies, a change that could clog the platform with sponsored content and invite more reply spam. Twitter was slow to warm up to the creator economy, but the largely text-based social app eventually joined in. The company has rolled out features in recent years to help content creators make money, including Super Follow, Ticketed Spaces and a special monetization dashboard.
Twitter's Creator feature emphasizes connecting creators directly to their followers through paid monthly subscriptions and tickets, but Musk is clearly interested in adding ad revenue share to it. Recent tweets suggest that Musk wants to position Twitter as a creator haven that can rival YouTube, but the platform has far less of a foothold in the video space, and it's unclear whether the company will be able to dominate the platform where it matters most. time to build resource-intensive video features. Basic functionality is already deteriorating.
"Let's see what happens when twitter gives creators better pay for good videos," Musk wrote in reply to MrBeast, the most followed user on YouTube.
This week alone, many Twitter users switched their accounts to private, following rumors that some saw a drop in engagement after the recommendations algorithm change. Other errors, like retweets incorrectly showing as deleted, have been popping up periodically and are mostly lingering.
It's also unclear if Twitter actually has a way to start sharing its ad revenue with creators. This change will provide a whole new monetization option, presumably requiring a lot of building in the backend to track, calculate and pay users a share of the ad revenue they get from replying to threads. To date, Twitter's monetization options for creators have been limited to relatively simple tickets and direct payments from subscribers.
