Image: © Sami/Stock.adobe.com
When one user tweeted, ‘the more haters you have in your replies, the more money you’ll make on Twitter,’ Musk replied, ‘poetic justice’.
Twitter has started paying verified and influential users for ad revenues generated in the replies sections of their posts to encourage more engagement on the platform.
Subscribers to Twitter Blue who have at least 5m impressions on their posts in each of the preceding three months will be eligible to apply for creator ad revenue sharing. They will also need to pass a human review for creator monetisation standards to ensure they’re not bots and that their content is in compliance with Twitter’s rules.
“We’re expanding our creator monetisation offering to include ads revenue sharing for creators,” Twitter wrote in its help centre. “This means that creators can get a share in ad revenue starting in the replies to their posts. This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter.”
Payments will be facilitated by Stripe and the feature will be made available to all countries where Stripe supports payouts. “We are rolling out to an initial group who will be invited to accept payment,” the platform added.
While it may seem like an altruistic move on the part of Elon Musk, a well-known fact about high engagement rates on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is that it is driven by emotional content. And this kind of content can often be problematic.
Poetic justice
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2023
According to The Washington Post, some of the first subscribers to Twitter’s ad revenue sharing scheme are high-profile and conservative figures such as Andrew Tate, Benny Johnson and Ashley St Claire.
When one user tweeted, “the more haters you have in your replies the more money you’ll make on Twitter,” Musk replied, “poetic justice”.
According to its content monetisation standards, however, sexual content cannot be monetised. Other types of content, such as “pyramid schemes or get-rich-quick schemes” and copyrighted content will also not be included in ad revenue sharing.
This push comes as Twitter’s own future is hanging by a thread. Not least because of Threads, Meta’s latest social media competitor which swiftly passed 100m users days after its launch.
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