Twitter now pays its content creators, but the selection criteria is… very specific

From time to time, it happens that Elon Musk keeps his promises.

But you shouldn’t be in a hurry. The businessman had promised last February that content creators on Twitter would receive part of the remuneration for advertisements that appear in response to their tweets. It took until last Thursday for the official Twitter account to announce the effective start of the program by surprise. But the influencers concerned are still only a handful and, above all, often have very similar profiles.

The strange selection criteria

On February 3, Elon Musk announced that “ Starting today, Twitter will share revenue with creators for ads that appear in their replies “. We hope that they did not immediately quit their jobs, because “ Today will still have lasted more than 5 months.

But, in fact, on Thursday July 13, a few dozen accounts shared screenshots of notifications they had received indicating that they were about to receive their share of advertising revenue. Some have thus received up to 100,000 dollars, but the period taken into account for the calculation of this income is not clearly indicated.

Twitter monetization rules indicate that to be a member of the program, you must have at least 5 million views on your tweets in the past 3 months and, of course, be a subscriber to the Twitter Blue program. Users theoretically eligible for these conditions are still numerous, but only a handful of them have received payment from Twitter. A Twitter Blue account with more than 300,000 followers made a request to Twitter to find out why he was not eligible, to which he was told that monetization was currently only available for profiles. selected.

These profiles did not force the matter, since they were as surprised as the others when the news fell, but all the same have points in common. The first of them is that they are almost all far-right influencers, such as Ian Miles Cheong, Tim Pool, or the @EndWokeness account. But above all, all the verified accounts have a direct link to Musk, with these three examples interacting regularly with the billionaire. There is also the youtuber MrBeast, an open fan of him, or several accounts that relay Tesla news, alongside the creator of Dogecoin.

It’s also worth noting that among those few paid profiles, several of them don’t even follow Twitter’s content or monetization policies. This is the case of masculinist influencer Andrew Tate, paid while his content consists of describing his methods of forcing women into prostitution, between two misogynistic outings. However, the rules of Twitter clearly state: You cannot monetize content that depicts criminal behavior like […] human trafficking. »

Why is Twitter doing this?

A platform that remunerates its content creators is nothing new: YouTube, Twitch and Facebook have been sharing part of their advertising revenue with their creators for a long time. The objective behind this maneuver is to motivate them to stay on the platform and to give them the means to live from it, at least partially. At a time when competition from Twitter has never been higher, that doesn’t seem unreasonable.

But since bluebird creators only get paid for the ads that appear in their responses, they’ll also be incentivized to create more engaging content. In other words, posting a highly divisive and uncontroversial opinion prompting people to respond is going to be hugely rewarding. This is not going to fix the atmosphere on the platform.

The real surprise is that Twitter still has enough money to afford this.

Sources: Mashable, washington post