Twitter Has Begun Paying a Select Group of ‘Creators’

Twitter:

To be considered eligible for creator ads revenue sharing you must:

  1. Be subscribed to Twitter Blue or Verified Organizations
  2. Have at least 5M impressions on your posts in each of the last 3 months.
  3. Pass human review for Creator Monetization Standards.

The idea is that this will turn Twitter into a YouTube-like platform for high-profile accounts. Seems like it might be a sham at this point though — there’s no open enrollment, and the people who are getting paid now seem hand-selected by Elon Musk. Taylor Lorenz, writing for The Washington Post:

Former Twitter staffers who worked on creator-focused products expressed skepticism over the rollout, with several calling it a PR stunt. One former Twitter executive who worked on creator partnerships and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said that “any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model. This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”

The former Twitter executive also cast doubt on Twitter’s revamped metrics, including impressions. “The numbers are totally and completely bogus. It’s all completely made up. It really feels like they’re arbitrarily writing checks to people they like, which is not a sustainable creator strategy.”

It’s worth taking quotes from anonymous “former Twitter staffers” with a grain of salt (and, perhaps, taking Lorenz’s byline with its own grain of salt), but it’s worth taking new Twitter initiatives with a truckload of salt. I really doubt this is going to prove sustainable. Would be kind of awesome, though, for someone to eventually be able to declare themselves a professional tweeter.

But it kind of smells like a scam: First you sign up to pay Twitter $8/month. Then you wait and see if you get selected to participate. Then they might start paying you. It’s like Amway-style multi-level marketing for social media.

★ Saturday, 15 July 2023