$88,920 Per Year For Tweeting? Elon Musk Delivers On Ad-Revenue Sharing Promise

In what could be seen as Twitter's latest dig at Meta Platforms Inc's META Threads app Elon Musk's social media platform on Thursday began paying its creators from its ad revenue sharing program, some of who earned as much as $37,050.

More on earnings in a bit.

What Happened, And What Is It? The Creator Ads Revenue Sharing initiative Musk hinted at back in January and began tracking in February rewards heavy tweeters for their engagement on the platform.

The creator revenue diversification on Twitter is wide-ranging. Besides the revenue from ads in replies, creators can also earn from video pre-roll monetization and subscription revenue. Twitter’s push for the creator economy serves to incentivize quality content production and increase the retention of its creators.

The program, limited to Twitter Blue subscribers, is part of Twitter’s broader strategy to help creators earn directly from the platform.

Musk, who had earlier promised to share ad revenue with creators, tweeted (and is now deleted), “Revenue payout to content creators will be cumulative from when I first promised to do so in February," with the total from the initial batch of payments being $5 million.

The initiative provides a new way for Twitter to compete with platforms like Alphabet Inc’s GOOG GOOGL YouTube, TikTok and Meta Platform’s Instagram, which have systems for paying creators directly, either through funds or ad splits.

So, who made the $37,050? Dogecoin DOGE/USD co-founder Billy Markus.

Markus (@BillyM2k) has 2.1 million followers on the platform and earned $37,050 from the start of the program though June.

Considering the time frame, Markus could potentially earn an annual income of $88,920 — 41.66% more than the average American salary of $58,260 — just from tweeting.

i like twitter pic.twitter.com/WRRoKUl3pr

— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) July 13, 2023

Another user, Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson), an independent journalist with 1.7 million followers, reported earnings of $9,546 during the same period. Johnson broke down his analytics, showing 433 million impressions, 4.58 million profile visits, 716,000 mentions from his 842 tweets just in the past month.

DogeDesigner (@cb_doge, 202.8k followers) put together a collage showing creators’ earnings anywhere from $1,004 to $24,305.

Twitter’s move into the creator economy aligns with the recent arrival of the Threads app, a potential “Twitter Killer” born out of Instagram.

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