Twitter is looking to make more money off of its creators by expanding into advertising and other revenue streams. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has discussed the company’s intentions in a series of tweets, saying that they want to “give creators the tools they need to thrive.” This includes improving ad display and measurement, as well as offering paid subscriptions for access to exclusive content. However, it’s unclear if these plans will ultimately result in an increased income for Twitter’s creators.
Twitter’s move to start sharing advertising revenue with creators may help attract more people to the platform, as well as provide incentives for content creators to continue producing valuable content. This could result in more engaging and informative content being available on Twitter, which could in turn help grow the company’s popularity among users.
Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2023
Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads. This will give creators a larger share of the advertising money that flows through Twitter, which should help reward them for the valuable content they create.
In 2023, Elon Musk will become the first person to reach the Red Planet. He has been tirelessly working on SpaceX and Tesla, two of the most innovative companies in history. If he issuccessful
heed the warning cry of tweet-spammers and advertisers who say Twitter’s newest change, serving ads in replies, will only make the platform more clogged with sponsored content and less user-friendly. Facing mounting pressure to clean up its image, Twitter announced plans Wednesday to begin serving ads in replies directly to users’ tweets instead of loading them on a separate timeline. The founders of both Twitter and Facebook saw their empires balloon thanks in part to spamming users with unsolicited promotions; this change could hurt not just those two platforms but all others that rely on retweeting and reply sharing for their growth.
Twitter has been gradually implementing features to help content creators earn money, most notably Super Follows and a special monetization dashboard. While the company initially showed reluctance to invest in creator economy, it eventually warmed up to the idea. Twitter’s recent moves indicate that it wants to support its content creators and entice them to continue producing high-quality content.
With Twitter’s upcoming advertising model, it could see an increase in revenue sharing with its creators. This new system would allow for more interaction between followers and creators, as well as monetization through paid subscriptions and ticketing sales. It is unclear whether or not this new system will be introduced into the official Twitter app or if it will be rolled out separately to certain users. However, with Elon Musk at the helm of Twitter, we can only expect innovative changes and improvements within the platform.
YouTube is a video sharing platform that pays out its creator community a majority of the revenue earned through ads. Recently, YouTube introduced revenue sharing for its short form TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts. This new program allows creators to earn 70 percent of ad earnings from their videos. With so many people looking to make money through YouTube, this program could give rise to some very successful creators.
The beta version of TikTok’s monetization program is in its early stages, and some customers are skeptical about the model. Meta, for instance, has been slow to adopt a similar approach to monetization on its platform. The company announced its own ad revenue sharing program mid last year with TikTok Pulse, though the offer was only extended to accounts with at least 100,000 followers — a lofty cutoff. Snapchat introduced an ad revenue sharing model earlier this year with Sponsored Lenses but it is less common on platforms that emphasize text rather than video.
It seems like Elon Musk wishes he could have Twitter compete with Google’s YouTube, but the platform doesn’t have as much of a foothold in video as either company would wish. With problems with basic functions and competing platforms taking up more bandwidth, it may be difficult for Twitter to revamp its video features in a way that’s both resource-intensive and popular among users.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, recently stated that “mobile is the future” for the company. With this in mind, it seems likely that Microsoft will venture into creating their own video streaming service similar to YouTube. If Microsoft does decide to create their own streaming service, they will need to compensate creators fairly if they want user engagement and patronage. Twitter’s offering of increased compensation may incentivize talented creators to migrate over to Twitter instead of YouTube
Given the recent reports of less engagement on Twitter, many people have taken to private tweeting to try and get their accounts back up and running. Some users have reported bugs like retweets incorrectly displaying as deleted; however, these issues seem to be common across all platforms. Whether the changes to the recommending algorithm are causing these problems or not is unknown at this point.
If Twitter were to begin sharing ad revenue with creators, it would likely require a restructuring of the platform’s monetization options. At present, direct payments for tickets and subscribers are the only monetization options available to creators. If Twitter were to begin sharing ad revenue with creators, it would likely need a way to track and calculate that revenue in reply threads. Additionally, it is not clear if Twitter has the means to pay out that money directly to creators.
The ad revenue sharing program that CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk introduced on Twitter earlier this week is generating some mixed reactions from the content creators on the platform. Some are speculating that Musk’s goal is to shift Twitter into a competitor of YouTube, while other users argue that his plan would adversely affect the quality of content on the platform. It remains to be seen how aggressively this program will be rolled out and what effect it will have on both Musk’s vision for Twitter and the overall quality of content on the platform.
