Twitter Starts Sharing Ad Revenue With Verified Creators (techcrunch.com) 62
Twitter has started sending out the first payouts to creators on the platform who are part of the company's revenue sharing program. The largest payout reported thus far was to Billy Markus, the co-creator of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, which amounted to a whopping $37,050. TechCrunch reports: Users who subscribe to Twitter Blue and have earned more than 5 million tweet impressions each month for the last 3 months are eligible to join. According to owner Elon Musk, the first round of creator payouts will total $5 million, and will be cumulative from the month of February onward. These payouts will be delivered via Stripe. [...] Twitter's payouts are determined by tweet impressions. Babylon Bee writer Ashley St. Clair (710,000 followers) said that she earned $7,153, and according to her "napkin math," she had around 840 million impressions from February through July. That would make her rate about $0.0085 CPM (cost per mille), or $8.52 per million impressions. It's not clear whether or not individual CPMs change from user to user.
They already couldn't cover the interest (Score:1, Informative)
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Me too! :D
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Re: They already couldn't cover the interest (Score:1)
Re: He doesn't have gov't subsidies (Score:2)
Love how you completely ignore he was involved in founding Paypal which he sold for $1.5B three years after his initial investment of $12M.
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When you compare the bailouts the other auto-manufacturers get, the support they receive from government purchases of vehicles (hint: 4 vehicles per govt employee), the subsidies keeping the cost of their fuel low, the wars ensuring other autos have a continuous supply of fuel, not to mention the litany of tax schemes and incentive packages for building an auto-plant, Tesla is far and away the lightest auto-manufacturer
Take away that government program (Score:1)
Americans don't like it when the gov't does things for them. We like to pretend we're rugged individualists who don't need no civ
Re: He doesn't have gov't subsidies (Score:5, Informative)
Just like he didnt found Tesla.
Also must be pretty nice to have 12 million to invest at the age of 20.
There's a phrase for guys like Musk (Score:2)
Re: He doesn't have gov't subsidies (Score:2)
Musk came in the first year at Paypal before it was a household name. But go ahead and player hate if that's your preference.
Re: They already couldn't cover the interest (Score:1)
It is ad revenue sharing, so it reduces their profits but doesnâ(TM)t impact their debt, they are not paying creators out of pocket. It is a way of attracting creators away from the only other platform, YouTube which does ad revenue sharing, which if they successfully get people leaving YouTube because of their reduced ad sharing revenues, Twitter hopes will lead to overall better ad revenue.
YouTube is the only profitable social media platform because of what used to be a generous revenue sharing model
Re: They already couldn't cover the interest (Score:5, Informative)
so it reduces their profits
What profits? Twitter is still losing money. In fact, ad spending has plummeted 54% [thestreet.com] in the past year. Ex-employees have filed a lawsuit for $550 million [reuters.com] in severance they were promised. This is on top of the multiple lawsuits [cnbc.com] Twitter faces for not paying its bills [reuters.com].
Still further, Twitter is now worth, maybe, one third [time.com] the $44 billion Musk paid for it.
What are these "profits" you speak of?
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"SB14 makes no new corrective actions or enhancements to laws already in place. Ultimately, members of the Assembly's Public Safety Committee understood the author's intent but recognized this bill needs considerable work and granted reconsideration," Jones-Sawyer's statement concluded.
"Longer sentences don't actually stop things from happening," said Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan, a Democratic member of the committee, during Tuesday's hearing.
Despite the fact that murder gets you a life sentence,ple
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The outgoing managers saddled the company with tons of poison to get it to fail
Literally nothing changed at Twitter between when the sale was announced and when Musk took over. Twitter was poisoned long before Musk even tweeted a joke about buying it. Only Musk (and you?) were too blind to see it.
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Twitter was burning cash before Musk bought it.
Yes, they were doing so for years before Musk even tweeted about it.
The management took out $12b in loans and servicing that debt, with a cash burn rate of a billion a year is a lot of poison.
Yes you need to take out loans if you have cash flow obligations.
This wasn't a poison pill for Musk. This was Musk (and you?) not having even a slightest clue of what bad shape Twitter was actually in. That shape was public knowledge before Musk joked about buying them. Him overpaying for something because he didn't do his due diligence is not the same as the previous owners sabotaging something because of the purchase.
Your quote even shows
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Musk is trying to turn this around by encouraging popular accounts to shitpost as much as possible, to increase engagement.
Meanwhile people are auto-blocking such accounts with extensions like BlueBlocker, and advertisers won't be interested in clicks if they are appearing along side all the previously banned extremist accounts.
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Twitter is still not allowing non-registered people to view posts, despite their claim. Those dozen accounts I visited to keep abreast of Ukraine still won't let me in.
Either that or the Russian agent is deliberately blocking those accounts because I can see an individual post from other accounts, but I cannot see any responses.
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It's the same for me from the UK. Can't view tweets without being logged in.
Occasionally I follow a link and it works. Seems to depend on the link maybe.
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Where's the data? You've cited a headline, with an article that cites a link to a splash page for a payment automation company.
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If the figures for CPM is somewhat correct it's a pittance compared to what you get on Youtube where the CPM starts at about $1. I doubt that kind of ad-share is going to drive creators from YT to Twitter in meaningful numbers but posting shit on Twitter is far easier and faster than producing videos for YT so a comparable CPM for Twitter is always going to be lower. Dunno what the conversion-factor is but I'm sure someone will come up with one shortly so a correct comparison can be done on the CPM.
Re: They already couldn't cover the interest (Score:2)
How may Youtube creators publish several videos a day, though? It's quite different to pay someone for a paragraph than to pay them for a 15 minute edited video.
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Conversion factor is what percentage of ads lead to a sale.
The issue with Twitter is that to share YouTube content you really need to pay the $8 for Twitter Blue, otherwise the limit on video length is quite short.
$8 might not sound like a lot, but aside from deterring casual/small posters, having that blue checkmark is likely to get you blocked by other users, or at least mocked. Blue checks are toxic.
Re: They already couldn't cover the interest (Score:1)
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Simple.
Now that word that you can make money on Twitter is out, people are gonna flood the blue checks. Then the activity's going to explode. Then Twitter's going to take those numbers to the advertisers and a) tell them it's safe and b) hike rates, because traffic is high.
And there you go. Of course, we won't talk about how all of this is going to pervert the quality of content on the site. But that's a conversation for a future day.
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They will use this pretext to give money to the cronies of Musk. They are hoping more lunatic right will create super duper content and create enough of a splash for 2024 election.
But, more established influencers are going to be pissed off. Left and center people will stop giving twitter clicks to deny ad stream for the fascists. So long before 2024 Twitter might just crash.
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Expect diminishing returns (Score:4, Insightful)
With the way things are going with Twitter (can they even cover their interest payments??), it's likely to only go downhill from here.
Twit... Definition. (Score:2)
A foolishly annoying person. Need I say more?
"Delivered by stripe" (Score:1)
Elon is so generous he can't afford to pay his landlords, employees, ex-employees, or vendors.
Perhaps instead of "Stripe" (not a real payment method in 2023) he'll just ship a bunch of pennies he's collected on the street in a large unmarked van.
Down by the river.
Rent (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe Twitter ought to pay their rent and their various financial obligations first...
Celebrities and reporters (Score:2)
I suspect the main motive here is to pull back celebrities and reporters with the promise of some cash.
Still, I wonder how many accounts actually achieve that threshold to start earning money.
Great deal for Taliban! (Score:2)
They clearly prefer Twitter and have the followers. [twitter.com] Even without a blue check.
Anas Haqqani
@AnasHaqqani313
Twitter has two important advantages over other social media platforms.
The first privilege is the freedom of speech. The second privilege is the public nature & credibility of Twitter. Twitter doesn't have an intolerant policy like Meta. Other platforms cannot replace it.
It's a win-win-win situation.
AK-47S FOR EVERYONE!
Incredible Moves by Elon Musk (Score:2)
Good move. Maybe the only move. (Score:4, Insightful)
I know the usual mode of "analysis" around here is to either idolize or vilify Elon Musk and then cherry-pick whatever facts that can be written up to support that worldview.
Speaking as someone who appreciates his accomplishments I could never figure out from the get-go why he wanted to get involved with, much less buy, Twitter. To me it looked like that the employees at SpaceX and Tesla locked him out of the office so he was looking for something to do.
Unlike must other people I never expected him to turn Twitter into some sort of glowing, instant success simply because of his wealth and Musk brilliance or whatever. It was a dumb toy site that started out as some sort of community SMS repeater and a very marginal business proposition. Anyone who thought he was going to just settle for little incremental changes here and there is simply not paying attention to his record.
He doesn't give a damn about risk. He doesn't give a damn about how you think you would do it. He was going to disrupt. He was going to let a lot of rockets blow up before his team learned how to make one. And that is what he did with Twitter. All the derision and naysaying is something he has disregarded before and he is doing it again.
What this news shows is that he has, at some point in the past, realized that in order to make Twitter a success you have to have attractive content. And to have attractive content you have to have paid content creators. To have paid content creators you have to pay them, regardless of whether you are making a profit at the moment or not. All the sneering about Twitter not making a profit at this point (as if it ever did) is irrelevant and off the mark. He is literally billions of times better off now than when he was trying to make the numbers with the Model 3 and he had no problem committing his last bit of wealth then. Now would be so much easier.
Will it work? Maybe. Blowing up a lot of rockets seems to have worked for SpaceX. Regardless, no matter how he got here I don't see any other option going forward.
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As someone who thinks Elon is a fool. This is not a bad move. In fact this is a good move. It will encourage those creators to drive engagement on the platform which long run will boost twitters revenue. The problem is it is the first good move he has made. All of his other moves have devastated twitter as a platform. If he had opened up with this first he would be well on his way to building twitter into a profitable business. I think it's too late now.
It also feels completely orthogonal to his goal of tu
Re:Good move. Maybe the only move. (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as someone who appreciates his accomplishments I could never figure out from the get-go why he wanted to get involved with, much less buy, Twitter. To me it looked like that the employees at SpaceX and Tesla locked him out of the office so he was looking for something to do.
He wanted to un-ban Babylon bee and libsoftiktok
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Speaking as someone who appreciates his accomplishments I could never figure out from the get-go why he wanted to get involved with, much less buy, Twitter.
He bought it because he's been trending alt-right for years, and for years Conservatives were complaining about censorship by the social media platforms.
Musk was literally the only guy rich enough to independently buy Twitter, the cheapest social media platform.
And he did it because he got caught up by the Conservative censorship narrative and wanted to play the hero.
Unlike must other people I never expected him to turn Twitter into some sort of glowing, instant success simply because of his wealth and Musk brilliance or whatever. It was a dumb toy site that started out as some sort of community SMS repeater and a very marginal business proposition. Anyone who thought he was going to just settle for little incremental changes here and there is simply not paying attention to his record.
I don't think he had a plan for significant changes other than this vague idea of a WeChat clone (be the everything app). The problem is that
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Virtual upvote. All your points are spot on.
And he did it because he got caught up by the Conservative censorship narrative and wanted to play the hero.
I would really really like to get him a back room somewhere and tied to a chair and slap the truth out of him over that. I get that one of his strengths is his nearly invincible naïveté balanced against his ability to learn critical stuff. But that seems to extend only to engineering/business issues and nothing else. Does he really think that right-wing ideology is what the country or the world needs to be ascendant right now?
There is simply no wa
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Basically Musk is an idiot who's rich. He's neither skilled nor smart. He got lucky by getting in early on the digital payments game by creating Paypal knowing people being able to send money via credit cards was going to be bi
Great artists steal (Score:2)
Elon knows a lot of people will copy stuff from other sources and put it on Twitter as their own due to this incentive.
Some comparison for you (Score:1)
just like a failing radio station (Score:3)
Time to start buying users because the platform is dead without them.
Who gets paid? (Score:2)
Here's an interesting question.
Is there any filtering of the paid users going on beyond Twitter Blue + impressions?
Because if there isn't, then he's probably paying some terrorism promoters and the like (basically, people just on the right side of a ban).
And if there is, then a rapist and human trafficker got himself on the white list [independent.co.uk].
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The last I heard, he hadn't been charged, let alone tried and convicted. At this point, it's wise to use the word "alleged" to avoid opening yourself up to a potential lawsuit for defamation.
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The last I heard, he hadn't been charged, let alone tried and convicted. At this point, it's wise to use the word "alleged" to avoid opening yourself up to a potential lawsuit for defamation.
They were definitely indicted [ctvnews.ca].
At this point I'll take my chances since they seem to be more occupied with suing their victims.
In the broader picture, if they reviewed the list of creators getting money, then including Tate is a very strange choice.
If they didn't then Twitter is probably sending cheques to terrorist recruiters for promoting terrorism.