Twitter says it will start paying creators this week

Months after Elon Musk announced that some Twitter users will be eligible to earn money via ads on the platform, popular creators are finally getting an update: the money is coming “within the next 72 hours.”

The revenue sharing program is only available to users who pay for a Twitter Blue subscription and is driven by ads placed in the replies to tweets. So far, payout amounts are ranging from a few thousand dollars to nearly $40,000 for accounts with a few million followers. In a thread, Twitter says it will expand eligibility to more creators later this month.

It’s not immediately clear how payouts are determined or how much revenue Twitter keeps itself, but accounts need to have at least 5 million impressions on tweets over the last three months. Conservative YouTuber Benny Johnson posted that he was eligible to make nearly $10,000; @Elon_alerts, an account that shares Musk’s activity on Twitter, said that its payout amounted to around $2,200. Musk said in a tweet that payouts are cumulative going back to February, when the program was first announced.

The revenue sharing payouts are coming at a time when Twitter’s dominance as the microblogging platform is being threatened. Meta’s copycat app, Threads, launched last week, and 100 million users signed up within days. A few days earlier, Musk announced he was limiting the number of tweets users could read “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” Interesting strategy for a company that depends on advertising to keep the lights on. And in the background of all of this, Cloudflare data shows that Twitter traffic has been tanking since January.