A month after Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced that the platform would be sharing ad revenues with creators, it appears nobody has received their share yet. Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time Musk failed to keep a promise.
Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads. To be eligible, the account must be a subscriber to Twitter Blue Verified.Elon Musk
In a Twitter post on 3rd February, Musk announced that Twitter would pay creators a share of the revenues for ads appearing in their reply threads. Of course, such a monetary benefit immediately made Twitter Blue more attractive. He later mentioned that the new feature is only for creators who have purchased the Twitter Blue subscription. Either way, nobody seems to have received any money yet – not even Twitter Blue users.
Twitter is completely silent on the promised sharing of ad revenues and the company’s failure to deliver on it.
Twitter wouldn’t have been the first social media platform to allow creators to monetize their content if they followed up with the promise. Other popular social networks like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have had such features for a long time now. However, unlike Twitter, users aren’t required to buy a premium subscription to unlock content monetization on those platforms.
Quite disappointingly, nothing has been mentioned about the feature on the Twitter Blue subscription page so far. Musk too appears to have forgotten about it and hasn’t brought up the topic again since his initial announcement last month. This leaves us in the dark about whether Musk is actually going to follow up and share the ad revenues or if it’s just another promise he’d fail to keep.
Musk’s poor track record of delivering on promises
Hundreds of companies have stopped spending on Twitter ads, resulting in a 40% year-on-year drop in revenues.
The non-payment of ad revenues is only another addition to the list of promises by Musk that he failed to deliver on. Previously, he made the headlines for lying about having a content moderation policy team in place at Twitter for vetting major policy changes. He later blamed activist groups, claiming he didn’t have to uphold his promise about the council due to the groups breaking a deal.
Later on, Musk made a similar promise about conducting votes on major policy changes. Twitter Blue verified users were supposed to be eligible for voting, but neither Musk nor Twitter followed up on the matter.
Twitter Blue subscribers did get some new features, such as being able to post longer videos (up to 60 minutes) and an increased maximum tweet character length of 4,000 characters.
Musk also promised two more Twitter Blue perks – a 50% slash in the number of ads and priority in replies, mentions & searches, both of which are still “coming soon”.
Since Musk’s takeover of the platform in October 2022, Twitter has suffered a great deal in terms of lost revenues and falling share prices. We’re unsure if content creators would have made a significant amount of money even if Twitter did deliver on Musk’s promise about ad revenues.
