Twitter is now paying Creators for a portion of the ad revenue earned from ads served in replies to their posts. Users who subscribe to Twitter Blue and have gotten 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 payouts from creators will total $5 millionand it will be cumulative from the month of February onwards. These payments will be delivered through Stripe.

From what some great creators are sharing on Twitter, these payouts are substantial. Writer Brian Krassenstein, who has some 750,000 followers, claims Twitter paid him $24,305.

SK, a creator with some 230,000 followers, claims to have won $2,236 from Twitter; Political commentator Benny Johnson, with 1.7 million followers, says he won $9,546.

Twitter payouts are determined by tweet impressions. Babylon Bee writer Ashley St. Clair (710,000 followers) said she earned $7,153, and according to her “math napkin”, had about 840 million impressions from February to July. That would make your rate $0.0085 CPM (cost per thousand) or $8.52 per million impressions. It is not clear whether or not individual CPMs change from user to user.

Twitter is monetizing ads served in Tweet replies, as it would be difficult to determine which creators will pay for ads served in the feed (this is the same issue as short-form video platforms). like tik tok they are running into revenue sharing). This of course means that creators will want to incentivize users to reply to their tweets. At best this would inspire a conversation, but as we know from platforms like Facebookextreme emotions drive the most participation.

As Farzad Mesbahi tweeted: “The more haters you get on your replies, the more money you make on Twitter.” Musk responded: “poetic justice.”

There are limits on what types of creators can earn money through this program. According to Twitter content monetization standards, sexual content cannot be monetized. This is a blow to Twitter’s sex worker community, as Twitter is one of the only major social platforms where adult content is allowed. Twitter will also not allow creators to monetize content about “pyramid schemes or get-rich-quick schemes” (looking at you crypto spamers), violence, criminal behavior, gambling, or drugs and alcohol. If a creator tries to monetize copyrighted content that they don’t own, that’s also a red flag.

While Twitter pays out $5 million to creators, the company was recently sued for $500 million unpaid severance checks to employees who were laid off in the midst of the Musk takeover. Twitter has also did not pay the rent in their office spaces.