Twitter: More impressions, more money and Twitterati ‘Xclaims’

ETtech Explainer: Why Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as XIt’s screenshots galore at X, formerly Twitter, ever since the platform started sharing ad revenue with eligible paying users.Since July, hundreds of Twitter Blue subscribers in India and around the world have been posting screenshots of the payouts they received as part of the company’s new monetisation program that rewards users with a share of the revenue earned from impressions (views) of verified users on the ads placed in replies to their tweets. They have to meet the eligibility criteria of over 15 million impressions over a three-month period, now brought down to 5 million, and a minimum of 500 followers.

The first tranche of payouts amounts to $5 million, owner Elon Musk ‘Xclaimed’ on the platform in June. While there is no clarity or confirmation from X on how the amount is calculated, a few US-based users reckon they earned roughly $9 for every one million impressions. According to estimates from analytics site Similarweb, visits to twitter.com had taken a 7.3% year-over-year drop in March, the third straight month of declines. However, the site's traffic saw an uptick June onwards, data from the analytics site shows. Twitter.com's desktop traffic has increased by 0.97% in July compared to the previous month, as per Similarweb.

The buzz has made Sanjana Ramachandran reconsider getting her Twitter Blue subscription.

“I had unsubscribed from Twitter Blue earlier as I did not see any marked increase in engagement in the one month I had it,” said the writer-marketer from Bengaluru. What piqued her interest this time is the mathematics of it all.
“I’m seeing so many tweets of people getting upwards of $1,000 payouts. How is Twitter able to do this?” she asked. After all, X has been in the news for a lawsuit over $500 million in unpaid severance checks, and for failing to pay rent of some office spaces.Also read | ETtech Explainer: Why Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as X

Globally, the creator payouts don’t seem to have factored in differential CPM (cost per million impressions) rates across geographies either, some noted; a factor that may reduce earnings of non-US users going forward.

For instance, with close to 23 million users, India contributes to roughly 5% of Twitter’s user base. “While it’s the third-largest audience segment after the US and Japan, India may not be contributing to more than 2%-4% of its ad revenue due to low CPMs (cost per million impressions),” said Gautam Mehra, cofounder of ProfitWheel, an ad analytics solutions platform.

“The US contributes to about 60% of Twitter’s ad revenue, and the company is estimated to hit $3.6 billion in ad revenue this year. Going by India’s low CPM rates, India would be making around $40-60 million, which is less than 2% of the overall ad revenue,” he added.

“In my understanding - the idea behind this exercise is to get more users to sign up for Twitter Blue alongside incentivising power users, considering the launch of Threads by Meta. The moment X hits a threshold value of creator payout, the platform will likely have to cap the same, similar to what we saw with the Reel creators payout initiative by Instagram sometime back,” said Yash Agarwal, a public policy professional who formerly worked with Twitter in India.

“Twitter tried enabling content monetisation by introducing tip jar in 2021, but it did not work out the way it was designed to. This time around, some power users may try to game the system by paying for Twitter Blue subscriptions for accounts apart from their own, and getting them to engage with their posts. But it might be hard to manually game the system at scale.”

It’s still early days though. Ravi Handa, an edtech professional from Jaipur who received Rs 37,000 from X’s first block of creator payouts, said he would give it three months for things to settle and clear user patterns to emerge.

“This is the first time Twitter users have been given an opportunity to monetise their engagement. Many users, including me, will be motivated to game the system to make money off it now, since tweeting is low effort compared to making videos on YouTube,” he added.

Ergo, the bragging screenshots have set off another trend. For instance, users are asking people to screenshot tweets of controversial premium subscribers to gatekeep their earnings, perhaps because it seems easier to earn money off impressions on Twitter than on YouTube where ad revenue rates differ across content categories. Many Twitter Blue members are now screenshotting tweets of others instead of quote-tweeting them to secure their earnings instead of adding to someone else’s engagement figures.

While X has copyright guidelines in place, there is no clarity on whether this could be copyright violations. Because “it certainly would amount to the reproduction of the content and hence copyright infringement – of course, as long as the tweeted content is original,” said Abhishek Malhotra, an intellectual property rights lawyer and managing partner of TMT Law Practice.

Some users have subscribed to Twitter Blue to be eligible for revenue share but have chosen to hide the blue tick mark next to their user handle because they feel it has lost its significance now.

“I have also noticed some Twitter Blue users post more controversial posts than they normally would, like the ones dunking on others or just nonsensical posts,” said Anmol Maini, a software engineer from San Francisco who keenly follows Indian tech Twitter.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen how thoughtful stuff doesn't get as much attention as someone making fun of someone else. People are likely to be more unhinged on the platform now, baiting to earn more revenue. But this will eventually descend into chaos,” he added.

Some users have already backed off from the platform in anticipation of the chaos Maini spoke of. Varun Mayya, author and tech entrepreneur with over 136,000 followers on X, announced a “sabbatical” from the platform earlier this month. He arrived at his decision after noticing some large accounts “wholesale attacking of each other and announcing revenue payouts a few posts later”.

“I think everyone has sort of realised that the easiest way to create engagement on this platform is by verbally attacking somebody else,” Mayya said. “Incentivising engagement with a payout in this scenario is like handing out money on the streets to anyone who harasses another passer-by,” he added. Over the last few weeks, X has announced updates to its ad revenue share terms and content guidelines, perhaps to check this tendency.

Going forward, advertisers may not be comfortable being seen alongside such content, Mayya noted. “I think after a point, people will realise this has devolved the platform into another version of 4chan, an imageboard site mostly used by young males and is rife with NSFW (not safe for work) content,” he said. Maini already thinks of Twitter/X as a place to share memes now.

Handa, on the other hand, said that people will not change their core behaviour on the site beyond a few clickbait posts. “People were posting unhinged content for reach earlier as well,” he argued. “Once they realise the payout is trivial and not that easy to earn in the first place, this tendency will taper off. If not, the graveyard of failed tech experiments will notch another entry.”