Elon Musk says Twitter will start sharing ad revenue with creators if they pay for Twitter Blue. He didn’t explain further.

Other big changes are afoot on Elon Musk’s Twitter.

On Friday, Musk announced via his Twitter account that the company would start sharing ad revenue with content creators on the platform starting today. He said creators get paid for the ads that appear in replies to their tweets.

In a follow-up post, Musk crept in an additional caveat: the creator must first sign up for a paid Twitter Blue subscription ($8 on web, $11 on iOS devices) before participating in the ad revenue sharing program.

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Twitter Blue requirement aside, that sounds very good for creators! For a long time, one of the biggest criticisms of the company from Twitter power users has been that it’s the only major platform that doesn’t actually pay creators. YouTube, Facebook, and even TikTok all have some sort of ad revenue-based monetization program open to the public. According to Musk, that’s finally changing.

Now you might be wondering, how do I sign up? Well, we don’t know. Aside from the Twitter Blue requirement, Musk didn’t provide any details. There is no additional information about this program, which is said to start today – neither from Musk nor from any of the official Twitter accounts.

If you are a YouTuber, you should be extremely careful with it for now. Twitter hasn’t shared what the revenue share is, e.g. B. what percentage each side would receive. The company hasn’t explained whether the payment is based on impressions (ie, how many times an ad is viewed) or whether it’s based on how many times an ad is clicked. Would revenue share actually be based on engagement e.g. B. how many interactions like likes or retweets an ad has received? Who knows?

Twitter also gave no details How Creators would be paid. Creators didn’t receive notifications about how to provide Twitter with their bank account information for payments. There was no news on where developers can monitor their revenue analytics or even sign up for the monetization program. Will every Twitter Blue subscriber be eligible, or will there be follower count requirements like other platforms’ revenue share programs? Again, these are all very good questions yet to be answered on the day this program appears to begin.

In any case, if you want to get paid, you have to pay Twitter first — a fact Musk gets criticized by users(Opens in a new window). No doubt there will be people signing up for Twitter Blue to monetize their content. But without details about the program, it’s impossible to say if it’s even worth it. For example, if you pay $8 or $11 a month and only make pennies during that time frame, why bother if the sole purpose of your subscription is to make money?

Twitter has previously made monetization models available to users. The Subscribe feature, formerly known as Super Follows, allows users to subscribe to paywall tweets directly with specific users. Major publishing partners were also able to monetize their videos with pre-roll advertising, but this program was fairly exclusive and not open to most users.

Musk’s announcement raised more questions than answers, and perhaps none of those questions are more pressing than these: Can Twitter even afford to run a revenue share program right now? The company has lost about half of its top advertisers since its Musk acquisition yielded results big drop(Opens in a new window) of advertising revenue.

It will certainly be interesting to see exactly how these joint revenues flow to users whenever the platform decides to reveal this crucial information.