As per Musk’s announcement, effective Friday (February 3, 2023), any revenue generated from ads that appear in the creator’s reply threads will be shared with the said individual. In order to get a share of the ad revenue, the user has to be an active Twitter Blue Verified subscriber. For those unaware, the Tesla CEO relaunched the revamped version of its subscription service, Twitter Blue on December 12, 2022. This service currently costs $8 per month if purchased via Twitter web and $11 a month when users subscribe to it directly through Apple’s App Store or Google Play. Users can also get a cheap annual subscription of $84 from Twitter. The Twitter Blue subscription comes with subscriber-only features, including the blue checkmark, prioritized rankings in conversations, the option to edit published tweets, 1080p video uploads, reader mode, and the ability to upload videos that are up to 10 minutes long on iOS and Android. “Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads,” Musk tweeted. “To be eligible, the account must be a subscriber to Twitter Blue Verified.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2023 It is important to note that creators running the legacy Blue Verified accounts won’t be eligible for Twitter’s new ad revenue share program. Those with a legacy Blue Verified check will need to subscribe to Twitter Blue in order to get benefit from the ad revenue-sharing program. While the ad revenue-sharing program has already been put in effect, Musk did not share much information such as the percentage of revenue that would be shared or the payment process or how could one sign up for the ad revenue-sharing program or how many viral tweets would be required to get benefited. With not so much clarity surrounding around Musk’s post, many users took to Twitter to express their thoughts on revenue split and logistics of the monetization dashboard for creators. “What will the Twitter/Creator revenue split look like?”, wrote one user, while another commented, “how is this going to look logistically? An ad monetization dashboard for creators?” The move of Twitter’s new ad revenue-sharing program comes immediately after YouTube introduced a revenue scheme to its Shorts format, effective February 1, 2023. This scheme allows eligible YouTube Shorts creators to earn a 45% share of the revenue from the ads viewed between videos in the Shorts Feed, while YouTube retains the remaining 55%. Ever since Musk has taken over Twitter, he has been looking for ways to monetize the platform, and introducing the new ad revenue-sharing program is one of them. This program will not only benefit creators but also help the microblogging platform as a whole with more users looking to join it.
