• Twitter owner Elon Musk has announced that creators will now earn revenue on ads in their reply threads.
• Sadly, you must be subscribed to Twitter Blue in order to be eligible for ad revenue sharing.
• There is very little information about this offer anywhere but Musk’s Twitter timeline.

The Twitter Blue subscription service is available in a handful of countries and while that list of countries expanded at the weekend, it also became a barricade.

That barricade is to earning money on Twitter.

On Friday afternoon, Elon Musk exclaimed triumphantly that, “Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads”.

That sounds like fantastic news but it was marred by the addition of, “To be eligible, the account must be a subscriber to Twitter Blue Verified”.

This is the first time we’ve ever heard of a platform asking creators to pay a subscription fee in order to earn money from that platform. Sure, Twitch and YouTube have partner programs, but those are purely to determine that an account is big enough to justify sharing advertising revenue with.

There is also no mention of this ad sharing news anywhere but Musk’s Twitter account.

The Twitter Blue support page makes no mention of sharing revenue with Twitter Blue subscribers which is rather important as it stands to reason that any Twitter Blue subscriber can earn money from a Twitter thread.

This is a bold move for Twitter considering it is trying to earn as much money as possible. Sharing revenue could bring more eyes to Twitter, but it’s going to have to offer creators something more than TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube currently offer in order to make it attractive and worthwhile for creators.

Over on Facebook, video creators can also earn a share of revenue, but that’s as low as 20 percent with the rest of the money being divided up between Meta and rights holders.

How Twitter would share advertising revenue and what split creators would get is unclear. There’s also the question of how Twitter would pay rights holders when their content appears in reply threads.

There are many many questions we have about this move and unfortunately we’ll have to wait for more information.

How eager creators are to jump on board a platform which cuts off previously free access to its API, limits the reach of users without informing them, and spooks advertisers by attacking other advertisers, remains to be seen.

We are also curious to know how many creators are willing to pay a platform in order to earn money from a platform. We live in truly bizarre times.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]