- YouTuber Zack “JerryRigEverything” Nelson shared that he’d received $186.66 for 17.6 million impressions over 70 days.
- The creator says that the same amount of views on YouTube would’ve earned him between $17 000 and $30 000.
- Nelson has become the latest creator to highlight that as a platform for creators, X is far too unreliable.
Over a year ago owner of X, formerly Twitter, announced that the platform would begin sharing advertising revenue with creators. Despite that announcement being made on 3rd February, it wasn’t until the middle of 2023 that X finally started paying Premium users for the views they earned on the platform.
To earn money for posts on X, a user must be subscribed to X Verified Organisations, X Premium or X Premium+ and have at least five million impressions in the last three months. This bar is relatively low but then again, so seemingly are the payouts.
On Monday, Zack “JerryRigEverything” Nelson shared information about his payouts from X and they leave much to be desired.
Having earned a staggering 17.6 million impressions over 70 days, Nelson received a total of $186.66 (~R3 564) from X.
“For transparency – those same views over on YouTube would be worth anywhere from $17,000 to $30,000. Not apples to apples obviously. X is definitely a fun place to shoot the breeze, but for an average non-boosted account like mine, there’s definitely no money in creating content specifically for X. I could make more money selling lemonade on a street corner in winter,” Nelson shared on X.
It is vital to remember that users who qualify for ad-revenue share only earn money when other X Verified Organisations, X Premium or X Premium+ users see ads in the replies to a post. Simply seeing the post in your timeline doesn’t earn a user any money, with seemingly one notable exception – MrBeast.
Real name Jimmy Donaldson, MrBeast has been begged by Musk himself to post content on X and when the creator did so he earned over $250 000 on a single video. However, Donaldson himself admitted that those earnings weren’t possible for an average creator as advertisers saw the traction the video received and purchased advertising specifically for that video. While MrBeast has uploaded other content to X, it’s not clear how much he has earned off of those videos and the fact that he isn’t sharing that data does raise our eyebrows.
There’s also no telling how many bots are viewing a tweet inflating engagement figures but not leading to earnings. Despite Musk’s reluctance to purchase Twitter because of these bots, the owner has done very little to curb fake accounts especially of late with the recent surge of accounts directing you to find their genitals in their bio.
We also have to point out that the quality of advertising on X has become awful. While this means that advertising is being purchased, it seems that X will take anybody’s money even from, Explored History?
X is just very unreliable as the only platform for a creator and that’s a pity because directing users to a different website counts against them in the algorithm’s eyes. That means creators who are all in on X such as Tucker Carlson are forced to make use of X’s frankly awful media player. We’ll admit that X is far better at serving video these days but we still aren’t watching a two-hour-long interview on a platform that can’t even remember where last we watched until.
For X to be a platform for creators it needs to be a lot more consistent and transparent about how payouts work. We can’t have creators questioning whether their 12 million views will be worth the same amount of money month to month.
While Musk may have dreams of turning X into an “everything app” it’s becoming increasingly clear that doesn’t mean everything will work as well as it should.
