X Significantly Reduces the Requirements of Its Creator Ad Revenue Share Program

I’m still having trouble with the mathematics, and the way X goes to make this all work. But today, Elon and Co. have announced a significant update to their creator ads revenue share plan, with the necessities for entry to this system now being reduced to enable more creators to earn money from their posts within the app.

As you may see on this updated welcome screen (shared by X News Every day), the qualifications for X’s ad revenue share program at the moment are:

• Be subscribed to X Premium or Verification for Organizations
• Have a minimum of 5 million post impressions over the past three months (down from 15 million at program launch)
• Have 500 followers within the app

The full impressions element is the most important barrier to entry, with only a few users actually reaching the unique 15 million requirement.

Within the first iteration of this system, it was actually 5 million+ monthly, but X recently updated this to fifteen million cumulative impressions over the preceding three-month period. That covers for many who do drive numerous engagement, but can have had a down month out of the three, but now, it’s been reduced by two-thirds anyway, which is able to make a heap more X creators eligible for payouts from the app.

In fact, lower total impressions also means fewer ad impressions as well, and thus lower revenue share payouts. As such, the newly qualified entrants are unlikely to see the tens of 1000’s of dollars that some have received within the initial payments.

But getting paid to post within the app in any respect is a bonus, and if it offsets the price of your X Premium subscription, every thing else is butter, as the children say (I don’t know, I saw it in a movie).

Though good luck attempting to work out the method behind this system, and the way much you may reliably expect to receive in consequence.

At present, X’s creator ad revenue program only aspects in ad impressions shown to verified users inside the reply threads of posts. Around 0.05% of X users have subscribed to X Premium (formerly X Blue, formerly Twitter Blue), so there’s only a finite amount of ad exposure up for grabs, while X can be still attempting to win back more advertisers, after seeing a 50% reduction in overall ad spend since Elon took over.

So limited exposure potential, and a limited amount of ads. The expanded risk here is that rather a lot more users will now be posting rather a lot more comment-baiting posts to tap into this stream of ad revenue, which could eventually see the payment amounts reduce significantly, especially for the large winners within the initial payouts.

It could also see X get stuffed with more offended posts, with a view to trigger more response. Anger and joy are the emotions probably to prompt a user to reply online, so this system essentially incentivizes people to post divisive takes to prod them into motion.

That’s probably not ideal for overall engagement, especially considering the noted shift, in recent times, away from divisive content in social feeds.

The opposite posting type that’ll get more comments?

So while this system is designed to drive engagement, there may be a risk that it finally ends up loading X with more low-quality junk, while the indisputable fact that you might have to appeal to X Premium subscribers specifically, who’re, largely, Elon Stans, also incentivizes creators to post about their key topics of interest, i.e. Tesla, politics, free speech, vaccines, etc.

But effectively, you might have no way of knowing what type of payout you’re going to get, because you may’t base it on impressions alone, as only verified users count, and without that, there’s virtually no strategy to break it down manually, with a view to see what number of ads are shown in your replies to verified users.

So that you’re going to be trusting X to pay you the suitable amount, and that quantity looks set to fluctuate rather a lot, now that a heap more users are eligible.

Possibly, in six months’ time, you’ll give you the chance to get a greater idea of the sorts of payouts you may expect, and the X team has also vowed to share more analytics in future.

But at this stage, it’s just sign-up and hope for one of the best.

If it’s sustainable, this might be an enormous step for Elon and Co. in encouraging more creators to maintain posting within the app, but we don’t know the way sustainable it’s because we don’t have the oversight.

Possibly, if X wins back more advertisers, that’ll prop up this system because it grows, but when it doesn’t, looks as if numerous individuals are going to find yourself very upset at some stage, which could spark a much bigger backlash.

As I noted in a recent post, it’s either a tremendous opportunity, and a step in the suitable direction for the app, or it’s a short-term stunt to get more creators posting, which is able to eventually fall flat as payouts reduce over time.  

And now, it’s going to get even larger, which is either way higher or way worse for X.