After Twitter began paying Blue subscribers in a revenue-sharing program last week—Musk is tweaking the program.
With the launch of Threads, Twitter is feeling the competition to retain content creators on the platform. The problem is that the revenue-sharing requirements outlined by Twitter is that some people are eligible—but haven’t gotten paid.
Twitter Blue subscribers who maintain five million tweet impressions over the last three months are eligible to join the program. Musk paid out $5 million in the first round featuring cumulative payments from February onward. Twitter says the revenue-share model is only from ads served in tweet replies rather than the main feed.
Many Twitter Blue verified creators who weren’t eligible were disqualified under a legacy Twitter policy that says profiles that feature “animals or fictional characters” are ineligible for subscription. Musk replied to users concerned about the policy saying, “Consider this silly policy deleted as of now,” the tweet reads. Musk has also stated that he wants to share revenue from profile page views with users, which would double payouts.
“Soon we will share ad revenue from profile page views, which should roughly double payouts,” Musk told one person. “Note, only views from verified users count, as it is otherwise trivial to bot scam the view count,” he continues. Musk has expressed concerns that bots are scraping free data from Twitter, used to train large language models like ChatGPT. Both Twitter and Threads have introduced rate limits in recent weeks to combat what it calls spam attacks.
“Spam attacks have picked up so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people,” Adam Mosseri wrote in a Thread. “If you get caught up in these protections, let us know.” In response to user complaints on Twitter, Musk increased rate limits for Twitter Blue verified users by 50% over the weekend.