As Twitter seeks to reinvent its business model, the company is inviting some high-profile creators to share ad revenue. Described as amounting to “millions of dollars,” the company’s first payments have reportedly been issued to popular Twitter posters including right-wing influencer Andrew Tate and the left-leaning twins Ed and Brian Krassenstein. Platform owner Elon Musk tweeted last month that the first block of payments would total $5 million. Twitter has initially launched the program to an invitation-only group “who will be invited to accept payment” and “will soon launch an application process” for broader outreach.

“This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter,” the company explains on its Help Center. To be eligible for ad revenue sharing, creators must be “verified” (i.e. Twitter Blue subscribers) and only ads served to verified followers will count in measuring payout amounts, Musk tweeted in June.

The first payouts will compensate creators for ads appearing in their reply threads and are being measured cumulatively, starting in February when Musk announced the program.

In addition to subscribing to Twitter Blue, participants must “own a Stripe account for payment and have more than 5 million tweet impressions in each month for the last three months to be eligible for ad revenue sharing,” according to Forbes, which says one account, the Internet Hall of Fame (@InternetHOF), claims to have “netted more than $100,000 already.”

The program appears designed to keep the platform’s top performers from migrating to other social networks, as users reportedly have. Forbes notes that the move comes as “Musk ramps up competition against Mark Zuckerberg’s rival Threads platform.”

The BBC writes that “Twitter has lost almost half of its advertising revenue” since Musk purchased the company in October 2022, an onerous position with “$13 billion of debt to pay by the end of July.”

Vox writes of this latest piece in the turnaround puzzle that “Musk is just throwing money at popular Twitter users now.” But the move is in keeping with the strategy announced by Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who Musk onboarded in June, to focus on creator-commerce partnerships, including video.

Of the initial group of revenue sharers, Variety says Tate, a “former pro kickboxer,” has amassed 7.1 million Twitter followers and in the process drawn controversy for what he has described as his “traditional masculine values.” In addition to Tate’s receipt of $20,379, the Krassenstein brothers got $24,305, podcaster Benny Johnson $9,546 and political satirist Ashley St. Clair $7,153.

Related:
Twitter Tweaks Its New Revenue-Sharing Policy for Creators to Expand Access, Increase Rate Limits, TechCrunch, 7/17/23
Elon Musk Says Twitter Cashflow Still Negative Amid 50% Drop in Ad Revenue, The Guardian, 7/16/23