On February 3rd, Musk said Twitter would share ad money with creators who bought Twitter Blue ‘starting today.’ But we haven’t found anyone who actually got paid.
On February 3rd, Elon Musk made a big announcement. “Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads,” he said, later adding that you’d have to be subscribed to Twitter Blue Verified to get your cut. We here at The Verge spent the rest of the day waiting for more information about the program or for official support documents going more in-depth on how the whole thing would work.
After a month, it hasn’t appeared. Both the Twitter Blue and Twitter Creators accounts have been silent about the feature, it’s not mentioned on the Twitter Blue signup page, and Musk doesn’t appear to have brought it up since his initial announcement. I also wasn’t able to find anybody claiming that they’ve been making money from the feature. (If you or anyone you know has, please reach out!) As far as I can tell, the sum total of publicly available info on Twitter Blue’s ad revenue sharing is contained within Musk’s tweet about its launch.
This wouldn’t be the first time that he’s made an announcement with little to no follow-up, even if you’re just looking at Twitter. Remember when he lied about having a content moderation council that would vet any major policy changes at the company — and then tried to sell that same story again but with voting instead of a council? He also said that you’d have to be a Twitter Blue subscriber to vote in policy polls, but we can’t tell if the feature exists due to a lack of follow-up policy polls.
Ad revenue sharing isn’t the only Twitter Blue perk that Musk has announced but that isn’t currently available to subscribers. In December, he promised that the service would cut the number of ads you see in half, and a month before that, he said it’d give you “priority in replies, mentions & search.” Both features are still listed as “coming soon” on the Blue signup page, which is still a step above the information available for ad revenue.
This isn’t to say that Blue subscribers haven’t gotten any new features since Musk’s takeover. They can now upload 60-minute videos instead of being limited to 10 minutes, and they can write 4,000-character tweets.
Even if the ad revenue sharing had launched in February (which, again, there’s currently no evidence that it did), it’s unclear how much it would’ve done for creators. While companies like YouTube have built thriving ecosystems based on sharing ad revenue, one of the key parts of that formula is actually having ad revenue to share. However, in January, Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer reported that Twitter’s overall revenue was down by 40 percent year over year as hundreds of companies stopped buying ads on the platform.