X Expands Creator Ad Revenue Share Program to All Eligible Users

X has announced that its creator ad revenue share program is now available to all creators worldwide, which will enable all users that see high engagement in the app to make money from their X posts, based on the ads shown in the replies.

X’s creator revenue program has already provided some big early payouts, sparking broader interest, and now, all eligible users will be able to sign up, so long as you meet all the requirements for X monetization.

Which, it’s worth noting, do set a high bar for entry.

The current qualifications for X’s ad revenue share program are:

• Be subscribed to Blue or Verified Organizations
• Have at least 15M impressions on your cumulative posts within the last 3 months
• Have at least 500 followers

The X team recently updated the middle dot point, with creators previously requiring at least 5 million post impressions per month, for three consecutive months. The updated definition means that users who are generally seeing high engagement, but have a down month, can still qualify for payment.

Also worth noting the removal of the term ‘tweet’, as Elon and Co. look to gradually weed out all the bird references. That’ll take some time, but the push towards X is now underway, and burying Twitter is a part of that shift.

The only other qualification for the program is a Stripe account, as X, at this stage, only offers payments via Stripe. Creators also need to reach at least $50 in cumulative ad revenue share payment before a payout will be made.

But if you have all that, and you adhere to all of X’s regular rules and guidelines, then you can now get paid to post in the app.

Though, again, 15 million impressions over three months is a lot.

To reach that level of engagement, you’ll likely need to be posting a heap, and because the program is based on ads shown within post replies, and importantly only includes ads shown to verified users, that could lead to a lot more provocative content, or cheap response posts, being shared in the app.

Research has shown that the best way to prompt replies to web posts is to share content that triggers high-arousal emotions, like anger and happiness, with anger being the most likely to generate comments. As such, the best way to prompt maximum replies to your tweets is likely via divisive hot takes, especially on issues that are of particular interest to verified users. So free speech, COVID vaccines, Tesla, political hot-button debates, all of these are likely to drive more response, with the system effectively pushing users to share more content on these specific elements.

That might better align with what Elon wants to see in the app, as he’s repeatedly noted that he enjoys the ‘PvP’ (player vs player) nature of tweets. Maybe, then, it makes perfect sense to incentivize such activity, but it remains to be seen whether general users want to see more argument taking over their tweet streams.

The other type of content this incentivizes is engagement bait.

Posts like this, prompting replies, will likely see a big increase, now that users can make money off them.

I’m not sure that either type of content will help to improve the X experience, but the program does provide another avenue for users to make money from their content, which, for the most part, is a good thing.

It’ll be interesting to see, however, whether these types of posts eat into the ad revenue share pool, considering that there’s only a finite number of advertisers in the app, and that number, at least right now, is not growing.

The impacts, then, could see those early payout amounts drop significantly, while even with these initial payouts, the actual number of people making significant money from the program is very low.

In other words, I wouldn’t be expecting to be raking in thousands from your X presence, but any money is better than nothing, and all creators will now, at least theoretically, have a chance to get paid for their X content.

Elon Musk has also vowed to expand the program to ad exposure on user profiles as well, which, in his view, will ‘approximately double payouts’. That also seems optimistic, but again, it’s another way to make money in the app, which is an important step towards Elon’s broader ‘everything app’ dream.

It’ll be interesting to see how the payouts evolve over time, and whether the X team can make this a sustainable revenue stream.

And as the program expands, it could well become a more viable pathway for creators, if X can work out a more equitable revenue share system, while also attracting more advertisers back to the app.