The company formerly known as Twitter, X, has reportedly paid out almost $20 million to creators on the platform.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted this week that the company had hit the milestone along with a retweet from Elon Musk noting that creators also now have the opportunity to restrict the DMs they receive on the platform to subscribers only.
X began paying creators on the social network in July. Payments represent a portion of the ad revenue earned by the company for serving ads in the replies to those users' tweets.
The program isn’t open to everyone. In order to qualify to get paid for their tweets a user will need to subscribe to X Premium, have more than 500 followers, and have gotten more than 5 million impressions on their tweets over the past three months, which is a challenge all on its own, especially since the platform is losing users by the day.
In July, some of the first beneficiaries of the program tweeted about their earnings thus far. Many of the program’s top earners appeared to be far-right accounts. For instance, self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who had recently been released from jail on rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, took home $20,379 in the platform’s first round of payouts.
Earlier this week European regulators reported that Twitter is currently the largest source of disinformation amongst social networks. The company also recently removed the ability to report electoral misinformation on the site.
