Elon Musk really wants users to sign up for X Premium, the $8-per-month subscription service formerly known as Twitter Blue. He’s so desperate for people to sign up for the ad-share revenue program that the company has lowered the threshold to qualify.
Now, you only need a paid X Premium subscription, 5 million impressions within the last three months, and 500 followers. In addition, the minimum payment threshold amount was lowered to just $10.
These are pretty big cuts. Previously, in order to be eligible for monetization, users who subscribed to X Premium needed to have a cumulative total of 15 million impressions over the past 3 months. It's now been lowered by two-thirds. Prior to that, the eligibility requirements were even more stringent, requiring at least 5 million impressions per month for the past three months. The threshold in order to get paid was previously $50 as well.
Shortly after the official announcement from the X account, Musk posted his own promotion of the changes. As usual, whenever he posts about the platform's creator program, he stressed that users had to be subscribed to X Premium and that only impressions from other X Premium subscribers count towards monetization.
This time, however, he went a step further. Musk promoted the program by stating that users who are eligible for monetization "essentially" will get X Premium for "free," assuming that they make more than the $8 per month that they spend on the subscription.
However, it remains to be seen how many X Premium subscribers will make more than the subscription fee each month.
Musk initially launched the creator monetization program in February, although there was little-to-no movement on the program for months after Musk's announcement. Then, suddenly, in mid-July, payments started going out to a select few users. It became pretty clear based on which accounts were going public with their earnings that the platform prioritized paying Musk's favorite X users first. In addition, the payout amounts were quite exorbitant, with some users posting payment stubs showing tens of thousands of dollars in revenue from the program.
At the end of July, the creator monetization program finally opened up to all users with the launch of a monetization page showing whether an account qualified for the program. Earlier this week, more X Premium subscribers shared that they had received their monetization payments, although the amounts that have been publicly shared appear to be much less than the initial batch of Musk's preferred users.
It's still unclear exactly how monetization is calculated, with Musk himself claiming it's "not exactly per impression."
Earlier this year, Mashable reported on the struggling subscription service X Premium, formerly known as Twitter Blue, with nearly half of all paying users having less than 1,000 followers.
