Elon Musk has said that he wants X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to be the "best platform for creators." In hopes of doing just that, Musk's platform has rolled out features like Subscriptions for creators and, most recently, a creator monetization program.
The monetization program has especially piqued creators' interests. Last month, a number of X users who are part of the monetization program shared how much they made. Many users who were paid in the first batch posted screenshots of their thousands of dollars in earnings. Some payouts were in the tens of thousands of dollars. Creators were making full-time monthly salaries for just posting tweets! It seemed too good to be true, yet some people were considering signing up for X Premium, the $8-per-month subscription service formerly known as Twitter Blue, in order to be eligible for the program.
For the majority of people hoping to make a living by just posting on X, it is too good to be true. And that's especially the case after hearing how much YouTuber KSI made off the monetization program.
KSI's Twitter earnings
KSI is a YouTuber with more than 24 million subscribers on his channel. He has turned his online fame into a career in music and boxing. Along with YouTuber and WWE Superstar Logan Paul, he is a co-founder of the Prime sports and energy drink company. He posts on X regularly and his tweets receive millions of views.
So, how much did KSI make from Musk's platform over the past month?
$1,590.
Speaking to Paul on a recent episode of his IMPAULSIVE video podcast, KSI shared that he receives hundreds of millions of views per month, which netted a bit more than $1,500 from his X account, which is followed by more than 8.9 million users.
While KSI and Paul mention how it's nice to make any money at all off the platform, it's incredibly low when compared to other online platforms that pay creators.
"Comparatively…to other platforms, for hundreds of millions on YouTube, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars," Paul says on the episode when describing how much money similar views metrics would net on the video platform.
Why does X pay so little?
Now, obviously, a big addendum here is that X is paying users for contextual ads that appear in the replies to their text-based or media-based content. Contextual advertising generally pays less than the video ads that YouTubers' monetization payouts are primarily based on. In addition, it's also obviously much quicker and cheaper to post a tweet than it is to produce a video for YouTube.
With that being said though, the disparity in pay is quite stark according to the YouTubers. And it's not just pay disparity either.
How did that first group of X creators make so much money off their tweets compared to everyone else? As Mashable previously noted, that first group of users included many accounts that Musk himself is a fan of or even subscribes to on the platform. Due to their connection with Musk, it's likely that these accounts have accumulated a large amount of X Premium subscribers. Being that X only pays based on impressions from other X Premium subscribers, these accounts have an advantage over the vast majority of the other users on X hoping to get paid.
So, unless you have a large following of users who subscribe to X Premium, you're likely not going to make much, if anything, off of Musk's monetization program. (That is, if you're even eligible. X not only requires a user subscribe to X Premium, but also have a cumulative total of 5 million impressions over the past three months as well as 500 followers on the account.) Even KSI couldn't pull more than $1,590 from his 8.9 million X followers. If Musk really wants X to be "best platform for creators," he's going to have to figure out how to compete with every other platform that's paying creators more than X is.
