The creator economy is an economic system featuring independent creators connected to businesses and audiences through the Internet. The audience supports the creator monetarily by engaging with their content, purchasing their merchandise, buying from brands the creator is associated with or just simply, making the creator a thought leader.
Content creators are not just people dancing to the most trending songs or comedians, they’re also podcasters, writers, newsletter creators, people who make informative videos and more. But, how are social media platforms impacting the creator economy? What about Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter? In 2023, Twitter announced it would share its ad revenue with selected creators.
The goal is said to be incentivizing the best creators to bring their content to X. So, creators could, potentially, earn a living directly on the platform. However, there’s said to be a catch. To qualify for this programme, accounts must meet specific criteria. The person must be subscribed to Twitter Blue. Twitter Blue is Twitter’s paid subscription service. Or the account must be a verified organization.
It must pass a human review. And it must have generated at least 5 million impressions every month for the past 3 months. But, according to The Washington Post, it may have been that creators benefitting from this scheme may have been accounts that have an affinity for trolling. Or it may be accounts belonging to people who lean right politically.
And in September 2023, X CEO Linda Yaccarino mentioned X had paid out almost $20 million to its creator community. Elon Musk is said to have promised a better deal than YouTube’s policy, where YouTube creators would get 55% of the ad revenue. It may be that YouTubers are using Twitter as a secondary platform to voice their thoughts and promote their YouTube content. At the same time, there have been reports of glitches, spam accounts and bot activity on X.
And X was said to have replaced its verification system with a paid blue tick system. Which is said to have been exploited by trolls, conspiracy theory-driven accounts, crypto scam accounts and more. This may be leading users to turn to social media platforms like TikTok and Threads. And maybe, 5 million impressions monthly could be harder for smaller creators to maintain. And Twitter may be relying on text-based content.
