• by Colin Kirkland , Staff Writer, June 28, 2023

Part of Elon Musk’s “mission to promote and protect the public conversation”––also known as  Twitter 2.0––includes a feature that may be close to launch: ad revenue sharing with creators.

On Tuesday, T(w)itter Daily News tweeted a screenshot sent from Twitter to select creators, inviting them to make money from ads shown in their tweet replies, marking a monetization opportunity Musk originally announced earlier this month.

While this may sound like a good idea, there are a few notable snags in the plan.

First, the program is restricted to Blue subscribers only, meaning that creators will only profit from replies posted by verified users. If you’ve been following the number of verified users on Twitter, you know it’s a devastatingly small percentage: 0.3% of total users pay for Twitter Blue.

Which means that payouts will likely be minimal.

Social media reporter Andrew Hutchinson noted that Twitter will make money with ads now appearing more frequently in-stream, but even more prolific and successful users will be lucky to generate enough to cover the costs of their Twitter Blue monthly subscriptions.

Based on his math, Hutchinson figures that “if every Twitter Blue subscriber was posting content that generated an equal amount of ads in their replies, they’d end up getting a tiny payment from this element every three months”––around $2.38 per month.

The bigger issue, however, looks toward a Twitter 2.0 promise Musk and his team made when he purchased the social network: “Brand safety is only possible when human safety is the top priority.”

As we’ve already seen, brand safety has been close to eviscerated since Musk’s platform takeover, with brands and top advertisers fleeing Twitter like citizens of a country under attack.

The upcoming ad revenue sharing feature depends on amplification. It only makes an impact––and barely––if a lot of people post a lot of tweets that generate a lot of replies. And if there’s one thing active tweeters––maybe our entire culture––understand, it's how to get attention online. For creators, it’s their livelihood.

The issue is that getting attention online can depend on content that makes people angry––that  hurts or offends other users enough so they reply. And before we think of the creative content that gains momentum based on positivity and inclusivity, we shouldn’t forget Twitter’s reputation of being a place that often runs on heated, often abusive message threads.

Even though Musk claims introducing users to content that may go against their political or personal beliefs can help stir productive and meaningful conversation between users, the research proves otherwise. With a depleted content moderation team, this perspective has become fuel for a research-based fire.

A study published in Harvard Business Review shows that on social media platforms, negative emotions contribute to higher virality, meaning that more arguments––more active engagement––stems from posting anger-inducing content, rather than content that garners positive engagement.

This fact does not bode well for brand safety or user safety on Twitter as the ad-revenue-sharing feature rolls out, with creators' earnings being tied directly to the amount of engagement they receive.