Last week, prominent Twitter Blue accounts began posting screenshots of thousand-dollar payouts they received through the platform’s newly launched ad revenue-sharing program.
The program grants high-engagement Twitter users who’ve paid for verification “a share in ad revenue starting in the replies to their posts.” To qualify, users need to have at least five million impressions on their posts in each of the last three months.
Figures like Andrew Tate, a misogynistic media personality who is currently facing charges of human trafficking in Romania, took home more than $20,000. Other influential right-wing accounts like Ian Miles Cheong, Benny Johnson, and QAnon influencer Jacob Creech netted several thousand. But it’s not all sunshine and checks, a number of prominent conservative accounts are furious that they were excluded from the first round of payments — some even think the system will make the website worse.
The account @Catturd2, an anonymous right-wing shitposter whose real-world identity is concealed by pseudonymous cat, boasts almost two million followers. Previously a Musk sycophant, Catturd has soured on the billionaire in recent months, and wrote on Monday that “most, not all, of the hand-picked Twitter accounts who were given big checks, not because of their ad revenue potential, but for being teacher’s pets are becoming insufferable.”
Catturd complained that he had “tried to figure out how I could get paid at first because of the size of my engagements and the years of work I’ve put in, but now that I see what’s going on, I’m good.”
“I don’t want my account to become a suck-up cringefest,” he added.
In the comments of Catturd’s post, a crowd of verified users complained that they too had not been included in the program. “We didn’t get a check either, and we signed up back in February,” wrote the pro-Trump comedic duo The Hodge Twins, whose shared account has more than two-million followers.
Dr. Anna Maria Loupis, a Danish medical professional who regularly trafficks in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, wrote to her half a million followers that Twitter “has become so bad and unfair – Paying and boosting some influencers while destroying others.”
Loupus included a screenshot of the website Twitter Shadowban Test, allegedly showing that her account engagement was being artificially restricted by the platform. “If @elonmusk decides to keep his promises of free speech, I’ll start tweeting again,” she wrote.
The Covid vaccine conspiracy group Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, which has accumulated just short of 30,000 followers, wrote that they have “been trapped in a never-ending ‘subscription review’ on Twitter for months.”
“While @elonmusk enjoys raking in our Twitter blue fees, it seems he’s blocking monetization for our movement,” they wrote.
Turning Point USA personality Drew Hernandez complained that he hadn’t “received a penny and have millions of impressions past 3 months, pay for Twitter Blue, and been activated for Subscriptions.”
The griping from mid-tier influencers who feel jilted by Musk is not unfounded. According to The Washington Post, plenty of creators are privately irked by what they see as Musk playing favorites and arbitrarily granting monetization to accounts he likes. One anonymous former Twitter executive told the Post that the numbers used to calculate an account’s engagement metrics “are totally and completely bogus” and that it “feels like they’re arbitrarily writing checks to people they like, which is not a sustainable creator strategy.”
“Any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model,” the executive added. “This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that [Musk] wanted to placate.”
The subject of revenue looms large over Twitter. The company is facing a slew of lawsuits from former employees who claim they are collectively owed millions in severance agreements that Musk never followed through on. On Monday, former employees of Twitter Africa revealed to CNN that the company had “ghosted” them after promising months of severance, and help with relocation expenses and legal fees.
On top of the lawsuits, Musk publicly confirmed on Saturday that the company is still experiencing “negative cash flow,” citing a “~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”
“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” Musk wrote.
