Elon Musk’s new round of X Ads Revenue Sharing payments arrived, eventually

The Twitter Blue — pardon me — X Premium Ads Revenue Sharing payouts that were supposed to roll out last week have been delivered, as the @Support account tweeted the news Monday night. Asked about the delay, X employee Eric Farraro said the late Friday announcement of a delay came only once the company was sure payments would not go out.

As for future rounds, he wrote, “We’ve done payouts to a much smaller number of creators before, but scaling to thousands of creators adds new challenges in terms of engineering, operations, and support. Having completed the initial wave of payouts yesterday, repeating that process is an easier task.”

We’ve seen some of the emails sent to participants in the program, and while the payments showed up, they still lack specific details about how the company calculated the payouts, or what time period they represent, which employee Evan Jones says the company “will look into improving.”

Now Elon Musk shared another @Support post about the program and claimed that thanks to a newly lowered minimum payout threshold of $10 and a minimum impressions requirement that is now 5 million views within three months instead of the 15 million listed on the company’s support page, people who pay for the additional features can come out even more quickly, writing that “This essentially means that X Premium (fka Twitter Blue) is free for accounts that generate above 5M views.”

In lieu of detailed reports about what the money represents, additional clarity has come mostly from people on the platform crowdsourcing the available information. @xDaily viewed a DM from an X employee that the most recent payment round represented just July, compared to several months for the initial payment.

They’ve also attempted to calculate how much a view is worth by comparing the deposits to what Twitter’s analytics tools say about views, with one user, @teslaboomermama posting a Google spreadsheet saying she sent out 2,709 tweets in July that generated more than 10 million views and received a payment of $698.70. The spreadsheet shows payment per thousand impressions dropping from $0.168 the first time to $0.066 this time, but it’s unclear how much the verification requirement affected this.

Musk’s comment also confirmed that the payouts are only for views generated by accounts that have verified handles, claiming that otherwise, bots would simply spam the system, despite reports of bot and spam accounts that have verified accounts.

In another post, responding to a user whose account was reinstated after being banned for posting imagery of child sexual abuse, Musk said advertisers refusing to run ads on certain accounts or content could also affect payout amounts, “If you can find advertisers that want to advertise alongside your content, then you get revenue share. We cannot make them do this.”

As it is, the payment system pays posters a fraction of a cent per view of their post, based on advertisers who pay for the views and users who pay to view the posts. CEO Linda Yaccarino touted new Sensitivity Settings and Enhanced Blocklist settings for advertisers this week, and in a CNBC interview on Thursday morning, said of the company’s operational run rate that “we’re pretty close to break even.”