Elon Musk Reveals Where His Share of Twitter Ad Revenue Is Going

Twitter rolled out an ad-sharing program for its content creators Thursday, sending out a block payment of around $5 million. Creators quickly began to receive notification of their payouts, which were cumulative since February, with some taking home tens of thousands of dollars. 

Though this move -- especially in light of the threat posed by Mark Zuckerberg's Threads -- has a lot of content creators excited about remaining on Twitter, it's not exactly easy to gain eligibility for the program. Creators must be subscribed to Twitter Blue -- which costs $8 per month -- and must also have racked up at least five million tweet impressions each month for the last three months to have a shot at taking in some money. 

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But Musk -- who controls Twitter's most-followed account with just shy of 150 million followers -- certainly will have no trouble remaining eligible for the ad share program. 

The world's richest man, however, said he isn't lining his pockets with extra cash from Twitter ads. At least for this first payout, he actually did the opposite. 

I gave my share to the creator payout pool— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 14, 2023

What he didn't say is how much his share amounted to. 

Based on the revenue share amount that many creators shared on Twitter over the past day, some users ran a couple of basic calculations to determine an approximate correlation between tweet impressions and cash.

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One user found that it takes about 100,000 tweet impressions to earn $1, 100 million impressions to earn $1,000 and one billion impressions to earn $10,0000. 

So, approx twitter ad share payouts on tweets:

~$10,000 per 1B tweet impressions
~$1,000 per 100M tweet impressions
~$100 per 10M tweet impressions
~$10 per 1M tweet impressions
~$1 per 100,000 tweet impressions
~$0.10 per 10,000 tweet impressions
~$0.01 per 1,000 tweet… https://t.co/l5SUUup6c3— stevenmarkryan (@stevenmarkryan) July 14, 2023

Musk, counting only tweets (and not replies) has garnered around 420 million impressions in the days between July 9 and July 14. 

But he said that the payout doesn't exactly correlate from dollars to tweet impressions. 

"It’s not exactly per impression. What matters is how many ads were shown to other verified users," Musk tweeted. "Only verified users count, as it is otherwise trivial to game the system with bots."

Twitter, according to the New York Times, earned $88 million in ad revenue, down nearly 60% from last year, between April 1 and the first week of May, making this $5 million ad revenue share over the past six months a relatively small portion of the total ad revenue the platform has brought in. 

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