After my first Twitter payout, is the X Premium programme worth it?
I admit I was a bit sceptical of Elon Musk’s claims about his Twitter/X Monetization programme (now called X Premium), but my curiosity got the better of me, so I signed up to Blue.
After my first payout, I think it is worth it, if you have a hobby account that’s popular – but you won’t get rich off it!
Is the X Premium scheme worth paying £10 a month for?
First of all, you need to do some basic maths to work out if it is worth the investment.
You have to be subscribed to Blue, or be a verified organisation as one of the qualifying criteria. Blue costs £9.60 a month, including taxes.
I’d also recommend checking your Twitter analytics before signing up. You need to have at least 15 million organic impressions on your cumulative posts in the last three months – that’s a lot for most people.
This rules out some of my hobby and personal accounts, apart from On This Day In WWE, which is dedicated to milestone anniversaries of events in wrestling, which has 50,000 followers. Having Blue has been helpful because I can post longer clips than 2’20”.
How do you qualify for the payouts from the X Premium scheme?
Looking at the last three months, which we believe to be the qualifying period (but we don’t know for certain), I was just over the threshold for impressions:
Twitter is hot on accounts using paid promotion, or bots or other ways to artificially boost your numbers.
The other qualifying criteria is that I needed to have at least 500 followers.
There are also caveats in the small print of X Ads Revenue Sharing terms – I had copyright claims for the footage I used from Sony India, which I successfully appealed, but that could count against you.
Are your Twitter/X posts interesting enough to make money?
Also buried in the small print is that the ad revenue sharing programme relates to the organic impressions of ads shown in replies from veriified users (ie fellow blue tickers) to the content you post.
So, if you’re generating a lot of replies to your content, great. That doesn’t mean you have to do clickbaity posts.
My wrestling content is aimed to stimulate reactions to memories – good or bad – about moments in wrestling history. Did you love a match – or hate a storyline? Optimising content to provoke genuine emotional reactions tends to do well.
And you are likely to need to post a lot to generate sufficient replies, unless something goes particularly viral.
Do you want to give Twitter/X your bank details?
The other consideration is that you need to have a Stripe account to receive payments. This requires using a bank account, which some people may be uncomfortable with.
Musk has talked about building financial services into Twitter, which has concerned some people – and you do connect your Stripe account with your Twitter account – but Stripe is a separate, and by all accounts, a secure organisation.
So how much did I make from X Monetization?
Drum roll… $202 – or £158.
Minus £30 of Twitter Blue payments, that’s £120. A nice amount for something I genuinely enjoy doing.
So if you’re hoping your meme account will make you millions…sorry.
But…
Again, Twitter makes clear in its terms that you have to have generated more than $50 (£40) to qualify for a payout.
And “X may modify or cancel the Program at any time in its sole discretion, including for business, financial, or legal reasons” – so this may be the peak in terms of payouts. They haven’t shown how they work out the amount they pay you.
Payouts are made “at a regular cadence” – it’s not clear how often.
So…
If you enjoy Twitter and posting what you do, and you get high levels of impressions, then it’s worth doing.
It’s more than any other social account is doing to help creators (unless you want to sell things through a shop on TikTok.)
Article updated to rename the Twitter Blue programme to X Premium