Thursday provided some big news for people who have built large followings on Twitter. Elon Musk teased months prior that his social media site would begin sharing ad revenue with “content creators.”

What does that mean? It means that certain accounts that meet certain baselines are now effectively being paid to tweet.

🚨BREAKING: Twitter Monetization For Creators Is REAL💰

I just received my first ad revenue payment from Twitter.

1st check = $10K (!!!)

I would typically never share personal financial info but creators need to know that @elonmusk means BUSINESS supporting the creator economy pic.twitter.com/JliTBR2LkG

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 13, 2023

All of those liberals with huge accounts who refused to pay $8 for Twitter Blue are looking silly now.

The payouts for Twitter creators are insane. $5,000 to $20,000 for many.
🤣 pic.twitter.com/fMpjDkJZLU

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) July 13, 2023

If you are wondering if you should run to sign up, there are some big caveats. For one, you must get at least 5,000,000 impressions a month. How difficult is that to achieve? To give you some idea, I got 7,870,000 impressions in the last 28 days and I have 47,900 followers on the site. In other words, that’s a stipulation that is going to cut off almost all smaller accounts from being eligible.

Further, you must be a subscriber of Twitter Blue, which is the site’s monthly subscription service (the cost is $8 per month). That’s where there’s a bit of cynicism to be had here. Is this being done as a way to push people into signing up for Twitter Blue with the false hope that they’ll be able to monetize their accounts?

Anecdotally, I’ve heard from several acquaintances on the site who met the baselines to be paid that they tried to sign up for monetization months ago and their applications are still pending. So the question becomes just how likely someone is to be approved even if they sign up for Twitter Blue and meet the minimum engagement requirements. Twitter should probably be more open about that.

As to what kind of money you can theoretically make, that’s difficult to pin down. Right now, given that impressions are used as a baseline for qualifying, most are assuming that impressions are the equivalent of views on YouTube as far as calculating how much you make. If that’s true, then it takes about 46,000 impressions to make $1.00 on Twitter.

That means, had I signed up and gotten accepted, I would have made a grand total of $170 over the last month. But for the larger accounts, this appears to be very lucrative, with one user even being paid over $100,000 for his engagement going back to February when monetization went live and started adding up.

With that said, is this a good thing for Twitter over the long haul? I’m not so sure. Yes, it will keep some of the larger content creators in the fold and drive people to Twitter Blue with the hope of cashing in. Yet, most of the accounts I’m seeing that made out like bandits under this new system are clickbait accounts, some of which are notorious for stealing others’ work and reposting it for impressions. Monetization only encourages more of that style of posting, and is that kind of content really valuable for anyone using Twitter? Is that what’s going to keep people coming back year after year? I’ll leave you to decide.