Elon Musk’s social network will make changes to payments to verified users. Now X will pay for interactions from other users with blue check marks.
Displaying ads in comments will no longer affect the payout, instead, users will receive income from the social network thanks to their blue-ticked followers. Interactions will be taken into account, including comments, likes, and shares from other Premium users.
Creators! We’re excited to unveil our biggest update to Creator Revenue Sharing yet.
Payouts are increasing and you’ll now be paid based on engagement with your content from Premium users – not ads in replies.
Here’s what’s changing:
— X (@X) October 9, 2024
Accordingly, the more subscribers with a blue check mark a user has, the more revenue they will receive. In addition, the company said that the number of Premium subscribers is growing, and therefore the revenue will also grow.
Among other things, this means that it will become even harder to find comments from real people under popular posts. X already has a big problem with bots. To get higher in the search results and in the comments, bots buy blue check marks. With these changes to payments, there will be even more of these bots. In fact, it is difficult to find at least one person without a tick under the post announcing the changes.
We remind you that X (then Twitter) first started paying verified users in the summer of 2023. Back then, payments depended on how many users saw ads in replies to posts. This gave rise to various controversial bait posts that encouraged users to leave as many comments as possible.