After recently announcing that a new CEO would be joining Twitter in six weeks and that he would be moving to overseeing product and tech, Elon Musk made another big announcement on June 9.
The owner of Twitter said that the microblogging platform will soon start paying verified content creators for ads in their replies. The first payment block will be of around $5 million, Musk said in a tweet.
“Note, the creator must be verified and only ads served to verified users count,” Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter last October, wrote.
In a few weeks, X/Twitter will start paying creators for ads served in their replies. First block payment totals $5M.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2023
Note, the creator must be verified and only ads served to verified users count.
Since Tesla CEO Musk acquired Twitter, the platform has struggled to retain advertisers, who have been wary about the placement of their ads after the company laid off thousands of employees.
New Twitter CEO
The move also comes as Twitter’s newly named CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an advertising veteran from NBCUniversal, takes the helm at the social media platform.
Earlier in March, Musk had said that the messaging service makes about 5 or 6 cents per hour of attention from users and could raise that to 15 cents or more with advertisements that are more relevant and timely.
Many big-ticket advertisers on Twitter had pulled their ads from the platform. Around 625 advertisers including Coca-Cola, Jeep, Unilever, Merck, and Wells Fargo stopped spending on the platform since January. The development led to a loss of around $4.5 billion in advertising revenue for Twitter. Elon Musk did take some measures to fill up these losses like running a Super Bowl ‘fire sale’ offer and also participating in a brand safety campaign that promised to prompt advertisers in case their ads appear alongside unsafe or inappropriate content.
Meanwhile, the firm also recently hired NBCUniversal’s senior executive Joe Benarroch in a role focusing on business operations. In a memo to colleagues on Sunday, Benarroch said that he was taking on a business operations position at Twitter.
“I am looking forward to bringing my experience to Twitter, and to working with the entire team to build Twitter 2.0 together,” he wrote.
“Welcome to the flock, @benarroch_joe! From one bird to the next,” tweeted incoming Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino.
Musk had fired or lost about 75% of Twitter employees since his October takeover, including most of those who had deep relationships in sales and partnerships. Recently, its head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin said that she has resigned from the social media company and later Reuters reported that the head of brand safety and ad quality, A.J. Brown, had also decided to leave.
