I know Elon Musk hates P.R. and marketing teams (which is why none of his companies have either), and I realize that this saves a lot of money, especially considering the amount of press coverage that he, personally, is constantly able to generate for free.
But I feel like if he were to have kept an official comms team at X (formerly Twitter), that would have definitely helped it avoid sharing some of the confused data points that it has been, in the hopes of highlighting how good the platform is performing.
Because the numbers that it’s sharing don’t really reflect that on scrutiny.
Case in point:
X is the platform for content creators to freely express their artistic and diverse perspectives without the constraints of censorship. Since the introduction of our ad revenue share program, X has paid out an impressive sum of more than $45 million to more than 150,000 creators. pic.twitter.com/oWVrEW6r2A
— Creators (@XCreators) March 19, 2024
$45 million to 150k creators is pretty great, especially considering that this is an all-new opportunity, that’s never existed for Twitter/X users before.
Being able to get paid for posting to the app at all is an achievement. But actually, $45 million in payouts suggests that take-up of the program is slowing, or its payouts are declining over time, or both, when you examine the data a bit further.
Back in June last year, when X began paying creators for ads served in their post replies, Elon Musk announced that the first block payout would total $5 million, backdated to February. Then in September, 3 months later, X CEO Linda Yaccarino reported that X had paid out, in total, $20 million to creators via the program.
So, averaging it out, X was paying around $5 million per month to creators for ad share by September, with the additional $5 million in early payouts feeding into that $20 million total.
It’s now been six months since September, which would mean that, based on these averages, X should have paid out an additional $30 million in payments, taking the total to $50 million shared. But the total, as X says, is actually $5 million less than that. And that’s not even accounting for new participants signing up, expanded ad placement, new opportunities, etc.
So while X is touting this as an achievement, the program is actually not growing, with payouts either reducing (possibly due to more advertisers pausing their X campaigns), or fewer people taking part.
Really, over time, as more people sign-up, and in order to entice more sign-ups, the total payouts should be increasing, which would reflect more opportunity, and growth within the X ecosystem. But that’s not what this headline figure shows.
Maybe there’s more to it, and I do suspect that reduced advertiser spend is playing a part. And it is also worth noting that X, with 80% fewer staff, is doing a lot better than many expected, and it does have some positive data to share, which would better reflect its achievements.
But random numbers like this are not a great reflection of its success.
Which is something that an official comms team would have been able to clear up ahead of time. But X, as always, is taking its own path.
Whether that works out in the end remains to be seen.
