Can You Really Make Money From Twitter?
Twitter has launched two new features, Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces, which the company says will help creators make money from their followers. Does this mean you could make a decent living with a social media app? Most likely not, unless you already have a massive number of Twitter followers looking to consume your content at a premium. Here’s a look at how the new features work.
Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces are currently by invitation only
Super Follows is similar to Patreon in that it allows content creators to charge their followers $ 2.99, 4.99, or $ 9.99 per month for access to exclusive content. What this additional content is is up to the creators, but it can take the form of bonus tweets, access to third-party community groups, or subscribing to a newsletter.
Ticketed Spaces aims to become a paid competitor to the Clubhouse audio meeting app and will allow you to charge users between $ 1 and $ 999 for access to exclusive Twitter audio rooms. Technically, Spaces, which launched in beta last spring, already exists for users with at least 600 subscribers; the “Tickets” part is what’s new (and currently only available to a select few).
To access these features now, users must have a lot of followers (10,000 for super subscribers, 1,000 for tickets with tickets), be active on Twitter, be 18 years old, and live in the United States. A complete list of Super Subscription eligibility requirements can be found here , and for seats with tickets, here . (If you qualify but are not accepted, you will be added to a waiting list until services open to more users, according to Twitter.)
To find out if you are eligible for ticketing spaces (available for iOS and Android) or Super Follows (only for iOS), log into the Twitter mobile app and look for the Monetization option on the left sidebar.
Although better than nothing, the salary is low
Twitter says they’ll only take 3% of your potential income, but that will grow to 20% if you make more than $ 50,000 on the site. This, too, is just the beginning – as Tech Crunch points out , both Google and Apple are charging an additional 30% off any in-app purchases on mobile platforms. And when you factor in federal and state taxes, that’s another 23% ( on average ) of your remaining income. Assuming you are lucky enough to make $ 70,000 on Twitter, you will see an after-tax profit of less than $ 30,000.
In contrast, Patreon only takes 5% -12% of the creator’s earnings with no additional in-app purchase fees (since it’s a web platform). For this reason, it’s hard not to see Super Follows as a more illustrious tip jar rather than a direct competitor, at least for now.
Bottom line
As with the monetization tools offered by other social media platforms (from TikTok to Instagram ), you are unlikely to make a lot of money from these apps, unless you are a celebrity or already have a lot of followers – and of course you should. produce even more content so that your subscription is useful to your subscribers.
Plus, you have to assume that you will actually get paid subscribers, which is hardly guaranteed. Twitter suggests that roughly 2% of your followers might be willing to pay for your tweets or other content, but that’s just speculation – the features are new, so there isn’t much data and people just might not be willing to pay for Twitter. One would assume that a popular web cartoon would be better than an account that mostly consists of guerrilla jokes, but who knows for sure? This is Twitter.