Can You Make Money on Twitter/X?

Is it possible to make money on Twitter/X right now? After six weeks on Twitter/X, I’m sharing some of my observations in case others might find them helpful in deciding the important question – Can you make money on Twitter right now? (For ease of reading, I’m simply calling it Twitter and not X for the rest of this post.)

To set the stage, I went back on Twitter at the end of August 2024. I decided to upgrade to Premium+ after about a week. I also purchased a Twitter course from Kanekoa the Great, someone I’ve followed online for a few years. The course is The X Accelerator. (Sadly not an affiliate link because I don’t have the required PayPal.) I also followed another account that does a good job of explaining the Twitter algorithm.

Ad Revenue Sharing Requirements on Twitter/X

In this post, I am focusing only on the ad revenue sharing opportunity and not the subscription option. In order to qualify for ad revenue sharing, you need 500 followers and 5 million impressions over the past three months. If you do the math, you need 55,556 impressions per day to hit that 5 million in three months. It sounds like a lot, but based on my limited experience I’m persuaded that if you put in the time it is very doable. I’ll illustrate this by sharing my numbers right now.

So I joined the last week of August 2024. Here is my current follower total on October 5, 2024.

I have 145 followers which means after just a month I’m almost a third of the way to meeting the follower goal.

Here are my impressions.

You can clearly see where I’ve had comments go viral (for me). It’s always fascinating to see which comments attract a lot if interaction. Just as I’ve learned with blogging over the past 20 years, you can never predict. Some of the posts I wrote quickly and threw up on here ended up being my biggest posts that continue to get daily visitors even after five or ten years. Some of the comments I’ve quickly (but deliberately) dropped on other people’s tweets have gone nuts. It’s just that way.

Tracking Content Impressions on Twitter/X

What are some of the comments that have done well for me? Here are some examples. I believe you can click on the time and date line of my tweet/comment to see the number of views on the live tweet on Twitter, even if you don’t have an account. 

Is Monetary Success Possible on Twitter/X?

Now keep in mind that I’ve done this from scratch with limited time to work on this. I’ve already learned some tricks that work for me, but I don’t have unlimited time to stay on Twitter all day and implement them. But if this was my job and I could invest 8 hours a day in this? I absolutely think my chances of success to meet that monetization goal would be excellent.

Of all the social media options out there today, I believe Twitter is the one with the most upside if you really work it and the people you want to reach use Twitter. There are some groups of people who simply aren’t on Twitter in any large numbers. Homeschooling as a community is virtually dead on there. The homeschoolers are all on Instagram, TikTok, CensorTube, and Censorbook. But other interest groups are thriving on there.

The course I purchased is very good. I honestly think if someone diligently follows what that course teaches and invests a lot of time in it, you can find financial success on Twitter. By comparison, I don’t believe that is the case with anything Meta owns (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) Meta’s platforms are endless money pits with abusive algorithms. I also don’t think this applies to TikTok any longer either based on what I’ve read and seen discussed by those on the platform. The peak earning opportunity for TikTok may have passed (at least for now). Based on my experience and what I’ve observed, Twitter is the current best place to try to build a social media following that grows and pays.

On Twitter you need to be able to write things that are interesting, especially long-form content which is what Twitter wants to promote the most via their algorithm. I have not had time to do this yet so I have focused on commenting strategically which is something I could carve out blocks of time for.

You need to be able to write very good comments that cut to the heart of a topic being discussed so people will interact with your comments on other posts. You must be able to create in topics that are of interest to a significant number of people if you wish to monetize.

With those things in mind, I think if you treat it like a full-time job and you have the right skill sets, you can be successful.

The Negatives of Using Twitter for Income

That said, here are the downsides as I see them.

Twitter is not efficient like Telegram. Telegram is just so efficient and everything else pales in comparison. It makes me sick that the Telegram owner sold out the privacy aspect of it.

Twitter, on the other hand, can easily become a huge time suck. Thirty to forty-five minutes can go by and it will feel like ten minutes. From that standpoint, Twitter is a platform that could become a big waste of time for me if it’s not offering a monetary return. I have enough stuff to do for free. I don’t need to do Twitter for nothing. It does draw you in. User beware. 

Twitter does something to you mentally. It dulls you. I’m not sure how else to describe it. Using it frequently each day does something to your mental sharpness when compared with other online endeavors like blogging or even Censorbook. I’m assuming it has something to do with the constant dopamine hits that control users of social media and video games. But after using Twitter a lot for a few days at a time, I notice that it consistently made me restless, unfocused, and mentally dull. I never feel that after working on my website. I might be mentally tired after doing a lot of work here, but it doesn’t impact me negatively in the way that Twitter seems to.

Twitter can give you a false sense of accomplishing something when you really haven’t. There have been multiple times I’ve used Twitter for a significant amount of time in a day, but when I go back to see what I’ve written, shared, and commented on that day it is shocking how little it was. You can easily spend a lot of time consuming, but not producing anything of real value. If you want to monetize, you need a plan and to implement it diligently. 

The need to constantly create content is probably the biggest negative regarding using Twitter as your full-time online base. It means constantly adding content including multiple long-form posts each day. That’s a huge amount of content to churn out on a daily basis, especially when most of it is not evergreen. If you look at the analytics of popular tweets and comments, they have an extremely short shelf life. A day or two at the most and often only hours. At least with a website people will continue to find and interact with your evergreen content for years afterward. Twitter is a bottomless pit of never-ending content creation. Once you get on that treadmill, you can’t stop or the money will stop. There is nothing passive about it. Unless you can drive people to buy products, there’s no residual income of which to speak. 

I have always promoted the idea of not building your business on someone else’s property. This applies to Twitter just as it does with Teachers Pay Teachers, Substack, CensorTube, etc. If you don’t own it, you don’t control it. Just because Elon appears to be someone we can trust, it doesn’t mean it will always be that way. So builder beware if you go for it on Twitter. Don’t put all your revenue and online presence eggs in one basket.

Moving Forward With Twitter Ad Revenue Sharing?

So those are my observations. I haven’t decided how much time I will invest in Twitter moving forward. There are some very real challenges and downsides to it for my particular situation. Between homeschooling and homemaking, I don’t have a lot of extra time. I definitely don’t have time to do a full-on blitz to get to the 5 million impressions as quickly as I would like. And because I’ve been experimenting with Twitter the past few weeks, I’ve spent way less time creating content for this website which is my online home base.

On the other hand, if I could get monetized as soon as I’m realistically able it could provide another revenue stream for our family. I always have something to say so even if I’m not making a full-time income on there, it could provide another modest bit of income. The only way I will know is to try. But I’m not convinced doing it a little bit even if you could build up a large following will maintain the level you need to make money. 

I’m still sorting it out. 

I hope this post helps others as they make decisions about their own online business endeavors!