X paid nearly $20 million to content creators on its platform, reveals CEO

In a bid to become a super app, X has been also trying to push content creators to make content on its platform by offering payouts and has handed millions of dollars so far.

X has paid nearly $20 million to content creators, CEO Linda Yaccarino revealed. (REUTERS)

Elon Musk completed his purchase of X (formerly Twitter) in October last year and his term began with brutal efficiency as he laid off a sizeable chunk of the staff, preferring quality of work over quantity of workers. Announcing his purchase, Musk declared “bird is freed”. However, that bird was given the boot recently as the Tesla CEO rebranded Twitter to X, aiming to develop it into a super app, much like China's WeChat. In the last few months, X has been also trying to push content creators to make content on its platform by offering payouts and has handed millions of dollars so far.

X paying content creators

In an X post on September 29, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced that the platform has paid nearly $20 million to content creators on its platform. The post said, “Create. Connect. Collect all on X. We're enabling the economic success of new segments like creators. And so far we've paid out almost $20 million to our creator community.”

While this may seem a lot, the amount YouTube has paid in the last few years dwarfs this figure. According to a letter published by CEO Susan Wojcicki in 2021, YouTube paid nearly $30 billion to content creators in the past three years from ads and merchandising.

The post was in response to another post by X chief Elon Musk who announced a new feature on its platform that allows creators to enable DMs from only their subscribers. Musk wrote, “Being able to talk to your favorite creator is a great reason to subscribe!”

On profits and advertisers

At the Code Conference 2023, CNBC's Senior Media & Tech Correspondent Julia Boorstin was joined by X CEO Linda Yaccarino for a chat. Yaccarino revealed that from the perspective of “operating cash flow”, X is “just about break even”. However, it could even turn profitable next year, as the CEO mentioned, “We'll be turning a profit”.

Yaccarino was also asked about the advertisers that left the platform in the past. She revealed that 90 percent of all the top 100 advertisers have now returned to X, with 1500 returning in the last 12 weeks.

Recently, Musk hit the headlines when he announced that X would be “moving to a small monthly payment” that would be charged to all users who wish to use the platform. Defending the X chief from these allegations, Yaccarino side-stepped the question by saying, “Did he say we were moving to it specifically, or did he say that's the plan?”, Yaccarino said.”

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