Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Thursday explicitly said that microblogging platform X was underpaying its content creators and praised Google-owned YouTube for its monetization scheme.
Replying to an exchange between X executive Nikita Bier, Musk unequivocally wrote, “No, the issue is that we are underpaying and not allocating payment accurately enough. YouTube does a much better job.”
The reply came on a thread from September 30, when Bier, the head of product at X, posted, “Over the next week, I’ll be dropping some small upgrades for power users. Most of these things were quick fixes that somehow fell through the cracks. Stay tuned.”
Bier’s post attracted over 500 comments, with many pointing out deficiencies in X’s payouts.
“…please fix the monetization. I have consistently compared my pay outs with my peers and have been consistently underpaid. Happy to provide data,” wrote user Peter Duan, while another user shared a photo of a dashboard tracking payments and asked for a similar feature.
As Bier’s post gathered more and more reactions, with quite a few of them being issues related to monetization, the X executive replied, “At this point, I think creator payouts does more harm than good—and we need to off-ramp to a different system.”
More than two weeks after this exchange, the thread seemed to have caught Musk’s attention, who outrightly lambasted X for underpaying its content creators and praised YouTube.
‘Slop content’, ‘anti-India’ bias
That said, Musk’s comment on Bier’s post opened up a whole new can of worms, with users pointing out problems with X’s algorithm and how it promotes user-generated content. Some even supported Bier’s assertion that the programme did more harm than good.
“No Nikita is correct. creator payouts have incentivized slop accounts, intentional misinformation, ragebait, reply spam, bad actors and the deterioration of discourse between users. Listen to your head of product (sic),” wrote user Rod Breslau.
“The issue is you’re paying influencers for stealing content from small accounts that you continue to throttle. The payment should be based on reposts so small accounts get an algo boost and also earn a portion of the credit (sic),” wrote another user.
Another, meanwhile, compared X’s practices with TikTok: “The problem with the creator fund is that you pay people who steal original work. Tiktok on the other hand does not pay unless it is original content. You have shared my videos several times, but from other accounts screen grabbing it so I do not get credit at all. Also, the ai accounts are just copying whole threads I do that take hours or even days. We should be able to report posts that are not original. These accounts are taking money from the people who are actually putting in the work to bring quality information to X (sic),” wrote investigative journalism Anna Matson.
Some even pointed out an anti-India bias: “The issue is monetization is incentivizing sensationalism, fiction over facts, and often hateful posts that drive engagement. Anti-Indian, anti-india, anti-H1B posts (not for legitimate reasons, opinions) are a prime example of how monetization has been hijacked (sic),” wrote one user.
What is X’s creator monetization programme?
The creator monetization programme was introduced by X under Musk’s leadership after his $44 billion takeover of the microblogging platform.
Under the programme, X allows verified users to earn a share of ad revenue based on users’ engagement with their posts.
That said, since the system has come into place, there have been many complaints about inconsistent earnings, delayed payments, and unclear metrics.
With Musk personally joining the conversation around X’s monetization scheme now, it remains to be seen whether the platform quickly addresses creators’ concerns.
