The Result
For 30 days, I committed to tweeting every day.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Number of Tweets | 30 |
| Number of Impressions | 7,120,000 |
| Dollars Earned | $15.24 |
| Dollars Per Million Impressions | $2.14 |
Introduction
Recently, Twitter has launched a monetization program for creators, where creators get paid for the number of impressions they generate. I do believe that Twitter has always been a fundamentally good product and that paying your power users and content creators is a good idea. You want your best users to be incentivized to keep doing more. Will these lead to more outrage farming style content, where people intentionally post incendiary content to gain impressions? There’s no doubt that will happen, but I’m also optimistic that it will also lead to more people posting interesting, thoughtful, or entertaining posts as well. A few years ago Youtube had the same issue with clickbait (and perhaps they still do) but ultimately the big picture trend is that good content creators rose to the top. “Create Value”, whether it be information or entertainment or both has always been my theory about getting people to engage with your content. Make yourself worth people’s time.
My goal here is to explore the Twitter impression waters and see if posting tweets in my sphere of knowledge/expertise is a viable way of making money. I am skeptical but intrigued. I am going to post every day for 30 days, iterating and improving my approach. I will share my results here.
Approach
My approach was to be genuinely helpful and engaging. I did NOT want to be intentionally provocative or controversial to gain impressions. I wanted to create value through education and entertainment.
I found that this was relatively easy to do. Being insightful is a superpower. Here is an example of a tweet that did well, an interesting exploit of a game.
Was It Worth It?
No. $2.14 per 1 million impressions is not worth it, plain and simple. From an effort to reward ratio, you are definitely making far below minimum wage, unless you have an established brand and audience. Can it be some nice chump change for someone who already tweets a lot? Sure. Still though, I thought it was a good experiment and I learned a lot about Twitter's monetization program.