Twitter Now Supporting the Influencer Economy

Twitter wants to help social media celebrities make more money from content posted on the microblogging platform. On their blog, Twitter announced plans to join Facebook and YouTube by introducing easier monetization tools for influencers using their platform for video or even regular tweets. While Facebook opted to pay millions to top influencers to produce content and YouTube set up their paid-per-month Red channel to funnel money to creators, Twitter is banking on brief ads to compensate their users.

As part of an update to their Media Studio (for desktop) and Engage (for mobile) tools, selected influencers can now allow preroll ads to appear in front of their content for a share of the revenue. This program, called the Amplify Push Program, has been available to publishers since late last year. The program is now available to a wider group of content creators, including regular users with sizable followings. Product Manager Guy Snir notes on the Twitter blog post that opting in for this feature “is as simple as checking a box prior to Tweeting.”

This feature is an expansion of Niche, a Twitter-owned network for influencers that provides a variety of benefits to its members, including advertising offers, analytics and training for creators. The revenue split from the program is attractive, too. Reports suggest that creators will get the bulk of the revenue from these preroll ads (70 percent, versus 55 percent for YouTube), but the income could still prove to be a steady source for the bottom line of the struggling 140-character social network.

In addition to the revenue opportunity, creators can now upload, manage and publish media across desktop and mobile devices more effectively as part of this update. The new versions of the tools add a single library for all visual forms (videos, images and GIFs), scheduling features, team use and multi-account management to the platform. Influencers can also track their earnings in a new section of the Twitter Engage app, which was launched just a couple of months ago to help creators on the platform optimize their content output.