Should Medium be worried?
From that bat, I’m going to say “no”. Medium should not be worried. Sure, it’s easier to now get money on X compared to Twitter. However, the window is essentially open to any one with a fairly popular following who could tweet about anything from news to “I pooped today”:
X Premium eligibility. Screenshot captured by Author (https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/creator-ads-revenue-sharing)
And, when they specify you need 5 million “impressions”, that’s not proper views like on Vocal & Medium (where someone stopped to read your content). Impressions are simply people scrolling through their feeds and your post just so happened to fall in their trough of passing information.
Sure, that’s great for us creators who want to make money online. However, this also means all the popular “I pooped today” X’s (ugh, rebranding…) will be rolling in the dough as well.
There’s also no upfront payment as well after you hit the 5M impressions (normally $8/month). Unlike with Medium’s consistent $5/month regardless of your following. You can just gather enough followers, post “I pooped today” and other random, quick posts, then rack in the money once you cross 5M impressions.
Say goodbye to quality.
At least with Medium, you have to put in some effort before you really notice the payouts. Share some knowledge, whine about a major/minor problem, discuss different ideas. Not just mash “I pooped today” posts into the Medium algorithms.
Won’t be long before advertisers get fed up with the “I pooped today” posts. Might be funny/meme-y right now, but not all brands want to be funny/meme-y. I can almost see X becoming more like Medium if it gets really bad. More reliant on all the “X Premium” paying subscribers. Might have to take away the “free” Premium membership.
That or take X Premium and monetization from all the “I pooped today” accounts. That would solve a few problems too.
Will see what happens. The “X Premium” monetization program is still early on. Maybe things will get really good.
Maybe I’ll have to start posting “I pooped today” on X.
