Twitter will soon begin paying verified content creators for ads in their replies, with the first payment block of around $5 million (roughly Rs. 41 crore), company owner Elon Musk said on Friday.
“Note, the creator must be verified and only ads served to verified users count,” Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter last October, said in a tweet.
Since Tesla CEO Musk acquired Twitter, the platform has struggled to retain advertisers, who have been wary about the placement of their ads after the company laid off thousands of employees.
The move comes as Twitter’s newly named CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an advertising veteran from NBCUniversal, is about to take the helm at the social media platform.
In March, Musk said that the messaging service makes about 5 or 6 cents per hour of attention from users and could raise that to 15 cents or more with advertisements that are more relevant and timely.
Meanwhile, Twitter alongside Meta Platforms‘ Instagram, Alphabet‘s YouTube, and TikTok could face regulatory action after European consumer group BEUC complained to the European Commission and consumer authorities that the online platforms allegedly facilitate the misleading promotion of crypto assets.
US regulators suing crypto platforms Coinbase and Binance, along with last year’s collapse of FTX, have sparked concerns over consumer protection related to crypto assets such as Bitcoin and ether.
The European Union last month adopted the world’s first comprehensive set of rules for cryptoasset regulation (MiCa).
BEUC in its complaint filed on Thursday said the proliferation of misleading advertisements of crypto assets on the social media platforms is an unfair commercial practice as it exposes consumers to serious harm such as the loss of significant amounts of money.
© Thomson Reuters 2023