Twitter Influencers: The Money Is Terrible, But We're Not Going Anywhere (2024)

ANAHEIM, Calif.—Twenty-two dollars. That’s how much Ellie Schnitt, who tweets as @holy_schnitt, made last month from what she characterized as more than 5 million impressions of her posts on X, where more than 550,000 people follow her observations on pop culture, politics, and everything else.

That non-endorsem*nt of the former Twitter, now Elon Musk’s social-media sandbox, came during a Friday panel on the future of X at the VidCon conference. A 45-minute session saw few endorsem*nts of X (which they all continued to call "Twitter") as a business proposition but also surfaced no interest among the speakers in fleeing it.

"It has been a bit of a roller coaster," said moderator and Changer Studios Founder Farhad Meher-Homji in a fit of understatement. His fellow speakers—Schnitt; Michaela Okland, who tweets as @MichaelaOkla and has a podcast with Schnitt; and content strategist Mario Joos—suggested that while the ride had gotten much bumpier, X remains on its tracks for their purposes.

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"I originally used it to build a community, which was a lot easier before the bots and all that," Schnitt said. "I still think there's something there that's worth pursuing and a community worth engaging."

“I love Twitter,” said Joos, by far the most bullish participant. “I do think there is a lot of untapped potential.”

Okland recalled how the platform’s creator outreach teams were early casualties of Musk’s takeover: “All of those people were laid off.”She has not seen any real upside from Musk’s addition of a revenue-share program for subscribers to X’s premium service tiers.

“All that there's been is the monetization,” she said, calling that an inadequate and unpredictable reward for her on a typical month. “It's $20, and for other people it's something else.”

Okland later added that indirect monetization via advertising partnerships has gotten harder too, an apparent consequence of Musk repelling advertisers with his own tweets or directly insulting them: “I have noticed less advertisers being less willing to work with me directly on Twitter after the change.”

Before later sharing her own $22 take from May, Schnitt clarified that she had no interest in joining the people paying to use Musk’s platform after he scrapped the old verification system.

“Elon had some misguided idea about the democratization of something or other,” she said. “But the only people that were paying for it were, like, bots and weird Elon fanboys.”

But then Schnitt found herself comped with a premium subscription anyway after Musk began handing them out to higher-profile users. “They gave me a blue checkmark against my will,” she griped before adding that workarounds to hide that checkmark no longer function. “They're not letting me do that anymore, and it's humiliating.”

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Schnitt and Joos criticized how the lure of monetization had encouraged “engagement farm” behavior in replies by paying and profit-minded users looking to game the system. There were always people who stole tweets and "did engagement bait," but "now you can make money with it," Schnitt said.

Even Musk’s decision two weeks ago to hide likes of posts from readers has already earned a thumbs-down from Okland.“I feel like it's harder for new people to be seen,” she said. “You're not seeing as many new people from your friends’ likes.”

The speakers did not, however, seem to think that Musk welcoming back a host of previously banned individuals made the discourse that much worse.“The replies have skewed a little crazier now,” Schnitt said. “There's always been crazy people, the crazy people are just a little louder.”

Okland said she will “lean into” provoking people into uninformed outrage—up to a point. “If a tweet gets over a certain amount, I stop reading the responses.”

So what is Twitter still good for?

Joos voiced confidence in his ability to game changes in Twitter’s algorithm to boost the visibility of clients’ posts: "We use the algorithm to create quick tactics for quick gains."

For example, he walked the audience through edits his team made to an underperforming tweet from a client. They dropped a reference to Detroit that left people from elsewhere thinking it wasn’t relevant to them, and cut a sentence to below 20 words so it only presented “a singular idea.” The repost of the original got 500,000 impressions, five times that of the first take.

X still works for selling merchandise from Okland's @SheRatesDogs account: “I've had so much more success with that on Twitter.”

The panelists also gave a thumbs-up for how well they can still use Twitter to point an audience to other platforms. “Twitter does have better community than other apps,” Okland said. “They really will follow you other places at a much greater percentage.”

Schnitt’s endorsem*nt: “I only have an Instagram following because of Twitter.”

“From TikTok to Twitter, good luck,” Joos said. “From Twitter to TikTok, almost every single person will go.”

But nobody even mentioned the decentralized alternatives to Twitter—Mastodon and Bluesky—while Meta’s Threads only came up in a brief, dismissive reference from Schnitt about how it failed to capitalize on its initial opportunity.

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And while the speakers have suggestions for how Musk could improve Twitter—more content moderation, a bot purge, talking more with the community—none seemed ready to give it up."Clearly, we're still on Twitter. We love it,” Schnitt said. “We will be playing the violins as the ship sinks.”