Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2008 and has been updated to reflect Blog Herald’s current editorial standards under Brown Brothers Media.
In September 2008, Blog Herald published a short post about a service called Adjix. The premise was simple: Adjix would shorten your URLs — like TinyURL — but display ads on the resulting page, giving Twitter users a cut of the revenue. The idea was to let people make money from their tweets by turning every shared link into a tiny advertising opportunity.
The reaction was almost universally negative. Readers called it tantamount to spam. They warned it would destroy credibility. The technical implementation was clunky — Adjix used frames instead of redirects, which broke bookmarking. And when Jeff Chandler at Performancing actually tested the service, his grand total earnings came to one cent.
One cent. That was the state of Twitter monetization in 2008.
Seventeen years later, X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — runs a formal Creator Revenue Sharing program that pays creators based on engagement from verified users, offers subscriptions, ticketed live audio events, and tipping features. Like other social media applications, monetising the platform is also a contentious issue. The payouts are real but uneven, the rules change frequently, and the fundamental tension between creator interests and platform economics remains unresolved.
The distance between Adjix and X’s current monetization ecosystem tells a story about what changes in digital publishing — and what doesn’t.
What the 2008 debate actually got right
Re-reading the original commentary around Adjix, what’s striking isn’t how wrong people were. It’s how prescient some of the concerns turned out to be.
The core objection in 2008 was that monetizing Twitter would undermine trust. That injecting commercial incentives into a conversational medium would corrupt the authenticity that made the platform valuable in the first place. People weren’t against making money from content — blog monetization was already well-established by then. They were against monetization that felt parasitic, that extracted value from the audience experience rather than adding to it.
That concern has proven remarkably durable. Nearly every controversy around X’s current monetization model traces back to the same tension. When creators optimize for engagement from Premium users rather than for genuine conversation, the platform becomes performative. When inflammatory content generates more ad revenue than thoughtful content, the economic incentives actively degrade the information environment. When the rules change without warning — as they did in late 2024 when X shifted from counting reply-based ad impressions to weighting Premium user engagement — creators who built strategies around the old system find their income disrupted overnight.
The 2008 skeptics weren’t wrong about the fundamental problem. They were just early.
Where things stand now
X’s Creator Revenue Sharing program, launched in mid-2023 after Elon Musk’s acquisition, represents the platform’s most ambitious attempt at native monetization. The current requirements are straightforward: creators need an active Premium subscription, at least 500 followers, and a minimum of 5 million organic impressions over the preceding three months. Payouts are calculated based on engagement from verified users, with the platform keeping an undisclosed percentage.
The earnings vary enormously. Epidemic Sound reports that creators with around 7,000 followers have earned roughly $300 per month, while some creators with 90,000 followers earn similar amounts — highlighting how opaque the payout formula remains. The average rate sits at approximately $8.50 per million verified impressions. At the extreme end, MrBeast reportedly earned over $260,000 from a single viral video, but that’s an outlier that tells you almost nothing about what a typical blogger or publisher can expect.
Beyond ad revenue sharing, X now offers creator subscriptions (where followers pay a monthly fee for exclusive content), Ticketed Spaces (paid live audio events), and Tips (one-time payments from followers). The platform has positioned itself as a comprehensive monetization ecosystem — a significant evolution from 2008, when the entire concept of making money on Twitter was considered distasteful.
The structural problems that haven’t changed
But here’s what I find most interesting about this evolution: the fundamental economic dynamics that made Adjix feel exploitative in 2008 are still present in X’s current model. They’re just more sophisticated.
The core issue is alignment. X’s monetization system rewards engagement — specifically engagement from Premium users. This creates an incentive structure where the content that generates the most revenue isn’t necessarily the content that’s most valuable to readers. It’s the content that provokes the most replies, the most debate, the most emotional reaction from people who pay $8 a month for verification.
For bloggers and digital publishers who use X as a distribution channel, this matters. The platform’s economic incentives are pushing creators toward a specific kind of content — provocative, polarizing, discussion-generating — that may not align with the kind of thoughtful, substantive work that builds long-term authority in a niche. You can play the engagement game and earn a few hundred dollars a month, or you can use the platform to drive traffic to your own properties where you control the economics. Those two strategies are increasingly in tension.
There’s also the durability question. X’s own documentation states that the company may modify or cancel Creator Revenue Sharing at any time, for any reason. The eligibility criteria have already changed multiple times since 2023. The payout formula is opaque and has been adjusted without notice. If you’re building a revenue strategy around X’s monetization program, you’re building on a platform that has explicitly told you it can change the terms whenever it wants.
That’s not fundamentally different from building a revenue strategy around Adjix in 2008. The scale is different. The sophistication is different. The underlying vulnerability is the same.
What bloggers should actually do with this
I’m not arguing that X monetization is worthless. For creators with large, engaged audiences — particularly in high-CPM niches like finance, technology, and politics — the revenue sharing program can generate meaningful supplementary income. And features like subscriptions and Ticketed Spaces offer genuine value for creators who can deliver premium content to a committed audience.
But for bloggers, the strategic calculus should be clear. X is a distribution channel, not a foundation. Use it to reach people. Use it to drive traffic. Use it to participate in conversations that raise your profile. But don’t build your economic model around it.
The bloggers who navigated every platform shift of the past two decades — from Digg’s collapse to Facebook’s organic reach throttling to Google’s algorithm overhauls — all share one characteristic: they own their audience. They have email lists. They have their own domains. They have direct relationships with their readers that don’t depend on any platform’s continued goodwill or stable economics.
The original 2008 article concluded with Jeff Chandler’s experiment earning one cent from Adjix. The implicit message was that Twitter monetization wasn’t ready. Seventeen years later, the platform has made it possible to earn real money — but the deeper lesson from that one-cent experiment hasn’t changed. When you build your income on someone else’s platform, you’re always one policy change away from watching it disappear.
That was true when it was one cent. It’s still true when it’s $300 a month or $300,000. The only variable that’s changed is the stakes.
