Elon Musk's creator monetization program fails to convince many to pay for X Premium

Elon Musk’s latest pitch to get people to sign up for X’s (fka Twitter’s) paid features is this: if you pay us, we might start paying you. The roll out began with Musk’s favorite creators sharing screenshots of payouts in the range of tens of thousands of dollars from X’s new creator monetization program, which launched last month. After that first batch was paid, much smaller creators’ payouts began to go out last week, with many being paid in the hundreds of dollars range. Musk himself has regularly posted about monetization since the launch, reminding users that the main prerequisite to being accepted into the program is to subscribe to X Premium, aka Twitter Blue, the platform’s $8 per month premium subscription plan that has struggled to take off.So, now buoyed by the prospects of getting paid, how have X Premium subscriptions been going? According to new X Premium subscription data, not great. Only around 94,000 net users have signed up for X Premium between July 1 and August 10. The data was collected by third-party researcher Travis Brown, who has been tracking X Premium subscriptions since Musk’s version of Twitter’s subscription service launched. X gained about 16,000 net new subscribers a week over the past month and a half, just a slight boost over the program’s previous gains, which were usually between 7,000 to 15,000 net new X Premium subscribers.The data suggests that monetization has, thus far, failed to significantly move the needle for X Premium aka Twitter Blue subscribers. Especially…Elon Musk's creator monetization program fails to convince many to pay for X Premium