Elon Musk says 'rewards will increase significantly' for creators, after YouTube star MrBeast rejected an offer to post his videos on X
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- Elon Musk appeared to respond to MrBeast blowing off his entreaties to put his videos on X.
- Musk said "creator rewards will increase significantly" in 2024.
- Musk has been trying to attract top influencer talent to his platform since he took over.
Elon Musk said online creators will soon be paid more for posting on X — possibly in response to getting publicly blown off by MrBeast for paying too little.
Musk made the announcement on Tuesday, not long after an exchange where MrBeast said that X didn't pay enough to justify putting videos there.
He didn't mention MrBeast by name, but addressed the same issue and may have had the creator in mind.
"Creator rewards will increase significantly this year," Musk wrote in response to graphic designer and X user DogeDesigner saying 80,000 creators had been paid through the platform's ad revenue sharing program since it launched less than a year ago.
Musk's tweet comes two weeks after MrBeast, one of YouTube's top creators, with 229 million subscribers, rejected Musk's offer to post videos on X.
"I uploaded, go watch or I'll drop kick you," MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, wrote on X on December 30, 2023, recommending viewers watch his new video on YouTube.
An X user then suggested he "upload on this platform too." Musk chimed in, adding: "Yeah."
But Donaldson rejected the idea, saying it wouldn't be worth it financially.
"My videos cost millions to make and even if they got a billion views on X it wouldn't fund a fraction of it," he said.
"I'm down though to test stuff once monetization is really cranking!"
Musk did not respond then, but picked up that thread with his Tuesday announcement.
Musk has been trying to attract top influencer talent to X for some time and has had Donaldson in his sights for over a year.
In an exchange with Donaldson in October 2022, Musk promised "higher compensation for creators" than on YouTube, but Donaldson was skeptical.
Donaldson said ensuring higher compensation than YouTube would be "hard." Some YouTubers were getting over $20 per 1,000 views, he said.
"I'd be shocked if you crack that code," he said.
Other creators have also doubted whether X can compete with YouTube regarding earnings. In August last year, Olajide Olatunji, better known as KSI, told fellow YouTuber Logan Paul on his podcast "Impaulsive" that he didn't think X "paid that much."
He said he'd only made $1,590 from the partnership program that month, despite hundreds of millions of impressions.
"There are going to be people who are like, you got $1,500 from Twitter? Which is cool," Paul said.
"But comparatively is what we're saying, to other platforms, for hundreds of millions on YouTube, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars."