X Starts Paying Creators | #35

X Starts Paying Creators

No. 35 — read time 2 minutes

Welcome to The Soloist, a weekly newsletter where I share timeless ideas and insights about life, business, and art.

Today at a glance

• X starts paying creators

Yesterday, I opened the X, formerly Twitter, app to find something interesting in my Notifications.

Between the usual likes and replies, X notified me that I am now receiving payments for my tweets posts.

Specifically, X shows ads under posts in the comments section if a post has a lot of impressions and they are now sharing this revenue with creators.

Two things — one, it’s not clear what the correlation is between impressions to dollars as I have less impressions (and followers) than my friend Decade Investor yet our payouts were close in size. Two, although I opted in to this scheme, I don’t currently have a say in where ads show up.

But there is a broader point I think most will miss.

$85 may not be a lot of money but to me, it’s a signal. A signal that says you’re on the right track.

As many of you know, in December 2022 I left the high-growth VC backed startup world to start writing online. To shift into being a creator.

As podcaster and creator Michelle Varghoose says, you make a shift from your previous life and into your “low status” stage.

To my friends and colleagues from my previous life, who are concerned with billion-dollar “unicorn” chasing, writing online to strangers full-time for free is an odd move. To celebrate an $85 payout is even stranger. When you are on the hedonic treadmill, the prizes need to continuously get bigger, brighter, and better to enjoy any sense of happiness.

I’m fortunate that I’ve turned off this instinct for the most part.

I enjoy the low status stage.

I prefer to be excited over the simple joys in life like the first customer, the taste of blueberry ice cream from a dairy farm in a rural county far from a big city, or taking my daughter on a small hiking trail that isn’t instagram worthy but fun nonetheless.

The small, simple things.

Because I understand overnight success is a myth. It starts with small daily actions when no one is around and nobody cares, and is sustained over a long period of time.

Gradually, then all at once.

So my lesson to you this week is to recognize the ways in which modern society might be trapping you in chasing the next shiny thing and ask — what am I really after? And am I willing to “suffer” the pain of low status, to toil away in obscurity, for no other reason than I enjoy the process of learning this thing.

There’s no guarantee any of it will work. But along the way, if you stick at it for enough months, you may see that first glimmer of a signal. A small sign that says, keep going. You’re on the right track.

Till next week,

-Tom

P.S. I’d like to make an ask this week:

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