Twitter is experimenting with monetization on Spaces and Super Follows
Twitter launched ticketed Spaces last year as a way for creators to charge a fee to listen in on their audio broadcasts. It is still in beta, but creators can set a price range from $1 to $999 and limit how many tickets are sold. Users can also cancel their spaces and request a refund.
The feature is currently available to selected iOS users, and it will be rolled out to Android broadcasters soon. Ticketed Spaces is just one of several monetization features that Twitter is testing as it looks to shift its platform toward being more creator-friendly and make it easier for content creators to generate recurring revenue from their accounts. Other monetization features Twitter is testing include Super Follows, in-app tipping and paid newsletters.
Ticketed Spaces was initially only available in the US, but Twitter is now rolling out the feature to iOS and Android users worldwide. It is available to iOS creators who have at least 10,000 followers and have posted at least 25 tweets over the last 30 days.
In October, Twitter launched a new creator program called the Spaces Spark Program to help aspiring Spaces creators get started with Twitter. The program provides three months of financial, technical and marketing support to help creators start and grow their Spaces.
Spaces is a live audio chat platform that allows hosts to connect with their audiences and create a more intimate, ephemeral social experience than a public Twitter feed. However, the app’s popularity lags behind Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.
As part of its push into audio, Twitter has added a new Spaces tab and launched a dedicated Spaces nav bar to more users, with the plan to expand it further in non-English languages and on Android devices. The company is also looking to improve Spaces discovery by adding new topic tags that can be used to highlight relevant broadcasts, in real-time, to potentially interested users.
Earlier this week, Twitter announced it was expanding Ticketed Spaces to more iOS and Android users, inviting hosts to monetize their Spaces by selling access to hosted audio chats. The new feature is still in beta, but the company expects to start accepting applications from selected Spaces hosts later this month and begin processing them within a few weeks.
Hosts can keep 97 percent of their first $50,000 in earnings and 80 percent on anything over that. But Twitter will take a 3% cut of all revenue generated, including Ticketed Spaces and Super Follows. If a creator’s total lifetime earnings on Twitter – including Ticketed Spaces and Super Following – exceed $50k, the company will boost that commission to 20%.
In addition, Twitter will also add new monetization tools to the Creator Dashboard in the future. The new dashboard will display a list of Super Followers, a list of people who bought tickets and your total estimated earned revenue through the Ticketed Spaces monetization feature.
