Why trolling the likes of Andrew Tate is actually earning them money

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, many controversial users who were previously banned from the platform have been allowed back on and are flourishing.

Users such as Andrew Tate have regained a platform to spout his harmful views to millions of users.

But, while it may feel satisfying to troll such users, engaging with their tweets actually earns them money. Here’s why:

Twitter recently announced it was paying out thousands of dollars in advertising revenue to users to “benefit” from their high engagement on tweets, earning more money the higher their engagement is.

As part of Twitter’s Ad Revenue sharing program, users require “5M+ Tweet impressions in each month for the last 3 months”.

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On Thursday (13 July), some eligible users began receiving notifications of how much money they would receive. The highest earner, Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus, known online as Shibetoshi Nakamoto, earned $37,050.

Tate also revealed in a tweet that he earned $20,379 from ad revenue generated in the reply threads under his posts.

The money comes from the ad revenue generated in their replies below the content they post on the platform, and is paid out via the Stripe account that the user registered for creator subscriptions with.

Twitter staffer, Patrick Traughber, said: “Excited to start sending our first payments to creators for ads revenue sharing today.

“Creators are the lifeblood of this platform, and it's great to see so many creators I follow getting paid today. The program will be expanding soon—more to come!”

The cash payouts come just a week after Meta launched its rival text-based platform, Threads.

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