Is Elon Musk Buying Twitter Good For People Making Money Online?
Maybe, I think.
If you didn’t know, now you know, Elon Musk bought Twitter. Now I know that there’s probably going to be a bit of time between April 25 (the day his offer was accepted) and when the keys will be handed over, but he bought Twitter. So why am I writing about this? First I’ll explain some of the things the internet has taught me about Elon Musk over the past few years to put things into perspective.
Elon Musk is a billionaire. He’s become insanely successful through some of the companies he’s either founded or been involved in. Most notably PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter.
He’s known for going all in on the things he believes in, regardless of what critics might say, and is very good at getting things done.
Elon is also a free speech absolutist. I’ve included a screenshot of a tweet he recently made below that clarifies his stance on free speech.
Basically, over the past few years Elon has been pretty vocal that he was not a fan of the way Twitter censors speech on their platform. Removing tweets, shadow banning users, or outright banning people from the platform (President Trump was one of many users that have been banned) Elon doesn’t seem to be a fan.
When he announced that he intended to purchase Twitter, the internet broke. Not to make this post too political, but basically the “left” including major news outlets like CNN lost it. Villainizing Musk basically trying to play a reverse Uno on him saying that with him owning Twitter HE would then be able to censor speech on the platform. You can’t make this up lol!
It’s a bit of a shit show if I’m being honest, the left is lashing out on Elon Musk and people who align with the “right” support him in his mission to make free speech free again (at least on Twitter).
Free speech aside Twitter has been a bit of a dumpster fire of a business (at least from what I’ve read). Having a really hard time monetizing the platform and driving revenue. Many people think that a super successful entrepreneur like Musk (a guy who creates rocket ships both literally and with the businesses he’s involved in) is just the guy to take Twitter to the next level with regard to optimizing operations and monetization.
So, with all that being said, is Elon Musk buying Twitter a good thing for people making money online?
Well, I’m no expert, but my gut tells me yes!
As someone who makes money online, through multiple channels (YouTube, Fiverr, thenardiblog.com, etc) Twitter has always been a platform that seems to be dropping the ball when it comes to it being a tool to drive revenue. Other than ticket spaces (which honestly seem like a joke) there is no real way to drive revenue directly from the platform.
YouTube has the partner program which pays people out based on the ad revenue YouTube sells and places in your content. But Twitter has nothing like that.
So on surface level, I think Elon Musk sinking his teeth into Twitter is going to be a very good thing from that perspective. Getting rid of spammers, and creating better monetization channels is something online entrepreneurs should be excited for (at least I am).
The second reason that I think Musk + Twitter is great for making money online is a biproduct of him “fixing” their censorship and content moderation problem.
With my little knowledge of how that all works, I imagine a big part of that is going to be reworking their search algorithm. This excites me, other than the fact that I think free speech is obviously a good thing, I think that Musk taking a look under the hood is a great opportunity to tweak things to be a bit more like YouTube.
YouTube is a content platform built on a powerful search engine. So every time you post something on YouTube it gets indexed by search and becomes a digital asset that can potentially drive you views, and revenue forever. If Twitter can figure out a way to improve their algorithm both from a content moderation perspective AND search perspective this could be a great opportunity for people looking to use the platform to drive traffic to their other web properties or even generate revenue directly through Twitter.
I think this would be especially valuable for any user who’s started playing around with Twitter threads lately. I’ve seen some super high value content threads on Twitter, and if a biproduct of Musk revamping the company is that the algorithm does a better job at serving threads to the right users this only seems like a good thing to me.
Net-Net of this rant. I think Musk is going to make Twitter less restrictive, and a better revenue generation tool. Which for online business owners or side hustlers, seems like a very good thing! What do you think?
