Elon Musk Hires Snapchat’s First Product Manager at X

Peter Sellis, Snapchat’s first product manager, said on Monday he is taking over product at Elon Musk’s X (Twitter). He inherits a creator pay system that X rebuilt seven weeks ago, which pays only for original posts seen by paying subscribers.

That paying audience is small. X had about 4.4 million Premium subscribers against roughly 550 million monthly users. X has not disclosed how much it pays creators in total.

Elon Musk’s New Product Chief Now Sits Over Creator Paychecks

X replaced its old revenue-sharing scheme with the Original Content Rewards program on September 8. 

Creators now earn per “qualified impression,” a unique view by a Premium subscriber in the Home feed.

To apply, a creator needs a Premium plan, 500 verified followers, and 500,000 verified Home feed views over 90 days. US payouts now land in X Money, the company’s own payments app.

Sellis spent seven years at Snapchat, then ran product at Discord. There, he managed Nikita Bier, X’s previous product chief, after Discord bought Bier’s startup.

On a recent Podcast, Sellis called ads the best fit for making money from consumer apps. He also named Snapchat’s camera monetization one of his biggest failures.

Bier stepped down in August. In April, under his watch, X cut payouts by 60% for accounts that repost other people’s news.

Twitter Ad Revenue is Falling

SpaceX, which owns X, booked $538 million in advertising revenue in the third quarter, up 18% from a year earlier, its results show.

Over nine months, however, advertising revenue still fell 6%. Twitter alone sold about $1.08 billion of ads in a single quarter of 2022.

Neither Sellis nor X has announced changes to creator pay. YouTube, by contrast, plans to double the viewing bar for its creators in 2027. SpaceX’s next quarterly report will show whether ad sales keep climbing on his watch. 

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