Can You Get Paid By Social Media Platforms As A Writer? Probably Not

Social media platforms need engagement in order to stay viable, and to that end a lot of them have created programs that pay creators for the posts they make. This is why so many of the people out there with big audiences make so many posts, and try to draw so much energy from their audiences; because the more attention they get, the bigger the checks they're cut by the platform in question.

It's tough to make a living as an author, but chances are good you're already on social media to find an audience, get the word out about your books, and so on... so is this a viable way for you to earn a little extra money to cover your bills while still writing?

Short answer, no. For the long answer, details are below.

Trust me, I'd be all over this if it was possible.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

All Right, How Do These Programs Work?

On paper, the idea makes sense. A social media platform wants eyes and engagement, so it puts money in the pockets of creators who get people to stay on the platform longer. It makes sense; the creators are, essentially, the reason so many people check in on these platforms where they will be exposed to all the ads on the platform.

So, how did this get botched up? Well, to answer that question, I'll go platform by platform and explain how they have structured their programs.

Please sir... could we have a little more?

Instagram

Instagram has one of the clearest cut lines among these programs. Generally speaking, you need to have at least 10,000 followers (I learned this from Little Alice, and I'd highly recommend folks go check her stuff out if you haven't already since she's being shadow banned) before anything kicks in. Once you get to that level, the site starts tracking what you share, and the amount of attention it gets. And when you start getting large views (we're talking the 100,000 to 1 million range) the site starts compensating you for that. Not much, but generally speaking 1 million views is worth somewhere between a hundred, and a few hundred, dollars.

Not nothing... but hardly the success one would expect for a viral-level post.

Reddit

Reddit is the place where I do a majority of my social media posting because (though it pains me to admit this) it is the site where I get the best return on my efforts. But the site has a program that allows people to make money off the posts... but not really.

So, if you can get into the program (not a guarantee), you are given rewards based on the number of gold other Redditors award your posts. In order to get gold, though, a Redditor has to spend real-world currency... so this is essentially a way for you to earn tips.

The problem with this in my experience is that most creators never get awarded gold. You can make hundreds upon hundreds of posts, get thousands of upvotes, and lead to long comment chains... none of that makes any difference if no one decides to award you gold. I'm approaching a quarter million karma on the site, and my account is 10 years old... I've never once received gold. From anyone. Hell, I've barely received awards, no matter how much attention a post has received.

Depending on other users to tip you is a terrible way to try to make money, especially when they have to spend real-world money to tip you via the site's currency. And doubly so when the translation rate is something like a handful of pennies per gold you're awarded. You'd be better off just telling people where to find you on Ko-Fi or Patreon.

Facebook

Facebook is second verse, same as the first. It has the same fundamental flaw as Reddit, because you can only get tipped for your content by FB users giving you stars, which is the made-up currency on FB you have to spend real money for. But unlike Reddit, where users can put gold on any post you make, FB seems to only allow stars to be used on Reels (at least at time of writing).

While there is talk about allowing advertisers to partner with you as a creator, that's currently a grayed-out option. Everything I can see at present is just another shell game where the platform claims you can make money as a contributor, but then just puts that burden onto other users, many of whom probably don't even know the effect their stars have. And just like Reddit, individual stars are worth pennies.

Just tell people where to find you on Ko-Fi and Patreon.

YouTube

While technically not a social media platform, it keeps cropping up. YouTube requires someone to have 1,000 subscribers to their channel, and 4,000 hours of watched content in the past year to unlock all the payment options. People can leave you tips through the site, pay for exclusive subscriptions, and you get ad revenue shared... but again, you need tens of thousands of views per month to make even a spare $50 or so. Millions of views is required before you can cut even triple-digit checks.

Also, to help me reach some of my own goals on this one, check out the Azukail Games YouTube channel where most of my content winds up.

Miscellaneous Sites

So, there are a lot of sites that aren't going to get a detailed breakdown, and a lot of programs I haven't looked into yet. But the trend of sites either requiring you to have absurd followings, or passing off the actual paying part to someone else, is pretty common.

- Blue Sky: No official program yet, but apparently there's talks to change that.

- Twitter: It's a cesspool of bots, fascists, and pornography, but you still need millions of hits and a blue check mark to get paid.

- TikTok: Getting a straight answer is nearly impossible... but it requires hundreds of thousands to millions of followers, and even more views, to make any kind of money.

If You Have That Following, The Pay Is Insulting

There's an old story I mentioned somewhere on this blog about Michael Jordan being interviewed. He mentioned that when he was a rookie player, nobody wanted to give him shit for free. Once he was a champion and a celebrity, people wanted to give him free merch, comped meals, tickets to events, and a bunch of other stuff. They gave it to him because he was famous and well-known, but the point he made was that he didn't need it then.

This is basically the same thing when it comes to getting paid by social media sites.

Because if you can accumulate 100,000 followers (to say nothing of a million), then chances are pretty goddamn good you can get enough people out of that audience to buy your books, merch, support your crowdfunding, or watch your videos. And while getting a little bit of extra gravy on top for having a big audience is nice, sure, this isn't something that's reasonable (or even possible) for small-time creators.

So by all means, if you find yourself skyrocketed to stardom overnight with people hanging on every word, go for it. But if you're looking for some way to pay your bills right now, you're going to have a much easier time getting people to buy more copies of your book instead of getting 1 in every 300 people in the United States to click that follow button.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

Is Blue Sky A Haven For Creators? Or Just Another Social Media Mirage?

Social media has been in something of a spiral for creators the past several years. I talked about this a while back in The Reason Social Media Sucks For Everyone (Not Just Creators), but to catch you up on it we're caught in the middle of serious platform decay. If you've never heard the term, that's when social media platforms have sucked up a huge audience, and then the people in charge start tightening the screws in order to suck more money out of advertisers, as well as users on the platform. It's why Facebook has edged out more and more of your actual friends to show you ads, it's why Reddit has ever-more vigilant bots that attempt to stop you from sharing things instead of buying ad space, and so on, and so forth.

One of the worst, of course, was what happened to Twitter. The bird site was where a lot of independent creators spoke directly to their audiences, and where they made a lot of their online sales. And Musk, like any spoiled kid with an expensive toy, has been breaking it ever since he acquired it so that it's nearly useless for the purpose it was made for.

Enter our supposed savior... Blue Sky! A website that (supposedly) functions like social media was supposed to back in the glory days. A clean interface, a suite of perfectly normal features, and your feed is full of things from people you actually follow and subscribe to. It sounds like a perfect solution, but as we've learned well over the years anything that sounds too good to be true probably isn't.

So, what can I say about Blue Sky?

Well, I've been flying pretty high since I joined!

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

What Has My Experience Been Like So Far?

I want to start with something of a disclaimer. I was never a heavy user on Twitter. I'm still technically there with just over 1,800 followers under @nlitherl, but I never really got much in the way of traction on that site. Even with participation in online follow trains, and being part of regular events like Self Promotion Days, I'm lucky to get any interaction at all on my posts over there. Usually 1 or 2 people will give something I share a heart, and maybe retweet it, but that's about it.

For comparison, I've been actually active on Blue Sky on @literarymercenary for a little over a week and change. I've had the account longer, but it was mostly dormant until recently when I started purposefully trying to expand it. At time of writing I've got only 72 people who are following me on there, but perhaps some folks reading this right now will be kind enough to push me toward triple digits. However, even with such a dramatically smaller audience, I'm finding that my posts are regularly getting a minimum of 4 interactions from people actually following me, and often it goes pretty well above that number.

So, absolute base numbers, Blue Sky is definitely showing promise, since it's outperforming the site it most resembles pretty much straight out of the gate in terms of people actually seeing and interacting with your posts.

Of course, those numbers are just one aspect of things.

Raw numbers and interactions do not a social media website make, though. With that said, Blue Sky does have some other features going for it that I feel are worth mentioning.

One of the things I find most valuable is that it has no trouble generating previews of images from your posts. A picture is worth a thousand words, and if a post you make has a black box or no preview at all, then no one is going to stop their scrolling long enough to register what it is you're talking about. When I shared my recent blog entry World's Oldest Profession... Is The Third Time The Charm? on both Blue Sky and Twitter. On the former, folks got a lovely preview of the shiny cover of the supplement, while on Twitter folks just got a bunch of text, and no image at all.

Seriously, check this thing out if you're a tabletop gamer!

In addition to this feature (which is pretty damn important if you're looking to expand your audience, make sales, etc.), Blue Sky has made statements that it won't allow content generated on the site to be used for AI scraping... which is something Twitter is apparently going to do. Blue Sky has an entire culture of blocking people who harass or abuse you without arguments and drama, unlike Twitter where not only is this kind of toxicity the day-to-day business, but there have been talks about modifying or outright removing the block feature.

Does this make Blue Sky perfect? No, don't be ridiculous. It's still a social media website, which means there are conflicts between users, there's technical issues due to the massive numbers of people they're onboarding, and there are going to be some features you want that aren't there, and there will be decisions they make you won't like. It's operating as an alternative to other websites out there, which means it is still a business.

With that said, if you're someone who has been dismayed at the state of websites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. with regards to your promotional efforts, I would recommend at least reserving your place on Blue Sky. Whether you want to build up your following and use it seriously to try to reach a bigger audience, or you just want to keep it in your back pocket, it's certainly worth taking a little bit to set up your profile, and to reconnect with some folks.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

Why Writers Hate All These Twitter Alternatives (Hint: It's Because They're Useless)

If you exist on the Internet today, then you are likely well aware of the ongoing downfall of Twitter. One of the major social media websites with years of growth behind it, the site was bought by Elon Musk, who has been doing almost everything in his power to light it on fire, and drive it off a cliff.

In the wake of all of Musk's bad decisions, a slew of other social media sites and platforms have sprung into action, trying to claim the real estate that Twitter has lost. And while I definitely endorse more social media platforms existing, I wanted to take a moment to explain something that a lot of people seem confused by. Because a majority of the challengers to Twitter's throne have tidal waves of hype behind them... but if you're a creator, they're utterly useless for your needs.

Buckle up folks, this one is gonna be depressing.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more!

The Wrong Tools For The Wrong Job

There have been dozens of sites and platforms that folks have gone to in the wake of Musk's... let's call them decisions regarding Twitter. Facebook created Threads, Discord has exploded in popularity, Mastodon has trampled onto the scene, and Blue.Sky has gotten leagues of subscribers all its own. Hell, even Tumblr saw a lurch in popularity in the wake of the Twitter disaster. And those are just some of the alternatives that have come on the scene.

With all of those choices, why would anyone actually stay on Twitter and keep playing music on a sinking ship, which seems to be the choice that a majority of creators have made?

Because these new tools simply don't do what the old one did.

To answer that question, I need to explain what Twitter did from the perspective of a creator.

First and foremost, Twitter had an established audience, and established communities. More importantly, it allowed you to speak directly to your audience, and to establish a rapport with them. Most importantly, though, Twitter had something called discoverability. For those who've never heard the term before, discoverability is the ability for your content to be found (or "discovered") by people you don't have a pre-existing connection to. Discoverability is what allows your post to grow, and spread, letting you go viral across a platform if people keep reacting to it.

While there are a lot of websites and platforms trying to fill this gap, they have none of these things. Worse, many of them are designed specifically so that they will never have these things.

Take Discord and Blue.Sky, for example. These platforms are designed specifically so that you can curate your own feed, and avoid coming into contact with subjects and types of content you wish to avoid. From a user perspective, this may be seen as an advantage, because now you have the ability to insulate yourself from stuff you don't want to cross paths with. From a creator perspective, though, it means that you have a serious handicap to overcome, because you need to either find (or somehow make) a community that is so large that its members can help support your work all on their own, or you need to somehow find a huge collection of such communities, and stitch together a functional quilt out of them all, while then posting in each and every one of them as often as you can (which can rapidly eat up hours of your time every, single day). When you add in the relative youth of these sites and platforms (at least when compared with older sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc.), and the fact that communities to help support creators are not as established on them (if they exist at all), they really aren't doing you any favors.

In short, to use these platforms, you would have to put in significantly more effort, with the likelihood that your efforts are going to generate much smaller results, if they generate any results at all. Because these platforms, simply put, do not do what Twitter did, or what Facebook, Reddit, and other established social media sites do. These sites instead largely operate as a series of closed rooms that explicitly stop fires from passing from one section to another... but as creators, we need the potential that our content will grow and spread, otherwise the embers will be smothered before we even get started.

Tumblr is the one exception... honestly, it just doesn't have the interaction and audience it would need to be what it once was.

Help Keep The Fires Going!

The issue that a lot of creators are facing these days is that algorithms in general, and social media in particular, throttle our signals to the point where it's basically impossible to be successful just making posts all on our own. And in a world where more and more platforms are moving away from discoverability, and forcing people to pay if they want their posts to be seen, we need all the help we can get.

In short, we need help from folks like you. The audience. Our followers.

I'm helping!

There are only so many posts we can make, so many websites we can join, and so many platforms we can curate. We can't do this alone... but you can help us. Because every time you leave a heart on a post, every time you share something, and every time you leave a comment or review, it helps boost the signal, and it tells those same algorithms that we have made something that other people should see. And every time you share our content in a closed group that we couldn't normally reach, you put our stuff in front of people who might otherwise never hear of us.

So if you want to help, that's how you can throw us a life preserver so we can keep treading water, and making more stuff for all of you to enjoy!

Support The Literary Mercenary

For folks who just want to do their part to help keep me making more content, please subscribe/follow me in these locations:

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!