Monetize X in 2026? Here is the real number.

The single question we get more than any other from creators on the prospective buyer side of our support inbox is "how many followers do I need to make money on X." The answer depends entirely on which kind of money you are trying to make, and almost nobody who asks the question has pinned down the specific revenue stream they are aiming at. This post breaks down the actual thresholds, in follower count and in supporting metrics, for each of the five real monetization paths available on X in 2026. Two of them start earning below 1,000 followers. Two of them need 25,000 or more. One of them is a trap and we will tell you which.

The five paths, ranked by median earnings per follower

Different paths produce wildly different revenue per follower. A creator with 5,000 followers who monetizes well can out-earn a creator with 250,000 followers who monetizes poorly. Median earnings per thousand followers per month, by path, based on a survey of 340 creators we ran in Q1 2026.

X ad revenue share is the trap

We listed it because every "how to monetize X" post focuses on it. Here is the honest picture. X's Creator Monetization program pays roughly $0.50 to $4 per thousand followers per month for most accounts, with top 1 percent earners clearing $20 per thousand. Most accounts at 10,000 followers earn $5 to $40 a month. Most accounts at 100,000 earn $50 to $400 a month. It is real money, but it is not the main monetization path for almost anyone. Treating X ad revenue as your revenue strategy is like treating YouTube ad revenue as your strategy as a 5,000-subscriber YouTuber. The program exists. The payout per follower is low. Use it as a supplement, not as the target.

The realistic thresholds, path by path

Zero to 500 followers: affiliate linking works, everything else is premature

Below 500 followers, the only monetization path that works reliably is affiliate linking, specifically on reply threads under big accounts in your niche. You reply to a viral tweet about coffee with a substantive reply that includes a tasteful affiliate link to a coffee grinder. A percentage of the readers click through. A percentage of those buy. At $0.50 to $3 commission per conversion, a well-placed reply can earn $5 to $40 on a single viral parent tweet's reach. It scales with your skill at finding parent tweets and writing replies, not with your follower count.

Do not try for X Creator Monetization below 500 followers because you are not eligible. Do not try for brand deals because no brand responds to outreach from accounts with no social proof. Do not try for subscription tiers because no one subscribes to an account with no posting history.

500 to 2,000 followers: newsletter funnel and X subscriptions unlock

At 500 followers with X Premium, you meet the minimum for Creator Subscriptions. This is the point where offering a paid tier becomes mathematically worth it, because you need roughly 50 to 200 paid subscribers to generate meaningful monthly income and your conversion rate from follower to subscriber is usually 0.5 to 3 percent. At 500 followers, 0.5 percent is 2 subscribers. At 2,000 followers, it is 10. At 10,000 followers, it is 50, which starts to be a real $500 to $1,000 a month at typical $10 to $20 price points.

More importantly, 500 to 2,000 is where a newsletter funnel starts to work. Convert a percentage of followers to newsletter subscribers via a single pinned tweet with a signup link, monetize the newsletter separately via sponsor placements, paid tiers, or selling your own product. Newsletter economics are much better than X economics directly. Creators who have built newsletter funnels off even modest X presences regularly earn 10x what they would from X native monetization.

2,000 to 5,000 followers: your own product becomes possible

This is the threshold where selling your own product, course, cohort, template, e-book, or service, becomes viable rather than aspirational. Conversion rates from engaged followers to customers hover around 0.3 to 1.5 percent for priced products. At 2,000 engaged followers, that is 6 to 30 customers for a launch. At a $50 price point, that is $300 to $1,500 per launch. Not retirement money but real money, and it compounds.

If the product you are selling is your time (consulting, coaching, freelance work) the threshold is lower. A 1,200 follower account in a specific niche with the right positioning can book six figures a year in consulting without any paid traffic.

5,000 to 25,000 followers: brand deals start landing but irregularly

At 5,000 followers, inbound brand deal inquiries start to appear in your DMs or on Twitter direct response marketplaces. They are irregular. Expect one to three inquiries per month, most of them for products you would not ethically endorse, and accept the reality that most creators in this band do one or two deals a quarter at $200 to $800 each. Meaningful supplemental income but not replacement income.

Brand deals scale faster than follower count in this range because the marketing metric that matters most, which is engagement rate, usually remains strong from 5,000 to 25,000 and then starts to decline as the audience grows less cohesive. A 12,000-follower account with a 6 percent engagement rate gets more brand inquiries and at higher rates than a 40,000-follower account with a 1.5 percent engagement rate.

25,000 plus followers: brand deals become a real income stream

Above 25,000 followers in a well-defined niche, brand deals become a stable monthly income line. Expect 4 to 10 inbound inquiries per month, accept 1 to 3, charge $500 to $3,000 per post depending on niche. Creators in B2B SaaS, finance, and technology niches command higher rates. Lifestyle and entertainment niches command lower rates because supply of comparable creators is higher.

Above 100,000 followers in a niche brands value, full-time creator income becomes viable. Expect $8,000 to $40,000 a month from brand deals alone at this tier if you maintain engagement quality.

The metric that matters more than follower count

Every brand deal inquiry we have ever heard about from creators in our customer base mentions a metric that is not the follower count. It is called engagement rate on sponsored content and it is the median engagement rate (likes plus retweets plus replies divided by impressions) across the last five sponsored or branded posts. Brands specifically track this because they know a creator's engagement rate on regular posts is a lagging indicator for how the creator's audience responds to paid placements, which is the only number the brand actually cares about.

Creators who maintain engagement rates above 4 percent on sponsored content command 2 to 3x the sticker rate that creators with equivalent follower counts but 1 percent engagement rates command. This is the metric to protect. It is also the metric most damaged by buying low-quality followers, because low-quality followers tank engagement rate across every post including sponsored ones. If you are building toward brand deals specifically, this is the reason to pay for tier quality, not to chase cheap follower count.

The realistic six month plan

If your goal is to monetize X meaningfully within six months starting from under 1,000 followers:

1. Month 1 to 2: profile optimization, twenty to thirty tweets published, affiliate linking experiments on reply threads. Target: cross 1,500 followers organically or with a targeted growth purchase from a quality provider.
2. Month 2 to 4: launch newsletter signup, promote via pinned tweet, convert followers to newsletter subscribers. Target: 200 to 500 newsletter subscribers from a 2,500 to 4,000 follower base.
3. Month 4 to 6: launch first paid product (can be a $15 template, a $49 mini-course, or a $150 one-to-one consultation offer). Target: 10 to 30 sales in first launch.
4. Month 6 onward: begin brand deal outreach if follower count clears 5,000 and engagement rate is above 3 percent. Or continue compounding newsletter + product revenue, which often out-earns brand deals anyway.

The follower count to actual dollars translation

The uncomfortable truth

Most monetization advice focuses on follower count because follower count is the only metric everyone can see. The actual drivers of creator income are niche selection, engagement rate, audience-to-customer conversion, and whether the creator has built distribution-owning assets like a newsletter list or an email course that do not depend on X's algorithm continuing to like them. A 4,000-follower creator with a 2,800-subscriber newsletter earns more than most 40,000-follower creators. That asymmetry is the main thing to understand. Follower count gates certain revenue streams but does not drive any of them on its own.

If you want to accelerate past the algorithm's cold start phase to focus on what actually matters (content, niche, funnel), our followers product at the Standard or Premium tier gets you through the threshold where compounding starts. Full pricing is here.