Some savvy Twitter users with few followers are making extra money by linking to brands in replies under viral tweets, possibly breaking Twitter's ToS
Michael Tobin / Bloomberg : Tweets: @mattnavarra Tweets: Matt Navarra / @mattnavarra : Step 1: Find a tweet that's gaining a lot of attention. Step 2: Reply to viral tweet to point other users towards a brand Step 3: Brand pays a small fee to user in exchange for their reply mention https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Paid placement hiding inside organic-looking surfaces is old ground for Twitter: back in 2014, promoted accounts started appearing in users' Following lists as if they were genuine follows, and by 2018 advertisers could run promoted Tweets with no linked profile at all, obscuring who was paying. The Bloomberg report extends that pattern below the platform's own ad product: individual users, not Twitter, are now selling reply slots under viral tweets directly to brands.
What makes this moment consequential is where it leads — three years later Twitter formalized reply-thread monetization itself, first announcing ad revenue sharing for paying Twitter Blue subscribers, then starting actual payouts to Blue creators clearing 5M+ monthly impressions. The gray market Bloomberg documented in 2020 looks like user-side arbitrage ahead of an official program.
First-order effects
- Brands get cheap, native-feeling reach in high-attention reply threads while small-follower users collect small per-mention fees — but both sides operate outside Twitter's ad system and risk enforcement under the Terms of Service.
Second-order effects
- The practice siphons demand from Twitter's own promoted-reply inventory, pressuring the company to either crack down on undisclosed paid mentions or capture the value itself — which is effectively what the later Twitter Blue reply-ad revenue share did.
Third-order effects
- If reply-level monetization keeps migrating from platform-run products to direct user-brand deals, disclosure obligations for paid endorsements become the enforcement battleground, and platforms compete on payout programs rather than ad formats alone.
The trend: Social platforms are absorbing informal, user-driven monetization into official creator payout programs, with Twitter's reply threads as the test case.