At the beginning of this month, CZ and Peter Schiff had an interesting debate on "Bitcoin vs. Gold" during the Binance Blockchain Week. After watching the video of this debate, I browsed through related discussion tweets on X, and suddenly I noticed a question…

On YouTube, Binance's official account has 1.22 million subscribers, but the debate video only garnered 160,000 views and 5,358 likes:

In contrast, if you casually search for related topic tweets on X, like the one in the image below, this X account has only about 250,000 followers, but the view count reached 517,000, with over 4,100 likes:

Such a data gap is significant, so is X creating "fake traffic"?

Is the view count calculation "exaggerated"?

The way view counts are calculated on X differs somewhat from our expectations; the calculation is much more lenient than imagined—each tweet counts as one view as long as it appears on a logged-in user's device screen. This means that even if a user doesn't pay attention to a tweet, as long as it is recommended to your timeline by X's algorithm, it counts as one view, even if you just scroll past it without looking.

This "scroll past +1" view count applies not only to recommended content on the timeline but also in search results, when viewing all historical tweets from a specific X account, and other scenarios.

Moreover, this counting is not "unique"; for the same user, if the same tweet appears multiple times on the screen, the view count will accumulate.

Therefore, if you open the creator center of an X account, you will find that the term used for view count is not "views" but "impressions." X's view count calculation is primarily used to measure the exposure of posts rather than actual engagement (such as likes, retweets, or comments), even though the latter better reflects real interaction.

So, is this considered "exaggerated"? It is somewhat, but it's hard to say.

Let's compare it horizontally with other social media platforms. Threads' view count calculation is almost identical to X's, focusing mainly on reflecting post exposure rather than actual interaction.

In contrast, video-centric platforms like YouTube and TikTok have much higher thresholds. For traditional long videos, YouTube requires a viewing duration of over 30 seconds to count as a valid view. The scale of long video content is obviously much larger compared to short tweets, so requiring over 30 seconds of viewing is reasonable. However, for short videos on TikTok, it is not much different from X, especially on the auto-playing recommendation page—just like X—if the video appears on the user's device screen, the view count goes up by one, even if the user scrolls past without watching.

The purpose of "exaggeration" is to better reflect the content's "exposure." So why is this necessary?

In fact, the ability for everyone to view the view count of a tweet is an update that came after Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Previously, only the poster could see the view count of their tweets. Musk himself tweeted about the reason for this update:

"Twitter is far more active than it appears because 90% of Twitter users only read without tweeting, liking, or commenting."

In this tweet, Musk also mentioned, "For videos, this is just normal operation." At that time, Twitter had just been acquired by Musk, followed by massive layoffs and the controversy over Twitter's "Blue V paid subscription," with the mockery of "Twitter is dead" echoing everywhere.

It's hard to say that Musk's decision to open up view count data didn't have a "counterattack" mentality, especially since even his own AI Grok said so:

This "exaggeration" may not just be our individual perception. According to a news report from Yahoo, a former Twitter employee stated that the reason for not opening view count data was that "it's hard to determine whether a tweet has been genuinely read or just scrolled past by the user."

Clearly, defining whether a tweet has been "effectively read" is itself a challenge. While Musk may have had a "counterattack" purpose, he also spoke the truth. For tweets, simplifying this view count metric is indeed necessary because many tweets (like memes, etc.) do not require deep user engagement but focus on attracting as many users as possible at the top of the funnel.

Prioritizing exposure over deep interaction, high visibility over deep reach, is what X and Musk need most.

Finding "truth" in "exaggeration"

Of course, if the sole pursuit is high visibility, creators may fall into another extreme—seeking quantity over quality. If this happens, over time, Twitter will also decline due to low-quality content.

Therefore, view count is not the only core metric that creators should pursue. The vast majority of creators work hard to create content to achieve monetization. For creators, income is a measurable return that can incentivize high-quality content creation; view count is like a rest stop in a marathon—congratulations, you've run this far and are ahead of many others, keep it up.

To have the energy for commercial monetization, building up view count is the first step, but even with high view counts, if the content does not attract advertisers—such as sensitive topics that attract specific audiences or short-term trending topics—the income will still be zero.

On Twitter, "creator revenue sharing" is clearly the compass for finding "truth" in "exaggeration." To measure an account's influence, creator revenue sharing is far more important than view count because to qualify for Twitter's creator revenue sharing, view count is merely a threshold and one of the indicators to help creators produce viral content.

Twitter's creator revenue sharing (Ads Revenue Sharing) was launched in July 2023. Former Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino revealed in May 2024 that over $50 million had been paid out in creator revenue sharing.

To qualify for creator revenue sharing, one must first meet the threshold—verified identity, activate Twitter Premium membership, have 500 Premium member followers, and accumulate at least 5 million views within three months.

But as we mentioned earlier, building up view count is just the beginning. Creator revenue sharing is calculated based on the verified (Premium member) interaction volume of tweets (such as likes and replies) and considers the impact of different content types, such as articles, videos, Spaces, and live streams.

Thus, on Twitter, we can see a creator with 330,000 followers earning over $2,000 in a month:

And we can also see a creator with only 13,000 followers earning over $1,000 in a month:

In October last year, Twitter officially announced that the source of creator revenue sharing would no longer be based on advertising revenue appearing in the comments but rather on subscription revenue from Twitter Premium members. This move aims to encourage more quality creators to emerge—let's grow the pie together; the more people pay Twitter, the more we can pay creators.

In November this year, Twitter launched a new feature called "Bangers," which periodically selects high-quality tweets based on their real interaction volume and awards creator accounts with a "Bangers" badge. This "tweet hall of fame" feature provides another basis for us to find "truth" in "exaggeration."

Conclusion

Perhaps we are currently in a time that best proves the view that "courage is the most important quality for success." The first step for creators is to "bravely express themselves," which is also a core quality of a qualified creator.

In an era where live streaming and self-media have quietly changed the work ecosystem for years, we often say, "Traffic is money." But the first step to making money is the view count of +1, +1, and +1 behind the screen, and you, who bravely express yourself, have already stood at the starting line.

Now that you have seen how Twitter creates "fake traffic," will you start creating your own real traffic from today?

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