A woman who went viral after tweeting about an unpleasant experience she had on a flight has revealed that she made a tidy sum of money from the controversy and engagement that her post received.
On December 26, Megan Jewell, a Texas woman with a little more than 125,000 combined followers across social media platforms, made a post on X that said she endured hours of pettiness after she refused to swap seats on a plane.
Jewell claimed that a father asked to take her aisle seat in exchange for his middle seat so that he could be closer to his wife and kids who were across the aisle.
She added that after “politely” declining his request, the unnamed dad kept reaching across her to his family on the other side of the aisle in an apparent bid to punish her.
The post went viral, drawing 4.2million views, 81,000 likes and hundreds of comments, as users weighed in with their opinions on plane etiquette.
On Friday, Jewell made a follow-up tweet explaining that the engagement received by the tweet she made the day after Christmas has yielded her a nice payday.
“I just wanted to say a big thank you to everybody that sent me death threats and called me a pretentious w***e because I didn’t switch seats on that airplane,” she wrote.
“The payout from X just booked my ticket to Europe this spring. Oh and I still won’t be switching seats with anyone. Hope this helps,” the tweet concluded.
Most social media sites offer users a cut of advertising revenue if their accounts fuel a large amount of engagement with the platform. YouTube, for example, has been doing it for almost two decades.
The monetization system for creators on X is much newer, however, as it rolled out in July 2023. Many people are not even aware that users can make money with their tweets.
According to X’s Creator Monetization Standards, there are many prerequisites to make money on the site.
Creators must be at least 18 years old, have an account that has been active for at least three months and have a profile with a picture, account name, biography and header image.
They must also complete identity verification, have a verified email address, be in good standing with X and have a premium subscription – which means paying the platform at least $8 per month.
Additionally, creators must not have a state-affiliated media account, they need to be in a country where monetization is available, have two-factor authentication enabled and connect a verified Stripe account to receive payments.
If all of those rigorous eligibility requirements are met, then users can get paid if they maintain more than 2,000 active followers with premium subscriptions and their posts receive at least five million impressions within three months.
Jewell’s first viral tweet received more than four million views, which by itself brought her more than 80 percent of the way to that five million impression requirement.
Follow-up posts that she made about the situation and responses to users in the comments of her viral post earned her hundreds of thousands more impressions.
The exact amount of money that X doles out for engagement with posts is unclear and likely dependent on a variety of factors.
Jewell did not say exactly how much she earned from the platform, but she said it was enough to book a flight to Europe.
She also did not say where exactly she will be flying into, but round-trip tickets from the capital of Texas, Austin, to European cities such as Paris, Barcelona and Rome, range from around $600 to around $850.
That is likely in the range of what Jewell made – some nice compensation for the rude tweets directed at her because of the controversial viral post.
The Daily Mail has reached out to Jewel for comment and additional details about how much money she earned.
By ELLIOT FORCE/Daily Mail
