Saturday night’s massive broadcast to over 640 live viewers on Twitter/X was an amazing feat for Jose “Chille” DeCastro and may have brought him false hope that the large turnout was going to jump start his new Twitter empire.
DeCastro’s been pushing leaving the confines of YouTube for literally anywhere else in the past few months, complaining of limited monetization opportunities based on the uncensored content he features on his channel.
One thing to note is that he’s not wrong about YouTube’s recent limits on monetizing content. Since August, YouTube has been a lot stricter in determining content that is suitable for advertising. We know this because our own benign near daily livestreams featuring Karens and drunk people are constantly flagged for limited advertising.
Even when we don’t show violence and most of the show is talking over the videos, we have a near automatic flag to limited monetization. We appeal, and 2-3 days later we receive full monetization again… after the opportunity to earn advertising revenue is pretty much lost since our viewers have moved on to our next live and don’t tend to go back and watch our old stuff.
YouTube is brutal with live content, but at the same time, live shows bring the opportunity for creators to directly advertise to a live audience. While there’s a delay in payouts of up to a month and YouTube does get a cut, encouraging members to buy super chats and memberships can make up for the loss in revenue from being limited.
Right now, we’re getting between $4.00 and $8.00 per 1,000 views on our channel. But we’re getting about $8.00 for every $10.00 super chat. With a channel as small as ours, that $8.00 super chat is probably more money than the video will bring in for its entire lifetime.
Bigger channels like DeCastro’s may not be bringing in revenue from advertising when they’re limited, but DeCastro’s last two live streams alone have brought in $290.00 in super chats. That’s about $100.00 more than we make off YouTube in a month, and that’s just from two days. His overall take in super chats for the month is $990.00 so far. Plus, roughly $354.00 based on a rate of $6.00 per 1,000 views, with 59,000 total views if those same videos are monetized.
The money is not and immediate payout, and YouTube still must take their cut, but for 9 days of work in the month, that’s between $990.00 and $1,344.00 in possible cash in his pocket next month that he won’t have if he switches to an exclusive Twitter/X feed.
Twitter/X does not offer super chats but does allow tips. Tips are essentially done via the profile of the creator and all the money tipped goes to the creator as payments are made via a third-party application (cashapp, paypal, etc.) and not through Twitter/X itself. The hoops you must go through to give a tip discourages the practice more than anything and we do not hold out hope that DeCastro can explain to his audience how to hand him money that way.
While Twitter/X offer paid Super Followers, the fact is that there are long waiting times just to be considered for that program. Super Followers are pretty much the same as paid memberships on YouTube or Patreon. They can’t be gifted en masse, like on YouTube, but the cut taken by Twitter/X is around 3% for most creators.
Revenue from Twitter/X’s Ads Revenue Sharing program is a lot harder to calculate. Essentially it is based on organic impressions from verified Twitter/X users leaving impressions in the comment section of your tweets.
A tweet may be “viral” but the only money a creator is going to make will come from those people with paid memberships that see the content. According to epidemicsound.com, at best, a creator is making $8.50 per million paid impressions to a tweet.
DeCastro is currently averaging about 700-1,000 impressions per tweet. Even if they were all from paid members, the return from the invested time in making the tweet is not enough to justify the effort. There’s no money there and DeCastro’s past history shows that he won’t be able to amass the paid viewership he needs in time to pay bills, especially if he leaves YouTube.
Let’s not forget in just the past six week’s he’s failed multiple times to leave or rebrand on YouTube:
- Patreon. Currently stands at 53 members and 4 paid members. Offering memberships as low as $10.00 a month to see “unedited” content (otherwise charging $10.00 to view videos). It was going to be his new home with uncensored content and community. He abandoned it last week and told his members to quit Patreon to go to…
- TeamDLZ.com. We’re not sure how good or bad this one is doing since it’s a private site. Offers memberships for as low as $6.00 and was supposed to be a complete social media experience. Three weeks after launch and he’s already putting his “uncensored” content on YouTube. He had been forced to make the $6.00 price point since so many people refused to pay $10.00 for his content.
- First Amendment Auditor YouTube. Launched by DeCastro at the same time as his other launches, he was going to “rebrand” to the channel to escape YouTube censorship on his other channels. Currently stands at 410 subscribers, and 5 total videos. His 623,000 subscribers didn’t come with him. No one is interested in the content and he recently had to pull a video featuring a tour of his studio as he accidentally doxed himself. He’s now calling it a “backup” channel and has at least briefly moved away from the rebranding.
Now DeCastro is urgently looking at Twitter to bring his 623,000 followers. After last night’s stunt he moved from 2,276 followers to 2,327 followers, a gain of 51 followers for the stunt. By comparison, his former partner, Collin “Project Constitution” Campbell, who focuses on extremely Twitter/X popular political views during an election year, has 20,400 followers and is barely making money off the platform due to its dire monetization.
DeCastro’s violent and misogynistic rhetoric may fit the current climate of Twitter/X, but after showing that he has no clue what he’s doing on social media over the past month, we stand by our assessment. His home is YouTube, like it or not, and his expansion to Twitter/X will only drive him further into failure.