Elon Musk Makes HUGE Move To Rival Youtube! This Is A Game Changer!

According to Forbes:

Elon Musk has roughly ten zillion ideas about how to generate revenue from Twitter, the most public of which, of course, has been his new $8 Twitter Blue auto-verification system that wreaked so much havoc in its first few days its been “paused” already.

But there is one idea that actually could make sense, depending on how much you trust Musk, and the idea that Twitter will even be left standing when all this is done.

The concept is that Twitter has never really generated anything approaching a creator economy. It does not pay its power users like YouTube and Twitch, many of whom have made content creation on those platforms a full-time living. And even if Musk’s “pay $8 for verification” thing is the opposite of that, charging creators, he does seem to want to embrace the notion of paying people to post their content on the platform.

One of his earliest questions he posed to the public after he took over was how much YouTube paid its creators, which is 45% revenue share. He said he could “beat that,” and that idea has not dissipated through the ensuing chaos. In a recent call, it was brought up again, this time with more specifics:

“Let’s just get a bunch of content creators that we think are cool on YouTube and say, ‘Hey, would you consider putting your content on Twitter, and we’ll pay you 10% more than YouTube and see how it goes?’” Musk said.

One immediate caveat here is that this idea may be proposed as an exclusive contract. As in, if you agree to say, a 55% revenue cut from Twitter, you can no longer upload that content to YouTube. That would be an enormous risk for creators who already have established YouTube audiences, and we have no idea what kind of revenue Twitter ads would bring in compared to YouTube ads, especially given that advertisers have begun to flee during Musk’s reign. If the contracts are exclusive, that would be a tough call for creators to make given all the uncertainty.

Twitter is already making moves to allow Blue users to upload long videos, up their quality to 1080p and monetize them. So unlike many Musk ideas, this one may actually materialize. But I do have to wonder about the idea on a few fronts, namely if Twitter has the technical backend to support mass uploads of long, high quality video as their video quality to date has long been absolutely terrible. The company also just laid off half its staff including a huge number of engineers, so you have to wonder about who would be managing the stability of this project.

And then there are Twitter’s revenue problems. Like I said, how much will ads pay when Twitter’s major advertisers keep dropping off the site, a problem not facing YouTube or Twitch? And how much revenue does Twitter really have to throw around to creators in the current state of the company which Musk has already said could be on the verge of bankruptcy, and he’s currently selling Tesla stock to keep it afloat?

I’m not saying that monetizing content on Twitter someday is something that no creator should consider. But I am saying with the current state of Twitter in the Musk era, I would approach this idea with an overabundance of caution, given all the moving pieces that would have to align to make this even a little bit plausible.