Like Twitter, the social media company struggled to find a niche market for influencers. While YouTube was home to pranksters and beauty gurus, Instagram was home to fashionistas and travel bloggers, Twitter was home to grumpy journalists, political flame wars, and niche humor. Before Musk took over, the company tried various methods to attract creators. The company funded aspiring podcasters to produce shows with its audio discussion feature Spaces, appealing to digital artists during the 2022 NFT boom.
“We're all fighting for people's time,” Weitz said.
Some of the creators that X wants to woo are skeptical about the revenue potential. YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, said in December that he was unlikely to make enough money from sharing his videos on X to finance the production. “My videos cost millions of dollars to make. Even if he's X and he gets a billion views, it won't even fund a fraction of that.” said in the post.
But this month, Donaldson decided to experiment and shared one of his old YouTube videos on X. That post garnered him 169 million views and earned him $263,655. “It's a bit of a sham,” he said. in post. “Advertisers (I think) realized that this video was getting attention and bought ads on my video. So my revenue per view is probably higher than what you experience. right.”
Paid partnerships with creators are new and relatively untested, so X does not require creators to sign exclusivity agreements that prevent them from posting their content on other social media platforms, and some companies intends to share the show more widely.
“Our feeling was that this was a great bet. Are there any guarantees? No, there aren't,” said the CEO of Range Media Partners, which represents sports radio host Roma. Director Peter Miceli said. “They know that if they don’t provide benefits to the artists, it won’t work.”
ryan mack Contributed report from Los Angeles.
