One of Elon Musk’s quieter strategies for Twitter is starting to come into focus.
The new owner of Twitter who has brought quite a bit of chaos to the company over the last few weeks has been hinting that the platform could be making a pivot to try and entice video creators and writers away from the big companies in those areas like YouTube and Substack.
Yesterday, Elon Musk indicated that the company is looking to compete with YouTube when he responded to a comment from Mr. Beast on the platform saying that “let’s see what happens when Twitter offers good video with higher compensation for creators.”
Musk also responded to someone else on the platform saying that not only would Twitter be looking to compensate video creators but written content as well. In addition, the company announced today that Super Follows has officially been rebranded to Subscriptions. The tweet revealing the change said that it was “wild but true.”
All of these moves are setting up Twitter to compete with video and written platforms for creators like YouTube and Substack. Substack might be an easier target for the company since it already owns Revue, a competitor to Substack that already integrates more tightly with the platform. However, there have been rumors that Twitter could shut down Revue by the end of the year, so it’s unclear what vision Musk has for compensating writers on the service.
The harder get will certainly be YouTube. The video platform is not only the most dominant in the world but also the world’s second-largest search engine behind Google which, of course, owns YouTube. Twitter will have a major challenge in building the tools and user experience to make the platform more friendly for video content as well as enticing creators away from YouTube which, in addition to having the best video platform for users, also pays creators the most.
Musk seems to think that Twitter can compete, so we’ll see where things go next. In the meantime, the company has seemingly delayed the launch of Twitter Blue again.
Related coverage: Hive passes one million users.
