As Twitter, the social media company struggled to find its influencer niche. While YouTube had pranksters and beauty gurus, and Instagram had fashionistas and travel bloggers, Twitter had vicious journalists, political flame wars and niche humor. Before Mr. Musk took over, the company dabbled in various ways to attract creators. It provided funding for aspiring podcasters to create shows on its audio chat feature, Spaces, and appealed to digital artists during the 2022 NFT boom.
“We’re all in a war for people’s time,” Mr. Weitz said.
Some of the creators X hopes to attract have been skeptical about the potential profits. Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTuber known as MrBeast, said in December that sharing his videos on X was unlikely to earn him enough to fund his productions. “My videos cost millions to make, and even if they got a billion views on X, it wouldn’t fund a fraction,” he said. he said in a post.
But this month, Mr. Donaldson decided to experiment, sharing one of his old YouTube videos on X. The post garnered 169 million views and earned him $263,655. “It’s a bit of a facade,” he said in a post. “Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) so my revenue per view is probably higher than what you would experience.”
Because paid creator partnerships are new and relatively untested, X hasn’t asked its creators to sign exclusivity agreements that would prevent them from posting content on other social media platforms, and some plan to share their shows more widely.
“Our feeling was that it was a great bet. Do we have guarantees or something? No, we don’t,” said Peter Micelli, the managing director of Range Media Partners, which represents Mr. Rome, the sports radio host. “They know they have to perform well for the artists or it won’t work.”
Ryan Mack contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
