Transcripts from a staff Q&A revealed that Elon Musk told Twitter employees to convince high-profile YouTubers to join his social platform with a 10% pay increase incentive as the streaming wars rage on.
Twitter is now in Elon Musk’s hands after his months’ long purchase, fraught with drama, finally concluded in late October.
Musk quickly implemented new changes to the platform, the most notable among them tweaks to its verification system, which now allows anyone to purchase a checkmark for $7.99 a month via Twitter Blue subscriptions.
Although several top-tier influencers have complained about these changes, Musk reportedly wants to bring YouTubers over to the platform amid conversations about increasing video length on the site.
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
In transcripts provided by the Verge from a Thursday staff Q&A at Twitter, Musk proposed changes to the platform’s video features, theorizing that creators would have more incentive to post directly to Twitter if they could post their entire videos, rather than linking out to their content on YouTube.
Musk asks Twitter employees to convince YouTubers to join platform
“Provided they are able to post their video on Twitter and monetize the video at least to the same degree as on YouTube, then naturally, they would just post their video on Twitter as well,” Musk said during the call. “But right now, content creators cannot post the length of video that they would like to post and they cannot monetize it, which means they cannot pay the bills.”
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That’s not all; in the transcript, Musk also proposed approaching YouTubers with exclusive contracts to upload content on Twitter with a 10% pay increase from their current deals.
“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 continued.
“Please do it. Let’s take action … So if you can do it after this meeting, I would do it after this meeting.”
For now, it’s unclear where the future of Twitter’s video content lies — but Musk is clearly interested in implementing a creator-focused approach as he continues to tweak the site.
This news follows the re-implementation of the site’s “official” status for previously verified members, which Musk had initially rolled back after implementing his Twitter Blue verification subscription method.