Elon Musk’s X, long known as a service for posting short text-based messages about anything and everything, claims it’s “now a video-first platform.”
The assertion, made by the company today in a blog post that was aimed at advertisers, follows an exodus of marketers from the platform including Disney, IBM, and Apple after Musk’s assertion that an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory was the “absolute truth.” That implosion plus other missteps have caused the value of the business to plummet from its $44 billion sales price last year by more than 70% according to Fidelity, one of X’s investors.
As proof of its video transformation, X touted a new video feature that is much like TikTok’s full-screen infinite scroll, and that has over 100 million daily users—”more than half of whom are Gen Z, the fastest growing audience on X,” the blog post claimed. It also mentioned letting users publish longer-form videos, crowing that “In December alone, people watched 130 years’ worth of videos 30 minutes or longer.”
However, X’s blog post was short on specifics. For example, its claims of a large Gen Z audience came without any metrics to back it up.
A source at X, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to talk to the press, was skeptical about the blog post’s assertion of a video-focused transformation. “I think it’s way too early to declare us a video-first platform,” the source said.