Elon Musk considers offering long form video content on Twitter, to compete with YouTube

Twitter's new owner Elon Musk is planning to offer long form video content on Twitter, something similar to YouTube. A content creator called Everyday Astronaut, who makes content on Youtube which covers basics of rocket science, tweeted to Musk that if Twitter allows him to upload long form videos, he will surely upload his videos on Twitter as well.

"If twitter could handle the full length feature videos that I produce and can offer a similar monetization system like YouTube does, I would consider uploading my full videos here too for sure," tweeted Everyday Astronaut. Musk himself is an avid viewer of content created by Everyday Astronaut and has granted him 3-4 interviews, whilst showing him around Starbase. Starbase is the place in Texas where SpaceX's rockets are manufactured and launched.

Accounts like Everyday Astronaut are offered 55% of the ad revenue by Twitter. Elon Musk has said that Twitter can beat that by offering content creators more financial incentives. There are several challenges Musk faces, the primary one is the fact that Twitter's user base is quite limited, compared to YouTube.

YouTiube has an active userbase of 2.1 billion, wheras Twitter has an active user base of just 390 million. Before acquiring Twitter, Musk himself had suggested that the number 390 million might be exaggerated. Second is the fact that YouTube already has an archive of video content, which Twitter does not have.

The network dynamics simply draws people towards YouTube as that is where most of the video content is. Few people would be willing to upload content on Twitter instead of YouTube. Attempting to make Twitter compete with YouTube also comes in the way of Musk's purported goal, which is relying less on advertisers for revenue. YouTube primarily relies on advertisers for its revenues and not on subscriptions. 

Challenges that Twitter faces

To make Twitter compete with YouTube in the sphere of video content, Twitter will have to scale up. There are technical limitations which limit Twitter's ability to host long form content on its platform. Musk has said that Twitter will begin with limited video content and scale up later. "We can do 42 min chunks at 1080 resolution now for new Blue, so you could break up a longer video. The 42 min limit should be fixed next month. How does YouTube monetization work & what could Twitter do better," he tweeted.