With the addition of X's slate of video programming, new only to the popular TV faces like Don Lemon, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jim Rome, the app is also tapping a new stream of monetization for said content-it will make users subscribe to X Premium in order to be able to see some episodes and updates.

According to new discovery in the app's back-end code, this suggests that the new prompt will throw users a sign-up request and that they will continue their viewing after hitting a point in playback.
As you can see here in this code snippet from social media expert Chris Messina, X is seemingly developing new prompts that will be triggered after a viewer has watched for a certain amount of time, pushing them to sign-up to Premium to keep watching.

There isn't much information about that as of now in terms of whether it's going to be a new broadcast or replay, and it could just be some experiment and may never go live in the app. But with X continuing to drive for more paying users on the platform, not entirely surprisingly if that can go along with that too, and would then allow X to monetize more premium content then, and build on its new "video first" approach.

But going all-in on video may not be what X is looking for. 

This route has been attempted many times by various platforms-including the former Twitter team, and none has achieved success with making it work, especially if you take into account paid subscriptions like that as well.

For years, Twitter tried to marry this behaviour of "second-screening" in the app through providing more premium content, especially sports programming, hoping this would translate into more people being more dependent on Twitter in isolation as one engagement vehicle.

That did not work out, and Twitter pivoted away from that strategy over time.

Meta, too, has tried the same, in the form of its Facebook Watch Originals, which it finally shut down last year, and Snapchat also axed its Snap Originals venture, though it could manage to generate decent interest levels among its users.

The problem is that producing original content costs an arm and a leg, and if you want to draw in an audience, you need quality celebrity-led shows to keep 'em coming back for more. It's hard to justify these kinds of cumulative production costs for social platforms, especially if they are unable to economically monetize enough episodic content to pay the bills from day one.

That's why YouTube tried "YouTube Red," a kind of X's new push, which provided a set of exclusive content for those paying subscribers.
YouTube Red cost $US9.99 per month, and gave users access to new shows from Ellen DeGeneres, Kevin Hart, Demi Lovato, and more. It's also where the now popular Netflix program "Cobra Kai" originated, but eventually, YouTube found that not enough users would pay for its exclusives, and it shut down the Red initiative in 2018.

Times are changing, and more people now rely on social apps for entertainment. However, the track record for such initiatives isn't great.
X focuses a little bit differently because it focuses on news content generally with lower production overheads while banking on celebrities that already have an established audience in the app.

In theory, that may be enough to see X go semi-viral. But its first partnership with Tucker Carlson, doing essentially the same thing, is not much of a predictor for this new push.

Carlson fired off his exclusive show on X back in May after getting the boot from Fox News, where he had a forum to air his extreme views about divisive issues. Carlson's shows on X have reached millions of people, although per-episode viewership had declined through the end of 2022. Actual viewers remain something of an open question due to X's sometimes misleading video metrics, but it certainly has enough users that Elon Musk, who owns X, claims not to intend to impose any restrictions on those creators as to what they can post in the app.

Last month, Carlson launched his own subscription streaming service to siphon more dollars from his X content as well as additional exclusives for payers. Carlson says he'll keep on broadcasting on X and also said that he did seek to host his personal archive offering directly under X itself, but could not manage to get such a service up or running as fast as he would like.

Thus, perhaps he does not want to get out of X either, as it is pretty clear that Carlson feels that the scope lies elsewhere. That would be bad news for the valuation of Elon's app.
And Elon himself might indeed be dreaming or living in a world where his ambition in this is more feasible.
Musk has frequently said that he believes X will soon be competing with YouTube, and even addressed a companywide meeting last November as if to tell a company all-hands meeting that X is "rapidly reaching parity with YouTube, and may exceed them."
Not remotely true.

According to Mr. Beast, YouTube's monetization system is much more developed than X or any other video sharing network for that matter, with YouTube paying out an average of $10 billion per year through its YouTube Partner Program.

Still, X is set to pay out less than $30 million to creators in a year under the Creator Ad Revenue Share scheme. In fact, X apparently only anticipates generating some $2.5 billion in total revenue in 2023. A long way behind YouTube by that measure.

On the various comparisons, it will be interesting to see how X is able to monetize and maximize its new slate of video content and whether it'll do better than it had for Twitter previously on this front. Focusing again on news content makes some sense and, Elon will also hope that it brings more attention to the app during what looks set to be a tumultuous election year.