Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has taken on Google’s YouTube in the battle for video advertising revenue after unveiling a new application that allows users to access the platform directly from their television screens.....CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE>>>
Dubbed the X TV app, the new feature points to the social media giant’s elevated interest in taking a deeper foray into the video entertainment space, which is currently dominated by YouTube in Kenya and followed closely by TikTok.
In a post on Tuesday, Mr Musk confirmed that the X TV app is already live on Android TVs and that it is available on LG, Amazon Fire TV as well as Google TV, with more integrations set to be unveiled in the coming days.
If the application attains market success, the X platform will mark a turnaround in its advertising fortunes after it took a hit following the Musk’s takeover in October 2022, with the Tesla billionaire reporting that the platform had lost at least half of ad revenue three months after he took over.
This was the result of radical, far-reaching disruptions brought about by a flurry of changes that Musk undertook as he sought to steer the social media giant into what he termed as a ‘free speech’ platform.
The first major disruption came in April last year, when the Tesla boss announced a new verification policy that would compel users to pay monthly charges for authentication badges that were previously issued for free.
In the new policy, the Tesla boss sought to phase out the legacy blue badge and strip verified accounts of their authentication marks, making the verification icon available for purchase.
In July of the same year, Mr Musk moved to rebrand the platform to X, dropping the signature blue bird logo and replacing it with a white X on a black background, while announcing that the site would move into providing payments, banking and commerce services in the coming days.
In Kenya, the disruptions saw X record a deteriorated performance after it emerged as the only social media platform whose potential advertising reach in the country dipped during the full year to December last year.
The Digital 2024 Report for Kenya published in May this year by global digital insights platform Datareportal showed that the potential audience that Kenyan marketers could reach with ads on X had fallen by 26,000, or 1.4 percent.
X’s declining performance came during a year in which the ad reach of rival platforms increased significantly, some as much as 41.1 percent year-on-year in the case of Meta-owned Facebook.
It also came at a time when Kenya’s annual digital advertising spend rose 8.8 percent year-on-year to hit a high of $108.4 million (Sh13.96 billion at current conversion rates), which was 24.6 percent of all advertising budgets by brands during the year.
Musk has also hinted at the launch of an email service dubbed XMail that’s widely seen as an onslaught against Google’s Gmail….CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ARTICLE>>>
