It still feels unusual to call Twitter “X,” right? Most of us still refer to a “tweet” or whether we use “Twitter” – and it doesn’t help that the blue bird logo is still synonymous with the enormous Californian-based social media site. However, it did make its name Twitter, and seismic changes in any company will often take years to impact the broader world significantly.
With its CEO, the world’s richest man and one of the world’s most recognizable faces, will his quest to turn the app into the everything app come true? Will he be able to manifest his ideas of turning it into a “free-speech town square” (whatever that means) and turning it into a reality?
Capturing The Market
If we look at the success of other industries that have emerged online, the crucial factor is providing value. Again, this is where Elon got off to a false start with X—not only did the value of the site plummet when he completed his takeover, but his idea to charge new users per post, essentially turning a free site into one that you pay for, is not the sort of business model that’s going to generate an influx of fresh customers.
Another key element for a business looking to gain ground on the competition is to offer something more convenient, or that provides a noticeable, distinct advantage over the rest of the market.
The casino gaming industry is one example of a market that took an existing, successful model and fused it with the new innovative features of the internet. While the mechanics of this were revolutionary, the simple use case for the end user meant they could play their favorite casino games more conveniently and without any upfront cost to travel to a land-based provider.
The Importance Of Continued Innovation
Casino gaming has continued to evolve, embracing mobile app ingenuity and, more recently, moving toward cryptocurrency casino gaming. X has become an essential social media site for cryptocurrency to gain recognition and validity in more traditional financial circles.
It’s a hotbed for those fascinated with the blockchain, and Bitcoin casino games are now positioned as one of the leading ways for people to spend their crypto online. BTC casino gaming platforms mirror the designs you’d see at a traditional casino. Still, being able to deposit your crypto via your wallet is a unique use case. It is a growing, popular payment method for those looking to play traditional-style casino games.
Although cryptocurrency casinos and gambling using Bitcoin are still a smaller, unique area of the casino business, a unique angle is often the key to success. Elon, a purveyor of many visionary business ideas and never too far from business news, knows this better than most.
Musk has wrestled with a few big ideas in this regard; he’s floated the idea of turning X into a gaming app, a banking app, or a combination of things – including big plans to turn it into the “everything app” in 2023 – but this doesn’t appear to have gained much traction since.
His 2021 fixation with memecoins, most notably Dogecoin, an itch he has continued to scratch recently, shows that he’s more open to blockchain and cryptocurrency implementation than other social media rivals, at least he perceives to be, anyway.
Tackling The Competition
Mark Zuckerberg also performed a similar pivot, changing from Facebook to Meta back in October 2021—but again, good luck finding anyone who calls it Meta and not simply their Facebook account. Without getting too bogged down in the specifics of what each site is called or what its CEOs want it to be known, we can safely say that social media behemoths are the most significant media and information sources for billions of people.
If we look at the numbers, Twitter is still far behind other social media platforms. In fact, it’s behind every prominent one if we’re talking solely about user bases; Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok all have over 1 billion users, while Twitter has less than 400 million. So, Musk’s quest to become the app everybody flocks to is ambitious.
Conclusion
For X to become the leading global news source, it must find a unique angle to attract hundreds of millions of users to the site and snare tens of millions of active users from other social media giants. The company’s value has plummeted by over 70% since Musk bought the site for over $40 billion in 2022.
So, if we put our cards on the table, we’d say that X is unlikely to become the go-to place everybody goes for their news and media. It does attract a substantial audience, though.
Some people are fiercely loyal to the brand, and this is something money can’t buy—independent media companies tend to use X to get their message to an international audience, so it’s unlikely that it will die out or become irrelevant as a news source. Still, the chances that it doubles its market share and attracts waves of new users from other more globally renowned social media sites are unlikely to happen.
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