Over the past few years, X has introduced a number of features in an attempt to make itself a more user-friendly platform for internet celebrities. What is the latest move to attract talent from social media? Its own editing tool.

Editing is a key technique in social media: cutting longer videos into “short clips” that fit the TikTok attention span, and then publishing them strategically to attract as many viewers as possible, thereby generating as much ad revenue as possible.

On Monday, X announced the launch of this tool. For now, it seems to be nothing more than a direct video cropping function that allows users to edit videos and post them on X.

The website indicates that each clip will come with a “Clip from” tag, which links back to the original video it was taken from, facilitating X users to learn more about the creator and their content.

"Pick your favorite moment from any video, add your comments, and then you can post it without leaving X," the company stated in its post.

The platform also added that creators and editors can “earn revenue from Original Content Rewards based on the number of views of their edits,” which is part of X’s reward program. This program is only available to eligible creators and payments are made based on a specific level of audience interaction.

In many cases, internet celebrities pay specialized companies to edit videos for them. An increasing number of large corporations are also turning to such services for their marketing activities, and this approach is also being used in political campaigns.

Over the past few years, X has been competing with other social platforms by expanding the types of content it supports. In order to match YouTube, X launched a long-video feature in 2022 – at that time, the website was still called Twitter – and since then, this type of content has also become very popular on the platform. To become more like Substack, X has long since removed the traditional character limits on its website and introduced long-form blog articles for paid subscribers.

X hasn't stopped this year either. In March, it added the " exclusive threads " feature, which allows creators to put a part of their posts behind a paywall, accessible only to subscribers; in July, it launched a live streaming studio and reserved $1 million in funds for creators who conduct live streams.