X is introducing its own version of YouTube Select

X will soon allow brands and marketers to “run ads against a curated list of premium content creators.”

“[W]ith the diversity of perspectives on X expanding, we are enabling a new opportunity for advertisers to connect to their customers by aligning with some of the world’s best content creators,” X, which lost major advertisers like Disney, Apple, and IBM last year due to rampant antisemitism on the platform, said in a company blog post.

Called Creator Targeting, the program lets advertisers use X’s self-serve ad manager to “to run pre-roll video ads against the video content of their chosen creator(s) in both the home timeline and profile.” In the future, Creator Targeting will have yet narrower capabilities, allowing advertisers to run ads against a single creator’s content.

X says Creator Targeting “is an extension of X’s powerful and brand safe video offering.”

If this idea sounds familiar, it’s because YouTube has had something similar for years: YouTube Select, formerly called Google Preferred. It, like Creator Targeting, is marketed as an ultimate brand-safety option for brands that don’t want their ads running next to questionable content.

YouTube has done work to clean up it brand safeness, but X is still rife with antisemitism, transphobia, and racism, much of it from “verified” accounts. Other verified accounts getting promoted to people’s timelines do nothing but post videos of violence and gore. Plus there’s Elon Musk‘s continued engagement with conspiracy theories. We’re guessing all these things will make legit brands (dropshippers and scammers are another story) hesitant to embrace X, even with a supposedly “powerful” brand-safe option at their disposal.