X is overhauling how it pays creators, retiring its long-running Creator Revenue Sharing program in favour of a new system built around original content rather than raw engagement.
What’s Changing
X stopped accepting new enrollments into Creator Revenue Sharing immediately, with the program shutting down entirely after September 7. Existing participants will receive three final payouts, in mid-August, late August, and around September 11, to cover earnings through the cutoff date.
In its place, X has launched the Original Content Rewards Program, which pays creators based on “qualified impressions” their original posts receive, rather than the advertising-revenue split that defined the old model. The company says the goal is to reward users who bring original ideas, reporting, creativity, and commentary to the platform, cutting out accounts built around reposting, aggregation, or engagement-farming tactics.
How Qualified Impressions Work
Under the new rules, a view only counts if it comes from a unique, verified Premium subscriber viewing the post on their Home Timeline, with at least half of the post visible on screen. Duplicate, fraudulent, paid, or promoted impressions will not count toward a creator’s totals. Content flagged as automated, copied, minimally modified, or reposted across platforms is excluded entirely.
To qualify for the program, creators must be at least 18 years old, hold a Personal or Business account in good standing in an eligible country, and maintain an active paid subscription tier. They also need at least 500 verified followers and a minimum of 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users over the prior 90 days, with replies excluded from that count.
Existing Revenue Sharing members can apply for the new program starting September 8. Migration is not automatic. Applicants must meet the updated thresholds and submit a fresh application, which X says it will review within three business days. Payouts under the new system will be issued every two weeks, with the first expected around September 25.
Why the Shift Matters
The old revenue-sharing model paid out based on ad impressions served against replies, which effectively rewarded posting volume and provocation over substance. Creators quickly learned to game the formula: post more, provoke more, farm more replies. Critics say that pattern gradually pushed the platform’s feed toward outrage-driven content rather than genuinely valuable posts.
By tying payouts to verified, original engagement instead, X is attempting to address a trust problem that has dogged social platforms broadly: bot networks, engagement pods, and coordinated reply farms have made “impressions served” an increasingly unreliable measure of real audience value. Advertisers have taken notice, and platforms with cleaner measurement and lower fraud exposure are increasingly favoured for ad spend.
X isn’t acting in isolation here. Other major platforms have made similar moves in recent years, tightening monetisation criteria around authenticity and original content rather than sheer output.
The Trade-Off
Not everyone is celebrating the change. While the shift has been welcomed by users tired of low-effort, recycled content clogging their feeds, some creators have expressed concern that the new impressions-based model, paid at a rate X has not disclosed, could mean lower and less predictable earnings than the old advertising-revenue split offered.
That opacity is worth watching. Since 2023, X has changed its creator payout structure three separate times, and each version has moved further from a formula creators can independently verify. Whether the Original Content Rewards Program actually curbs low-quality content, or simply shifts how creators optimise for payouts, will likely become clearer once the first rounds of payments go out later this month.
