X‘s Original Content Rewards programme marks the platform’s most significant overhaul of creator pay since it launched revenue sharing, replacing a system its own team acknowledged had buckled under misaligned incentives.
The change was announced by X’s Allegra Jacchia, who wrote that the existing Revenue Sharing programme ‘had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned.’ The platform will stop accepting new participants into the old scheme immediately; those already enrolled can continue earning until 7 September, after which they may apply for the replacement starting 8 September.
The core shift is in what gets rewarded. Where the old programme distributed a share of advertising revenue, Mashable reports that the new programme ties earnings to ‘qualified impressions’ a creator’s original content receives. The underlying logic is straightforward: rather than incentivising creators to game an ad-revenue formula, X wants to pay for the content itself.
What X Original Content Rewards Will and Won’t Count
Qualifying content, under the new rules, includes original reporting and analysis, photos and videos the poster created themselves, and memes or graphics of their own design. Commentary is also acceptable, provided the creator contributes ‘meaningful original value’ when incorporating material made by others.
The disqualifications are where the programme gets specific. Posts copied wholesale from another account, content downloaded and re-uploaded without transformation, and reposts ‘without meaningful transformation’ will not count. Engadget reports that even adding captions or text overlays that ‘simply describe what’s going on’ will not be enough to qualify another person’s content as original under the new guidelines.
Entry thresholds remain in place. Creators must subscribe to one of X’s Premium tiers, hold at least 500 verified followers, and accumulate 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users within 90 days.
A Platform Still Feeling Its Way
The announcement is the latest in a string of attempts to fix the Revenue Sharing system. In April, X moved to reduce payments to aggregator accounts and what it classed as ‘clickbait’ posts. That effort drew complaints from accounts that had built followings, and audiences, around exactly that kind of content. Elon Musk subsequently reversed part of the change, restoring a weighting towards a creator’s local audience in payout calculations, after a backlash from affected creators.
Jacchia was candid about the limits of the incremental approach. ‘We could have kept adding more rules and exceptions,’ she wrote, ‘but ultimately the better decision was to start fresh and build a program designed from day one to reward originality.’
Her rationale was equally direct on the old incentive structure: ‘Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts.’ She added that X would ‘continue refining the program, improving our models, and raising the bar over time.’
SpaceX owner Elon Musk has positioned X as a platform for substantive, original voices since acquiring it, though the Revenue Sharing programme’s repeated adjustments suggest the gap between that ambition and the actual behaviour it was producing had grown wide enough to warrant rebuilding from scratch.
The practical test arrives in the weeks after 8 September, when creators apply en masse and X’s models begin classifying content at scale. Whether the platform’s definition of originality holds up under the volume, and whether popular accounts find the new thresholds worth meeting, will determine if this reset sticks where the previous patches did not.
