X has concluded that it was paying its users to do the wrong thing. The company is winding down its Revenue Sharing programme — the system that has paid creators a cut since 2023 — and replacing it with something called Original Content Rewards. "The existing programme had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned," wrote X's Allegra Jacchia, which is a commendably tidy way of describing a machine that paid for provocation by the impression.
First, the dates, for anyone with money in this. The old programme has stopped accepting new participants. Existing members keep earning until 7 September. Applications for the new scheme open on 8 September. If posting on X is part of your income, that is a four-week runway to work out whether you still qualify.
The thresholds say qualifying will be harder. Applicants must subscribe to Premium, hold at least 500 verified followers, and show 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users over the previous 90 days. Note the word doing the quiet work in that sentence: verified, twice. Impressions from the unverified crowd — which is to say, most of the crowd — no longer count towards entry.
Then there is the definition at the heart of the rename. Qualifying work, X says, means original reporting and analysis, photos, videos, memes and graphics made by the poster, or commentary that adds meaningful original value. Reposts, reuploads and lightly transformed material will not qualify. Anyone who has spent time on the platform will recognise the target: the aggregation accounts, the screenshot mills, the engagement farms that repackage other people's work at industrial speed — much of it, lately, machine-assisted. X has spent months tweaking against exactly that crowd, with occasional reversals when the tweaks caught the wrong people.
Which is the caution worth carrying into September. The judgement between "commentary that adds meaningful original value" and "lightly transformed material" will not be made by an editor reading your work; it will be made by models X says it will continue refining over time. The platform's recent history of refinement has included false positives, creator complaints and walk-backs, and there is no reason to expect the new scheme's first months to be tidier.
Still, credit the direction of travel. A major platform has moved from paying for attention, however generated, to at least claiming to pay for originality. That is the same correction LinkedIn, Spotify and Snap have each made in their own dialects this summer, and it points one way: the era of being paid to reheat the internet is closing. If you make your own things, little changes except the paperwork. If your business was other people's things, lightly warmed — the platform has given you notice, in writing, with a date on it.
