X begins rolling out its Original Content Rewards Program today, replacing the three-year-old Revenue Sharing model that governed creator payouts on the platform. Existing Revenue Sharing members can begin applying now; earnings accrued through September 7 will pay out around September 11, and after that the old regime is done.
The shift is less a rate change than a rewrite of what X is willing to pay for. Allegra Jacchia, X’s Senior Product Manager for Creators, wrote in a post about the changes that the previous program “had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned,” and that “creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts.” Read that as an admission: three years of paying against engagement produced a timeline dominated by clip-farms and screenshot aggregators, and the algorithm now has to unlearn what it taught everyone to do.
The eligibility bar itself is unchanged in shape but not in meaning. Per TechCrunch and The Verge, creators need an X Premium subscription, at least 500 verified followers, and 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users in the prior 90 days. Qualified impressions only count when at least 50% of the post is visible to a Premium subscriber. Every threshold now filters for a specific audience, the paying one.
What’s new is the disqualification list. X’s help page enumerates four categories that don’t earn: content copied from other creators, posts modified by “a word or two” or a filter or text overlay, aggregated compilations without substantial new framing, and cross-platform reposts uploaded by anyone other than the original creator. Tubefilter reports that X defines qualifying originals as uploads reflecting “your own voice, perspective, expertise, or creativity.” Meaningful transformation counts. Reuploads don’t.
For founder-led accounts running X as a marketing channel, the practical calendar shifts three ways. First-person expertise (product notes, teardowns, customer stories) needs to carry more of the weekly volume. When outside material shows up, it needs real framing wrapped around it, not a caption. And X now behaves more like one node in a discovery mix than a standalone growth engine, which fits a broader shift in how consumers now find local businesses through AI tools, where Google Search Console has started surfacing AI performance reports of its own.
One more line from the help page is worth reading twice. X “reserves the right to accept or revoke your participation” for business, financial, or legal reasons. Payouts, in other words, are discretionary, and the discretion runs one direction. The creators who benefit will be the ones who’d have posted the content anyway.
Sources
- https://help.x.com/en/using-x/original-content-rewards
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/08/x-replaces-misaligned-revenue-sharing-program-with-original-content-rewards/
- https://www.theverge.com/2026/8/8/x-replaces-its-revenue-sharing-program-with-original-content-rewards
- https://ignitevisibility.com/digital-marketing-news/
- https://www.tubefilter.com/2026/08/11/x-monetization-original-content-rewards-program-creators/