For the better part of a decade, making money on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, was a permanent promise: you built a following, posted well, and hoped the company would one day pay the people who actually create value. That day finally arrived in February 2023, shortly after Elon Musk bought the company, with Revenue Sharing, a program tied to the Premium subscription. The idea was straightforward: a cut of advertising revenue would be split among creators who drove engagement. In practice, though, the system turned into a prize for whoever could work the algorithm best — not necessarily for whoever produced anything original.
Now the company has decided to start over from scratch. In an announcement on August 8, X confirmed it is retiring Revenue Sharing and replacing it with something called Original Content Rewards. Creators already enrolled keep earning through September 7; from September 8, everyone must apply for the new scheme. And there lies the real pivot: the emphasis shifts from raw reach to originality. According to executive Allegra Jacchia, the old program “had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned,” with creators focused on maximizing payouts instead of bringing net-new content to the platform.
The eligibility rules are not for casual users. You must be at least 18, subscribe to Premium (or Premium+, or Premium Business), hold at least 500 verified followers, and rack up 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users over 90 days. The toughest part: those numbers must be maintained after acceptance, or payouts stop. What counts as original got stricter too — your own reporting, photos and videos you filmed, memes and graphics you designed. Reposting someone else’s clip with a caption slapped on top, or copying content from another account, no longer earns a cent.
This is a course correction the platform economy knows well. Think of a market that realizes it has been paying more to resellers of goods than to the people who grow them: the farmer loses the incentive, and the stalls fill with middlemen. X now wants to reward the farmer — and only when the harvest is genuinely his own. It is the same tension that has haunted every engagement-driven network since the early days of monetized content, and it explains why X has spent 2026 tinkering with its rules, cutting payouts to aggregators in April and later reversing course after a backlash from popular accounts. The momentum is broader than one company: Snapchat banned AI-generated videos from Spotlight the same week, and YouTube has been cutting payouts for automated content.
There is a business implication hiding in plain sight. By limiting valid impressions to verified subscribers, X turns creator payouts into yet another reason for audiences to buy Premium. It is not just about rewarding authors — it is about selling the subscription package itself, using creators as bait. The question that lingers: with so many platforms fighting for attention and AI flooding feeds with synthetic content, has “original” become the new gold of the digital age — or just another label that algorithms will learn to game?
Sources: TechCrunch, The Next Web, Livemint
✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing
