X is retiring its Revenue Sharing program. In its place: a system called Original Content Rewards, built specifically to pay for work creators actually made themselves, not content they moved from somewhere else. TechCrunch reported on the change on August 8, and the details are worth unpacking for anyone who publishes on the platform or watches how creator economies evolve.
What's actually changing
X will stop taking new sign-ups for Revenue Sharing immediately. Existing participants keep earning under the old rules through September 7. Starting September 8, everyone has to apply fresh to Original Content Rewards. A Premium subscription is still required, and X is adding hard thresholds: 500 verified followers and 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified accounts within a 90-day window.
The bigger shift is qualitative, not numeric. X says original reporting, self-shot photos and video, and hand-made memes or graphics all count. Commentary counts too, but only if it adds real value on top of whatever material it's referencing. Straight reposts, downloads re-uploaded as your own, or content copied without meaningful change won't qualify.
The context nobody's ignoring
This isn't X's first swing at fixing creator payouts. Back in April, the company cut payments to aggregator and clickbait accounts. In March, Elon Musk reversed part of an earlier update after popular accounts pushed back, restoring extra weight for a creator's local audience in how payouts got calculated. X's Allegra Jacchia framed the latest overhaul as a response to incentives that had become "misaligned", arguing it was cleaner to rebuild the program than keep patching it.
That pattern matters. Each fix invited a workaround, and each workaround drew a new rule. Original Content Rewards reads like an attempt to break that cycle by defining the goal upfront — reward net-new material — instead of chasing bad actors after the fact.
Why this is harder than it sounds
Verifying originality at platform scale is a genuinely difficult problem, and X hasn't said how it plans to do it beyond "improving our models" over time. Commentary is the fuzziest category here. A lot of high-performing X content is reaction and analysis layered on someone else's post, video, or news story. X's own language, that creators leaning on others' material need to add "meaningful original value," leaves plenty of room for judgment calls, and judgment calls are exactly where creators and platforms tend to disagree.
There's also a timing question worth watching. The rollout lands as AI tools make it trivially easy to generate large volumes of text, images, and video that look original but aren't reported, shot, or designed by a person in any meaningful sense. Whether X's detection can tell the difference between a creator's own work and AI output dressed up to pass as original will likely shape how much trust the new program earns.
For now, the practical takeaway for anyone earning through X is straightforward: the September 8 application window is the point where the old strategy of maximizing reach through recycled content stops paying, and a different kind of content strategy starts to matter more.