Elon Musk's X is ending Creator Revenue Sharing: What creators need to know about its new rewards programme

Elon Musk's social media company X (Formerly Twitter) is shutting down its Creator Revenue Sharing programme and replacing it with a new Original Content Rewards programme, with stricter eligibility rules and a bigger focus on original content.

X stopped accepting new creators into the Revenue Sharing programme on August 7, 2026, and will retire it completely on September 7.

For creators already enrolled, there’s no immediate change. You will continue earning through September 7 and will receive three final payouts — on August 14, August 28 and a final payment for earnings accrued through September 7, expected around September 11.


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From September 8, existing Revenue Sharing members will begin getting access to apply for X's new Original Content Rewards programme.

What changes for X creators?

The biggest change is how X wants to reward creators. The new programme is specifically designed to pay creators for original, high-quality content — whether that's a post, article, video or image.

X says content that reflects your own voice, expertise, perspective or creativity can qualify. That means commentary, analysis and reactions to news or cultural events can count as original content, provided you're actually adding something of your own.

Simply reposting someone else's work won't.

Copied posts, videos or images, content with only minor edits, aggregated content and posts taken from other platforms and uploaded to X by someone else will not qualify for payouts.

How much do you need to qualify?

The new programme comes with a fairly high bar for creators.

To apply, you must:

• Be 18 or older
• Have an X account in good standing
• Have a Personal or Business Account
• Have an active X Premium, Premium+ or Premium Business subscription
• Have at least 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users in the past 90 days
• Have at least 500 verified followers
• Regularly post original content

Political and government organisation accounts are not eligible.

Even if you meet all these requirements, X says joining the programme is not guaranteed. Once eligible, creators can submit an application, and X says it will respond within three business days.

So, how will creators get paid?

The new X monetisation programme will pay eligible creators based on qualified impressions generated by their original content.

A qualified impression is a unique impression from an X Premium subscriber viewing a post on the Home Timeline, with at least 50% of the post visible.

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X will not count repeated impressions from the same account on a post, paid or promoted impressions, artificially generated impressions or fraudulent impressions.

Payments will be made every two weeks, as long as the creator and their content continue to meet X's requirements.

Don't expect copied or AI-generated spam to make money

X is also making it clear that creators cannot simply recycle content or try to game the system.

Content that is copied, substantially reproduced, automatically generated, misleading or in violation of X's rules will not qualify. Content that has a helpful Community Note can also be excluded from payouts.

Creators cannot use bots or other automated tools to artificially generate likes, follows, views, comments or shares. X also prohibits repeatedly asking users to engage with posts solely to boost monetisation.

The platform says accounts can be temporarily or permanently removed from the programme for violations.

What happens to existing Revenue Sharing creators?

If you're already part of X's Creator Revenue Sharing programme, you don't need to switch immediately.

You can continue earning until September 7, after which X will begin rolling out access to the Original Content Rewards programme from September 8.

Creators who have already completed ID verification and connected a valid payout method will not have to repeat those steps.

However, if your monetisation is currently paused because of a previous policy violation, X says you will not be eligible to enrol in the new programme at this time.