For more than three years, X has been experimenting with one of the most consequential ideas in social media: paying users directly for the attention they generate.
That experiment is now over.
X has officially retired its Creator Revenue Sharing programme, ending a monetisation model that became one of the platform's most visible attempts to compete with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and other creator economies.
The retirement became effective September 7, 2026, after X stopped accepting new applications on August 7. Existing participants received their final payouts under the old system, with X saying the final payment for earnings accrued through September 7 is expected around September 11.
But X is not abandoning creator monetisation.
Instead, beginning September 8, the company is rolling out a replacement called Original Content Rewards.
And that distinction matters.
X is effectively saying that it no longer wants to pay primarily for the attention surrounding a creator's posts. It wants to pay for original work that generates valuable attention.
That is a significant change in the economics of being a creator on X.
From Twitter's conversation economy to X's creator economy
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, one of his ambitions was to transform the platform into a much broader digital ecosystem.
Creator monetisation became an important part of that strategy.
X's own 2023 product timeline shows that the company launched its advertising revenue-sharing programme in February 2023, made its first creator revenue payouts in July and expanded advertising revenue sharing globally later that month.
The idea was relatively simple.
Creators generated conversations.
Conversations generated engagement.
Engagement attracted advertisers.
Therefore, creators should receive a portion of the economic value they helped generate.
It was an attractive proposition.
Instead of simply using X to build an audience, creators could potentially turn that audience directly into income.
X eventually made the programme a major part of its creator strategy. In January 2024, the company said it had paid more than 80,000 creators through its advertising revenue-sharing programme in less than a year.
For creators in countries where traditional creator-economy opportunities were limited, the appeal was obvious.
Nigeria was among the countries supported for X payouts.
That made X particularly interesting to African creators.
But the system also produced a problem.
What happens when you pay people for attention rather than originality?
The engagement-farming problem
The answer became increasingly visible across X.
Creators learned what generated engagement.
Controversy generated engagement.
Political arguments generated engagement.
Outrage generated engagement.
Celebrity gossip generated engagement.
Breaking-news-style posts generated engagement.
And, perhaps most importantly, reposting or recycling material that had already gone viral could generate engagement with considerably less effort than producing original journalism, analysis, video or research.
That created an incentive structure in which the smartest creator was not necessarily the person producing the best work.
It could be the person best at gaming the attention system.
X gradually began trying to correct that.
In April 2026, the company cut payments to users posting clickbait and recycled news, with its product leadership explicitly targeting accounts that republished material without adding meaningful value.
That was a warning sign.
The old programme was no longer merely a monetisation product.
It had become an incentive system that could influence the entire information environment on X.
And X eventually decided that changing the rules was not enough.
It needed a new system.
Enter Original Content Rewards
The replacement programme is called Original Content Rewards.
The philosophy is radically different.
According to X's official documentation, creators will be rewarded based on qualified impressions generated by their original content.
The word "original" is doing enormous work here.
X says qualifying content can include:
- Original written posts
- Articles
- Videos
- Images
- Commentary
- Analysis
- Personal perspectives
- Graphics
- Memes
- Other creative work
But merely taking somebody else's content and reposting it will not qualify.
Neither will downloading a video from another platform and uploading it to X.
Slightly modifying someone else's post will not qualify either.
Aggregating other people's material without adding substantial perspective is also excluded.
This represents a fundamental change.
X is moving from paying for engagement to paying for original contribution.
That may sound like a small technical adjustment.
It isn't.
It changes what creators are economically encouraged to produce.
The new formula is much harder to game
Under the old Creator Revenue Sharing system, eligibility required an active Premium subscription, at least 5 million organic impressions over three months, at least 500 verified followers, a supported country and compliance with X's rules.
The new system lowers one major threshold but changes the quality of the audience that matters.
Creators need:
500 verified followers
and
500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users during the previous 90 days.
They must also maintain a Premium, Premium+ or Premium Business subscription, be at least 18, operate an eligible account in a supported country and consistently publish original content.
That is a dramatic shift.
The old threshold required five million organic impressions.
The new programme requires 500,000 qualifying impressions—but those impressions must come from verified/Premium users and occur in the Home Timeline.
In other words, X isn't simply asking:
How many people saw your content?
It is asking:
How many valuable users saw your original content?
Not every impression is equal anymore
This is probably the most important technical change.
Under Original Content Rewards, X defines qualified impressions as unique impressions from Premium users on the Home Timeline where at least 50% of the post is visible.
Artificial, fraudulent, paid or promoted impressions are excluded. Multiple impressions from the same account on the same post also don't simply stack indefinitely.
That means creators cannot look at the public view count on a post and assume that number represents their monetisation potential.
A post could receive millions of impressions but generate relatively little qualifying value if those impressions don't meet X's criteria.
This is much closer to an attention-quality economy than a simple view economy.
X is trying to destroy the business model of repost farms
This may be the most consequential part of the change.
For years, social platforms have struggled with a basic contradiction.
They need creators to produce enormous quantities of content.
But when they reward quantity and engagement too aggressively, they create incentives for people to manufacture content specifically for the algorithm.
X has experienced that problem particularly intensely because of the nature of its platform.
A person can publish dozens of posts every day.
A controversial sentence can go viral within minutes.
A copied news story can generate thousands of replies.
A recycled video can attract millions of impressions.
And an account can potentially build a large following without actually producing anything original.
X now wants to reduce the economic value of that behaviour.
Its new rules explicitly exclude copied content, minimally modified content, aggregated content and cross-platform reposts when the creator is not the original author.
That could force an enormous change in creator behaviour.
The easiest way to make money on X may no longer be to find something viral.
It may be to make something worth going viral.
The irony: X spent years building the old system
There is an interesting irony here.
The company itself helped create the incentives it is now attempting to dismantle.
In 2023, X aggressively promoted creator monetisation.
Its first payouts became a major publicity event.
Creators shared screenshots of earnings.
Musk encouraged users to publish more.
The programme became part of X's argument that the platform was building a new economic model for creators.
The strategy was understandable.
X needed creators.
Creators generate content.
Content creates engagement.
Engagement brings users.
Users attract advertisers.
Advertisers generate revenue.
The creator gets a portion.
Everybody supposedly wins.
But the model encountered the same problem that has affected other platforms:
attention is not the same thing as value.
A million angry replies are attention.
A million people reading an original investigation are also attention.
But they are not necessarily equivalent from the perspective of the health of a platform.
X's creator economy has always been unstable
Another problem has been predictability.
Creators don't like monetisation systems they cannot understand.
The old X system was frequently criticised because creators couldn't easily determine why one account earned significantly more than another despite apparently similar levels of engagement.
That uncertainty is dangerous.
A creator is effectively operating a small business.
If the platform changes the formula without warning, the creator's income can collapse overnight.
X has repeatedly changed its monetisation incentives.
In October 2024, for example, the company shifted away from advertising impressions in replies and toward engagement involving Premium subscribers. X said the change was intended to reward quality interactions, while reporting at the time noted concerns around low payouts and potential gaming.
Later, X changed Premium Plus pricing partly in connection with its strategy for funding creator compensation.
Now the entire revenue-sharing mechanism is being replaced.
For creators, the lesson is uncomfortable:
Your income belongs to the platform until you have diversified it.
What this means for Nigerian creators
This is where the change becomes particularly important.
Nigeria is explicitly included in the countries where Original Content Rewards is available.
That means Nigerian creators are not being excluded from the new economy.
But they are being asked to play a different game.
The Nigerian creator who simply reposts Nigerian political news may struggle.
The Nigerian creator who copies international technology stories may struggle.
The account that downloads TikTok videos and reposts them on X may struggle.
The account that posts screenshots of other people's tweets with little additional commentary may struggle.
But the creator who researches Nigerian politics, explains Nigerian technology, investigates African businesses, analyses markets, produces original video, develops strong opinions or creates genuinely distinctive cultural commentary may actually become more valuable.
This could be good news for serious African creators.
It potentially shifts the incentive away from being first to copy toward being first to understand.
And that is a much healthier creator economy.
The new system could reward journalists and analysts
Consider the difference.
A traditional engagement farmer might post:
"BREAKING: Nigeria is finished!!!"
and attach somebody else's video.
It could receive enormous engagement.
But under the new system, that alone is unlikely to qualify as valuable original content.
A researcher could instead produce:
"Why Nigeria's latest electricity tariff changes could affect household spending—and what the numbers actually show."
Then provide original analysis.
That is harder.
It requires research.
It requires expertise.
It requires time.
But it also produces something that cannot easily be copied.
That is precisely the kind of content X says it wants to encourage.
The new system therefore has the potential to move X closer to a platform where expertise becomes monetisable.
But there is a major catch
Original Content Rewards is not a guaranteed salary.
Meeting the eligibility requirements does not guarantee acceptance.
X explicitly says it retains discretion over participation.
Creators must also remain compliant to continue receiving payouts.
And there is another major dependency:
Premium users.
Qualified impressions are specifically tied to Premium subscribers.
That means the value of a creator's audience is increasingly linked to X's paying customer base.
This creates an interesting economic loop.
X needs Premium subscribers.
Premium subscribers create the pool of users whose impressions have monetisation value.
Creators need those users to see their posts.
Therefore, creators are indirectly dependent on X's ability to grow and retain its subscription business.
That is very different from a pure advertising model.
X is building a more controlled creator economy
There is a bigger strategic story here.
X wants to become more than a social network.
Under Musk, the company has repeatedly promoted the idea of an "everything app" combining communication, content, payments, AI and other services.
Creator monetisation fits into that vision.
But creators cannot be allowed to completely determine the economics of the platform.
X has to control fraud.
It has to protect advertisers.
It has to manage Premium subscriptions.
It has to control spam.
It has to distinguish human creativity from automated content.
And increasingly, it has to deal with generative AI.
The Original Content Rewards rules explicitly prohibit automated content and impose restrictions around certain AI-generated material.
The platform is therefore moving toward a more heavily governed creator economy.
The era of simply posting whatever generates maximum engagement may be ending.
And AI makes this even more complicated
Generative AI changes the economics of content production.
One person can now produce hundreds of posts, images, videos and variations of the same idea.
That creates a massive supply problem.
If X rewards volume, AI can flood the platform.
If X rewards engagement, AI-generated outrage can potentially outperform human creators.
If X rewards originality, it must determine what "original" means when AI assists with writing, editing, image generation and video production.
This is going to become one of the biggest challenges facing every social platform.
X's response is essentially to put greater emphasis on the creator's human contribution.
The question is whether X can reliably measure it.
The creator economy is becoming less passive
There is a broader lesson here for creators everywhere.
The old dream of social media was relatively simple:
Build an audience.
Post consistently.
Let the platform distribute your content.
Collect advertising revenue.
That model is becoming increasingly fragile.
Platforms are moving toward more sophisticated systems that reward particular types of behaviour.
YouTube has its own increasingly complex monetisation rules.
TikTok has multiple creator and commerce programmes.
Meta has shifted between bonuses, advertising, subscriptions and other monetisation models.
X is now moving again.
The common lesson is that platform revenue should never be confused with creator ownership.
If X pays you today, it can change the rules tomorrow.
If TikTok pays you today, it can change the programme tomorrow.
If YouTube changes its monetisation policies, your income can change.
The safest creator is therefore not the one who earns the most from one platform.
It is the one who uses a platform to build an audience that can be monetised elsewhere.
The death of X's first creator-revenue experiment
So, is X abandoning creators?
No.
In fact, the opposite may be true.
X is becoming more deliberate about which creators it wants to subsidise.
The company is effectively saying:
We don't want to pay you simply because you generated noise. We want to pay you because you created something people genuinely wanted to consume.
That is a sensible direction.
But it also represents an admission that the original revenue-sharing experiment had serious incentive problems.
The old system helped prove that creators could be attracted with direct payments.
It also demonstrated that monetisation can fundamentally change what people publish.
Now X is attempting the second phase.
The question is whether it can successfully reward originality without creating another system that creators learn to exploit.
For African creators, this could be a turning point
There is a particularly important opportunity here for Africa.
African creators have traditionally operated in a digital economy where much of the platform value flows outward.
The audience is local.
The platform is foreign.
The advertising infrastructure is foreign.
The payment systems are often foreign.
And the algorithms determine which African voices become globally visible.
X's decision to keep countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and others within its new creator-rewards ecosystem creates another opportunity for African digital entrepreneurs.
But African creators cannot approach this simply as another way to collect platform payouts.
The smarter strategy is to use X as an audience acquisition machine.
Build authority.
Create original research.
Publish distinctive analysis.
Develop a newsletter.
Sell products.
Build communities.
Create courses.
Generate consulting opportunities.
Drive traffic to websites.
Develop YouTube channels.
Build businesses.
The platform should be the distribution layer—not the entire business.
The biggest change is psychological
Perhaps the most important consequence of X retiring Creator Revenue Sharing is psychological.
It tells creators that virality alone is no longer enough.
For years, social media taught people to chase the algorithm.
The new X model is attempting to make people chase originality.
That is a much harder standard.
But it could also create a much better internet.
Because the future of social media cannot simply be billions of people repeating the same viral information faster and louder.
The valuable creator of the future will be the person who can add something that did not exist before:
A new investigation.
A new explanation.
A new perspective.
A new piece of art.
A new argument.
A new story.
A new discovery.
Or simply a better way of helping people understand something they already see.
X has killed its old Creator Revenue Sharing programme.
But it has not killed creator monetisation.
It is attempting something more ambitious:
to change what gets paid for.
And if Original Content Rewards works, the creator economy on X could become less about who can generate the most noise—and more about who can create the most value.
That is a gamble.
But it may be the gamble X has to make if it wants to build a creator economy that can survive the age of AI, engagement farming and infinite recycled content.
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