X ended creator revenue sharing. Read who the new rules pay.

X is shutting down Creator Revenue Sharing on September 7, 2026 and replacing it with the Original Content Rewards Program. The new deal pays for one thing: original posts that verified X Premium subscribers see on their Home Timeline. If your reach comes from replies, reposts, or an audience of free accounts, most of it stops counting.

This is the third time X has rewritten how creators get paid since the program launched in July 2023. Each version narrows who qualifies. This one adds an originality check and limits the payable audience to Premium subscribers, a group X has reported at under one million people. The pool of money did not grow. The rules for reaching it got tighter.

Here is what changed, what it pays, and who comes out ahead.

The timeline, in plain dates

The old program keeps earning through September 7. Existing members get three final payouts, on August 14, August 28, and September 11. Applications for the new program open September 8.

The new program starts paying sooner for people already inside it. The first Original Content Rewards payout lands August 28; anyone who applies fresh after September 8 waits until September 25 for a first check. After that, payments run every two weeks.

So for a short window in late August, some creators draw from both programs at once. Then the old one closes for good.

What a qualified impression actually means

The new program pays on a unit X calls the qualified impression, and the definition is narrow. It counts a unique view from a verified Premium subscriber, on the Home Timeline, where at least half the post is on screen. One person viewing your post twice counts once. Promoted or artificially generated views do not count at all.

Then there is the content gate. To qualify, a post has to be your own writing, reporting, photos, video, memes, or illustrations. Reposts, minimal edits, and notes are out. Slapping a caption on someone else's clip does not qualify. As X's Allegra Jacchia put it, the old system's incentives had reached a point where they were misaligned, and creators should bring new content instead of maximizing payouts.

Read plainly: the two changes stack. Your post has to be original, and it has to be seen by a paying subscriber, before a single cent attaches to it.

The eligibility floor

To get in and stay in, you need an X Premium subscription, 500 verified followers, and 500,000 qualified Home Timeline impressions from verified users in the last 90 days. Those thresholds have to hold continuously. Drop below any of them and payouts stop until you climb back.

That 500,000 figure is the one to sit with. It is not total views. It is views from verified accounts, which is a fraction of most creators' reach. An account that pulls millions of impressions from free users can still miss the floor.

Why this is model three, not model one

The program has never sat still. It started in July 2023 as ad revenue sharing: X paid you a cut of the ads shown in the replies under your posts. That formula rewarded whatever dragged people into your replies, which is why the era filled with rage bait and reply farming.

Then on November 8, 2024, X cut ad impressions in replies out of the math and switched to engagement from Premium users. Now, in August 2026, it drops engagement for impressions and bolts on the originality check. Three formulas in roughly three years, each one changing who earns and how much.

The payouts were already thinning before this switch. X was sharing around $5 million a month with creators early on, and the trend since has been down. The spread between accounts is enormous: one industry writeup reports MrBeast pulling $263,655 in a single week while a mid-size creator, Mike Holden, took $125.43. Averages hide that gap. It is the same math problem behind beehiiv paying $1M a month across 60,000 newsletters: the mean tells you almost nothing about the median creator's check.

The number that decides your check

Here is the ceiling nobody in the announcement leads with. X funds this pool from Premium subscriptions, allocating up to 25% of that subscription revenue to creators. And the last subscriber count X disclosed put X Premium under one million people.

Stack those two facts. The money comes from a slice of a subscriber base that may still be under a million, and the only impressions that draw from it are the ones those same subscribers generate. The audience that pays you and the audience that funds you are the same small group.

X has not published the per-impression rate for the new program. Until it does, or until the first payouts print on August 28, no creator can actually compute what an original post is worth. Anyone selling you a number today is guessing.

Who wins, who loses

Winners: creators whose original posts land in front of Premium subscribers. Niche expertise, first-hand reporting, genuinely made images and video. If verified accounts follow you and read you, the new rules point money your way and cut out the reply farmers competing for the same pool.

Losers: reply-guys, quote-tweet dunkers, and repost or aggregator accounts. Their entire model just stopped qualifying. So did anyone whose audience is mostly free accounts, because those impressions no longer count, no matter how large.

This is the second platform this summer to gate creator money behind an originality rule, the same wall faceless AI YouTube channels ran into when the payout rules tightened around reused content. The direction is consistent across platforms: reach alone stopped paying, provenance started mattering.

What to watch

Three things will tell you whether this is a raise or a cut dressed as one. First, the per-impression rate, whenever X names it or the August 28 checks reveal it. Second, the X Premium subscriber count, because the whole pool scales with it. Third, whether model three lasts longer than model two did.

If you earn on X, treat this as a base that keeps moving. Building a real income on a payout formula X has now rewritten three times is a bet on the next rewrite going your way. Keep the original work, keep the audience. Just do not budget around a rate that has not been published yet.

Sources

• X replaces "misaligned" revenue sharing program with Original Content Rewards, TechCrunch, Aug 8, 2026
• X replacing revenue sharing with a new original content rewards program, Engadget, Aug 8, 2026
• X shuts down revenue sharing on September 7, The Next Web, Aug 2026
• X ends creator revenue share program; final payout coming in September, American Bazaar, Aug 8, 2026
• X removes ad revenue share from creator payments program, Social Media Today, Nov 2024
• X (Twitter) Ads Revenue Sharing: eligibility and payout math, Influencer Marketing Hub, 2026

This is not financial advice.