X Killed Revenue Sharing. Original Content Rewards Pays Out From 25 September

X's ad Revenue Sharing programme retired on 7 September 2026 and has been replaced by Original Content Rewards, which pays on qualified impressions rather than on ad revenue attached to replies. Eligibility is 500 verified followers, 500,000 qualified Home Timeline impressions in 90 days, an X Premium subscription, and content that meets X's originality standard. Creators who move across on or after 8 September get their first payment on 25 September. The old programme's final payout, covering earnings through 7 September, was expected around 11 September.

What changed

• Revenue Sharing is gone. It stopped accepting new enrolments when Original Content Rewards launched on 8 August 2026 and retired fully on 7 September.
• The payable unit moved. Revenue Sharing paid on ads shown in a post's replies, which rewarded engagement farming. Original Content Rewards pays on qualified impressions: unique impressions from Premium subscribers, on the Home Timeline, where at least half the post was visible.
• The bar is now impressions, not followers. 500 verified followers plus 500,000 qualified Home Timeline impressions in a rolling 90 days. The follower number is trivial. The impression number is the actual gate.
• Originality is an explicit requirement. X defines original content as something you wrote, filmed, designed or produced. Reacting to and analysing current events counts. Reposting and repackaging does not.
• Payouts every two weeks, conditional on the account and the content continuing to meet the requirements.

Why it matters

The old model paid for arguments. Because earnings came from ads served in a post's reply thread, the optimal strategy was to write something that provoked a long fight, and X spent two years being reshaped by that incentive. Paying on visible impressions from paying users removes it. It also narrows the audience that counts: an impression from a non-Premium user earns nothing, which means a creator's payable audience is a subset of their actual one, and they have no way to see how large that subset is.

The originality requirement is the second shift, and it is aimed squarely at the aggregator accounts that rebuilt themselves around Revenue Sharing: screenshot reposters, clip farms, accounts that repackage other people's videos. Those accounts were the programme's heaviest earners. Removing them is the whole point of the redesign.

Who benefits

• Creators posting original writing, video or analysis to an audience with a high Premium density. Tech, finance and politics skew heavily Premium; lifestyle and entertainment do not.
• X itself. Payouts now scale with Premium subscriptions rather than with advertiser spend, which ties the cost of the programme to a revenue line X controls.
• Not clip and repost accounts. The originality standard is designed to remove them, and they were the ones earning most.
• Not creators with large but non-paying audiences. A million impressions from free accounts is worth nothing under this model.

What creators should do

1. Check the 90-day impression figure before planning around this. 500,000 qualified Home Timeline impressions is a real bar and it counts only Premium viewers, so your analytics number is an overestimate of what qualifies.
2. Do not restructure your content for it. Two payouts a fortnight from one platform's rewards programme is not a business, and this is the third payout model X has run in three years.
3. Stop reposting other people's material entirely. Under the originality standard that content earns nothing and puts the whole account's eligibility at risk.
4. Route the audience somewhere you own. A platform that has changed its payout model three times is a distribution channel, not an income source. Send people to an email list or a link in bio destination you control.
5. Diversify to platforms with a defined rate. X does not publish a per-impression rate, so you cannot forecast anything. Run the numbers on the platforms that do, with the TikTok money calculator or the YouTube money calculator.

What to watch next

The first real payouts land on 25 September, and the creators who were earning well under Revenue Sharing will post their before-and-after numbers within days. That comparison, not the announcement, is what tells you whether the new model pays more or less per unit of effort. Watch how originality is enforced too: an automated standard applied to commentary and reaction content will produce disputes, and X has not described an appeal path.