The platform is replacing revenue sharing with rewards for original content. The bigger shift is from monetising attention to monetising authorship.
X is changing the economics of being a creator on its platform. The social-media company has announced that it will discontinue its Revenue Sharing programme and replace it with an Original Content Rewards Programme, putting greater emphasis on creators who produce original ideas, reporting, expertise, commentary and creative work.
The change takes effect in stages. X has stopped accepting new participants into the existing Revenue Sharing programme, while current participants will continue to receive payments for earnings accrued until September 7, 2026. Existing participants will be able to apply for the new programme from September 8, subject to meeting its requirements.
The new programme will pay eligible creators every two weeks for qualified impressions generated by their original content. X defines qualified impressions as unique impressions from Premium users on the Home Timeline where at least half of the post is visible.
But the important change is not the payment cycle. It is the definition of value. X Wants More Than Reach Under the old revenue-sharing model, the central economic currency was engagement. The more attention a creator’s posts generated, the greater the potential reward. The new system gives X a different proposition: not everything that attracts attention deserves to be rewarded. The platform says eligible original material can include reporting, analysis, commentary, videos, memes, graphics, illustrations, threads and reactions that add meaningful value to an existing conversation. Simply reposting another person’s material will not be enough, nor will superficial editing be enough.
X says cropping, adding borders, filters, watermarks, changing playback speed or placing simple text over someone else’s material will generally not amount to meaningful transformation. Content copied or substantially reproduced from another creator, or downloaded from X or another platform and re-uploaded by someone who did not create it, will not qualify. Automated content, disinformation and misleading content are also excluded.
Creators will also be responsible for obtaining the necessary rights, permissions or licences for material belonging to others. In effect, X is drawing a line between distribution and creation. That distinction matters.
What Nigerian Creators Need to Know
For creators in Nigeria, the immediate question is whether an account qualifies. X says creators must be at least 18, live in a country where the programme is available, maintain an account in good standing and operate either a personal or business account.
They must also subscribe to X Premium, Premium+ or Premium Business, have at least 500 verified followers and generate at least 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users within the preceding 90 days. Regular production of original content is also required. The 500,000-impression threshold is particularly important.
Having 500 followers is not enough. A creator must demonstrate substantial recent reach among verified users. And because X is changing what counts as a monetisable impression, creators cannot assume that every view appearing in their analytics will translate into earnings. X says impressions from the same account counted more than once on a post, paid or promoted impressions, artificially generated impressions and fraudulent impressions are excluded.
The platform is therefore creating a much narrower definition of commercially valuable attention.
The End of the Repost Economy?
Not quite. But it may be the beginning of the end of a particular kind of creator strategy. For years, social platforms have encouraged an attention economy in which speed often mattered more than originality. A creator who could find an interesting story, meme, photograph, video or opinion and distribute it quickly could accumulate an audience. That model created a peculiar digital profession: the professional aggregator.
X’s new policy makes that business model less attractive. A creator can still participate in a conversation started by someone else. But the creator now has to contribute something of their own – context, analysis, humour, reporting, expertise or another meaningful transformation.
That changes the question from: “What can I repost?” to: “What can I contribute?”
That is a profound change in the economics of digital influence. For Nigerian Creators, Expertise May Become More Valuable This could work in favour of Nigerian professionals who have something distinctive to say. Consider an economist discussing the naira. A technology expert explaining an AI development. A doctor interpreting a health policy. A lawyer explaining a new regulation. A marketer analysing a brand campaign. A journalist reporting an original development.
None of these creators needs to manufacture controversy simply to generate engagement. Their competitive advantage is knowledge. The creator economy has often been described as an economy of followers. X’s new policy points towards something more interesting: an economy of expertise.
The distinction matters because followers can be accumulated through entertainment, controversy or aggregation. Expertise is harder to manufacture. It takes years to build.
The Implication for Personal Brands
There is a lesson here for Nigerian professionals who use X as a platform for personal branding. The strongest account may no longer be the one that comments on everything. It may be the one that becomes known for something. A financial analyst who consistently explains Nigerian economic policy can become an authority.
A communications professional who analyses campaigns can develop a marketing reputation. An entrepreneur who shares practical lessons from building a business can create an intellectual asset around experience. In each case, the social-media account becomes more than a collection of posts. It becomes a body of work. That is an important distinction. A post disappears into the timeline. A body of work builds reputation.
Originality Is Becoming More Valuable in the Age of AI
There is another reason X’s decision deserves attention. Artificial intelligence is making content production cheaper. A person can now generate hundreds of headlines, captions, images and short-form posts in a fraction of the time previously required. That creates a paradox. The easier it becomes to manufacture content; the less valuable generic content becomes. AI increases the supply of words.
It does not automatically increase the supply of judgement. That is why X’s emphasis on original ideas, expertise, reporting and commentary is significant. The platform appears to be moving towards rewarding the thing that automated production finds hardest to replicate convincingly: a recognisable human perspective backed by knowledge or experience.
For creators, AI therefore presents two very different possibilities. It can be a productivity tool that helps a creator research, structure, edit and produce better work. Or it can become a content factory producing large quantities of interchangeable material. The first strengthens a creator’s voice. The second risks making the creator indistinguishable from everyone else.
The New Battle May Be Over Authorship
The creator economy has always had a problem with ownership.
Who created the viral idea?
Who first reported the story?
Who owns the photograph?
Who produced the original video?
Who deserves the commercial reward when thousands of accounts reproduce it?
X’s new programme is, in part, an attempt to answer these questions by putting greater economic value on the original creator.
But this will not be easy.
Determining whether a piece of content contains “meaningful” commentary or transformation is partly a matter of judgement. As the volume of content grows, platforms will increasingly have to rely on automated systems to make such determinations.
That creates another question: Who governs the algorithm that decides what counts as original? The creator economy is therefore becoming a governance problem as well as a commercial one.
A New Challenge for Influencer Marketing
Brands should pay attention too. For years, influencer marketing has often been evaluated through metrics such as:
- Followers
- Reach
- Impressions
- Engagement
- Clicks
But X’s policy change reinforces a broader movement in digital marketing towards distinguishing attention from influence. A creator may have a large following but contribute little original thinking. Another may have a smaller audience but possess enormous credibility within a particular professional community.
For brands, the second creator may ultimately be more valuable. The question for marketers should therefore become less:
“How many people follow this creator?” and more: “What does this creator make people think, understand or do?” That is a much more sophisticated measure of influence.
The BrandiQ Takeaway: Nigeria
Nigeria’s creator economy is becoming an important part of the country’s digital economy. But its sustainability cannot depend entirely on platform payouts. X can change its rules today. Another platform can change its algorithm tomorrow. A third can alter its monetisation model next year. Creators who build their businesses entirely around the rules of one platform therefore have little control over their own economic future.
The stronger strategy is to use platforms to build portable intellectual and commercial assets.
An X following can lead to:
- A newsletter
- A podcast
- A YouTube channel
- A book
- A course
- Consulting
- Speaking
- Brand partnerships
- A media business
The platform should be the distribution channel, not the entire business. For Nigeria, this distinction matters because the country’s enormous pool of young digital talent could become an economic asset if creators develop businesses around intellectual property, expertise and audiences rather than simply chasing platform payments.
The African Implication
The same argument applies across Africa.
Africa’s creator economy is growing, but much of its digital infrastructure remains controlled by foreign platforms. That creates a structural dependency: creators produce the content, while platforms control the rules governing distribution, monetisation and visibility.
X’s decision is a reminder of this asymmetry. A platform can redefine the economic value of a creator’s labour without consulting the creator. This does not make the platform’s decision wrong. Platforms must evolve their business models.
But it does demonstrate why African creators need stronger ownership of their audiences, intellectual property and commercial relationships. The strategic objective should therefore be platform participation without platform dependence.
The Global Implication
X’s decision also reflects a wider transformation in the global information economy. The internet once suffered from a scarcity of information. Now it suffers from abundance. Generative AI is accelerating that abundance. When everyone can produce content, content itself becomes less scarce. What becomes scarce is credibility, originality, experience, judgement and trust. That changes the economics of influence.
The next generation of valuable creators may not necessarily be those who publish the most. They may be those whose work audiences recognise instantly as worth reading, watching or listening to. The scarce resource may no longer be content. It may be human judgement.
What Creators Should Do Now
Nigerian creators who want to remain competitive on X should therefore reconsider their content strategy. Build around a subject rather than around the algorithm. Develop recurring formats rather than random posts. Produce original commentary rather than merely aggregating news. Use other people’s material only when there is a legitimate right to use it and when the creator adds substantial value. Develop expertise that cannot easily be commoditised. Use AI to improve production rather than surrendering authorship to it. And, above all, build an audience that can travel beyond X.
A creator should aspire to own a relationship with an audience, even if the platform owns the channel through which that relationship currently operates.
BrandiQ Verdict
X is not killing the creator economy. It is raising the price of admission. The platform’s new rewards programme signals a shift away from paying simply for the ability to generate attention towards rewarding creators who contribute something recognisably their own. That will hurt some creators, particularly those whose business depends heavily on reposting, aggregation or low-effort transformation.
It could benefit others. For Nigerian creators with knowledge, a distinctive voice and the discipline to develop original work, the change may prove less a threat than an opportunity.
The deeper lesson is bigger than X.
As artificial intelligence floods the internet with cheap content, originality is becoming scarce, expertise is becoming valuable and trust is becoming an economic asset. The creators who understand that shift will not merely chase the next platform payment. They will build brands. And the most successful of them may eventually discover that the real business was never the platform at all.
