Elon Musk’s X platform said it will reduce payouts to aggregation accounts in favor of rewarding original content in an overhaul of how it compensates creators.
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Nikita Bier, the platform’s head of content, posted Friday that X was allocating a portion of revenue exclusively to original content creators “for this creator payout cycle,” saying the shift would enrich the app’s timeline.
“Reposts & commentary will always be a core pillar of X, but our Revenue Sharing program should incentivize original, high-quality content that brings new value to the Timeline,” Bier wrote. “This means rewarding the effort it takes to produce something, not just the poster who helped it travel furthest.”
Aggregation accounts copy and paste content from other creators or companies en masse — often without attribution — to drive engagement. Under X’s revenue-sharing program, the more engagement a monetized account receives, the larger its payout.
In a reply posted Saturday, Bier said aggregation accounts saw their payouts cut by 40% in the most recent cycle, with an additional 20% reduction planned for the next one. He said it had become clear that such accounts “crowded out real creators and hurt new author growth.”
“X will never infringe on speech or reach—but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users,” Bier wrote.
The policy drew criticism from some creators who argued that reposting is central to how content spreads on X. Creator Dominick McGee, who goes by the handle Dom Lucre, pointed out that his own career had been built on others sharing his videos — including instances he described as people “stealing” his content.
“X is the app that makes posts from other apps news,” McGee wrote. “If you take that away it will no longer have the value of being the great validator and creators won’t bother posting ‘original content’ because of the 90% reduction which means original creators will never blow up.”
The New York Times described McGee last year as a “master of outrage” on the platform, where he ranked third most-influential user at one point. He told the newspaper that his pay from X was inconsistent as he had no tools to see how much money he was earning from each post, as opposed to other social media platforms such as YouTube.
Others raised questions about how X defines aggregation. One user who replied to Bier noted that he produces original content alongside occasional reposts. “Do my occasional reposts make me an aggregator?” he asked.
Another account asked Grok, X’s AI chatbot, whether it would be classified as an aggregator under the new rules. Grok said it was a low-risk account, noting that it promoted local content and offered substantive replies rather than relying on mass reposts of third-party news or “BREAKING”-style bait posts.
Pop culture account Daily Loud called the move “genius” — cynically — arguing that X would pocket the reduced payouts while creators would remain on the platform simply because that’s where their audiences are. In an exchange with Bier, the account pressed him on “who gets the credit for the original work.”
Bier was direct: Any post that is a repost or sourced from a third-party network will be subject to a deduction. “I recommend recording original videos with your own voice over,” he said. “We want net new content on the app.”
Bier joined X last summer to lead its product team, announcing the move in a June post thanking Musk for the role.
In November, he helped launch a location-transparency feature that allowed users to see the country or region associated with any account — a tool Bier said would help “verify the authenticity of content” and reduce the influence of coordinated troll farms. He later acknowledged that the feature had been temporarily disabled due to inaccuracies affecting some older accounts, which he attributed to IP address ranges shifting over time.
