X continues to refine its creator incentive program as it tries to improve the quality of content posted to the app. The company’s latest target is engagement baiters and users who repost other people’s content.
On the first point, Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said in a Thursday post on X that users who directly ask other users for engagement will be removed from the platform’s creator revenue share program.
As per Bier: “Soliciting engagements (‘I’ll follow everyone who replies’) 3 or more times will results in removal from the program and your account will be forwarded to the policy team for suspension.”
Bier said that X’s Grok artificial intelligence system is now more effective at catching these violations, which will ensure that the X team is able to stay on top of users looking to game its revenue-share system.
In the same post, Bier said X has updated its models for detecting duplicated content, in alignment with its latest rules about how original creators get paid.
In April, X announced a system designed to better identify original creators and penalize aggregators in order to remove the incentive for users to steal other people’s posts.
Now X is expanding this push, with improved detection of re-purposed and remixed uploads.
“Adding watermarks, intros and other edits will send monetized impressions to the original uploader,” Bier said. “This also includes copying viral text posts (most common one: ‘Twitter is like the smoking section of the internet’). We detected 1.5 million posts that were stolen this cycle.”
The expanded push will see aggregator accounts lose a significant share of their income through X’s updated payment scheme. Bier reported that payouts to aggregators have already declined by about 80% this year.
This also has an impact on X more broadly because it reduces the flow of content and could potentially alter engagement as a result. However, the impetus makes sense, because the company is trying to ensure that original content creators get the recognition and payment they deserve.
Bier said that repeated or intentional circumvention of its copied content policy will lead to removal from its revenue share program.
“With these changes, over $1 million will be given back to original content creators,” Bier said, highlighting the significance of the push in redistributing revenue to original content creators in the app, which will ideally help to keep them posting.
These updates come in addition to X’s other revenue share program refinements, which include changes designed to restrict crypto projects from spamming promotions and improved measures that demonetize AI deepfakes.
At one point, X also proposed removing the incentive for creators to post about political topics outside of their home nation. However, platform owner, Elon Musk, nixed the plan after several of his favorite users complained about the update.
Because X really needs the users who do post to keep sharing in the app.
According to previously shared insight from the company, around 20% of X’s total user base creates 100% of the content, with the vast majority of users in read-only mode, but never engaging with creators or posting anything themselves.
That means X is reliant on a relatively small number of creators to keep the app going. As such, the better it can reward these users, the better off X will be.
Improved incentives could also encourage more people to post, which would also ensure an expanded data stream for xAI’s projects.