X head of content Nikita Bier announced Friday that the platform is overhauling its creator compensation program, reducing payouts to aggregation accounts and redirecting revenue to original content creators. The changes are part of a broader shift in how X's revenue-sharing program distributes payments to monetized accounts.

"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," he added.

Aggregation accounts — which copy and paste content from other creators or companies, often without attribution, to drive engagement — saw their payouts cut by 40% in the most recent cycle, Bier said in a reply posted Saturday. An additional 20% reduction is planned for the next cycle. Under X's revenue-sharing program, the more engagement a monetized account receives, the larger its payout.

Bier said aggregation accounts were crowding out real creators and hurting new author growth on the platform. "X will never infringe on speech or reach—but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users," he wrote.

The announcement drew pushback from some users. Dominick McGee, an X creator who goes by the handle Dom Lucre, said his career had been built on others sharing his videos. "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," he added. Last year, the New York Times ranked McGee as the third most-influential user on the platform and described him as a "master of outrage." McGee told the newspaper that his pay from X was inconsistent because he had no tools to see how much money he was earning from each post, unlike other platforms such as YouTube.

Pop culture account Daily Loud called the move genius but argued that X would pocket the reduced payouts while creators would remain on the platform because their audiences are on X. The account also asked Bier who gets credit for the original work under the new structure.