X is making significant moves to attract creators and journalists back to its platform by increasing creator payouts and expanding access to its long-form Articles feature. Elon Musk recently instructed X’s head of product Nikita Bier to boost creator earnings, prompting an immediate response from the creator community, who reported substantial increases in their payments during the subsequent payment cycle.
Enhanced Creator Payments Drive Content Quality
The strategy aims to tackle a fundamental challenge facing xAI’s projects like Grok: while the platform excels at capturing real-time discussions, it struggles with accuracy and in-depth insight. By offering higher compensation, X hopes to incentivize quality, authoritative content creation on the platform. The logic is straightforward—if creators can earn more posting directly to X than elsewhere, they’ll be motivated to share their work on the platform.
Long-Form Articles Now Available to All Premium Users
To support this initiative, X has announced that all Premium subscribers can now access the long-form Articles feature, previously limited to Premium+ users. This option enables creators to post extended content directly to the platform, improving distribution while keeping users engaged within X rather than directing them to external websites.
However, X faces a significant hurdle: rebuilding trust with journalists. Despite his desire for quality journalistic content, Elon Musk has consistently criticized and derided media outlets, creating tension between his vision for content quality and his antagonistic relationship with the journalism community. Whether financial incentives alone can overcome this disconnect remains uncertain, though X’s approach suggests the company is willing to invest heavily in solving this challenge.