X does not pay a fixed rate per 1,000 views; payouts through its Creator Revenue Sharing programme typically work out at anywhere from a few pence to a few pounds per 1,000 views, depending on engagement from verified subscribers. I've run accounts through this scheme and seen wild swings month to month, with reply engagement and ad revenue share mattering more than raw view count. You need Premium verification and 500+ followers just to qualify, and payouts often lag behind other platforms like YouTube.
The short version: X does not pay a flat rate per view. It pays out from a shared ad revenue pool based mostly on engagement from paying Premium subscribers, and the real numbers most creators see land somewhere between a few pence and 50 pence per 1,000 views, not the pounds-per-thousand you'd hope for. A small number of accounts with the right audience mix report far bigger cheques, but for most business owners and marketers it is not worth building a strategy around.
What X calls "pay for views"
There is no button on X that says "pay me per view." What people mean when they ask this is the Creator Revenue Sharing programme (it started life in July 2023 as Ads Revenue Sharing), where X splits a slice of ad revenue with eligible creators based on the engagement their posts generate, weighted heavily towards engagement from other paying subscribers.
To even qualify you need all of the following:
I've gone deeper on this in How Much Do Threads Pay Creators Per View.
- An active X Premium or Premium+ subscription (roughly £8 a month for Premium, around £35 to £40 a month for Premium+ at the time of writing)
- At least 500 followers
- At least 5 million organic impressions on your posts in the trailing three months
- A verified payout account with tax details completed inside the Creator Dashboard
Once you clear those bars, X puts you into a monthly payout pool. Your share depends on a formula the platform has never fully published, but based on public statements and thousands of creators comparing notes on X itself, it weighs three things: total impressions, engagement rate, and crucially, how much of that engagement comes from verified Premium subscribers rather than free accounts. That last part is the bit almost nobody explains when they write about this, and it's the reason two creators with identical view counts can get wildly different cheques.
The real numbers
X told the world its first payout round in August 2023 totalled around $5 million (roughly £4 million) split between about 1,900 creators. Do the maths and that is an average of just over $2,600 per creator for that first round, but averages hide a brutal spread. A handful of high-follower political and meme accounts publicly claimed payouts of $10,000 to $20,000 for a single month. Most eligible creators reported far smaller sums, often in the $20 to $200 range for the same period.
Since then the platform has changed the formula more than once, and by 2026 what most working creators report, based on screenshots shared openly on X and in creator forums, is something like this per 1,000 views:
- Standard business or personal account, mixed audience: roughly $0.01 to $0.10 per 1,000 views
- Accounts with a high percentage of Premium-subscriber followers: $0.20 to $1 per 1,000 views
- Viral outlier posts that get heavy reply engagement from verified accounts: occasionally much higher, but wildly inconsistent month to month
Compare that to YouTube, where a typical mid-size channel earns $2 to $12 per 1,000 monetised views through AdSense, or the Reels bonus schemes Instagram has run on and off, which I've broken down in how much Instagram really pays creators per 1,000 followers. X's programme is not in the same league, and it was never designed to be. It's a loyalty tool to keep Premium subscriptions selling, not a creator economy built to compete with YouTube.
A real example: 5 million views, £9 in the bank
A consulting client of mine, a UK-based recruitment marketer with around 40,000 followers, hit the 5 million impression threshold within two months in early 2025 after a couple of his threads got picked up by bigger accounts. He was excited, understandably. He connected his payout details, waited for the next cycle, and got £9.14.
He'd assumed 5 million views meant a decent cheque. What happened was that the vast majority of those views came from free accounts scrolling past on the timeline, not from Premium subscribers actively engaging in his replies. The formula simply didn't credit that traffic the way he expected. He ran the same volume of impressions the following month, changed nothing about his content, and got £41 because one thread happened to attract a cluster of verified replies. Nothing he did differently caused that swing. That inconsistency is the single biggest reason I tell clients not to plan around this income.
The bit most writers on this topic skip
Here's the uncomfortable part. The formula rewards conflict. Threads that provoke arguments, quote-tweet pile-ons, and outrage bait consistently outperform useful, calm, expert content, because arguments generate exactly the kind of high-engagement, verified-subscriber-heavy reply chains the algorithm pays for. Several of the highest publicly reported payouts in 2023 and 2024 went to accounts posting deliberately inflammatory or recycled content rather than original work. X has tightened rules since to try to stop outright engagement farming and even clawed back payments from some accounts, but the underlying incentive hasn't changed. If you want to maximise this specific revenue stream, the honest playbook is picking fights, not writing good posts. That's a bad trade for anyone building a business reputation, and it's why I don't recommend chasing it as a core strategy for clients who need to be trusted, not talked about.
Related to that: engagement quality also affects visibility in ways that trip people up. If your replies keep vanishing from view or getting buried, worth reading why X hides some of your replies, because a hidden reply earns you nothing under this scheme even if it was seen by thousands before it got suppressed.
The risk nobody mentions: you can lose it overnight
Payout eligibility isn't permanent. Account restrictions, a temporary suspension while a review happens, or even a bug flagging your account for spam, and your monetisation pauses or resets. I've seen this happen to a fellow consultant whose account was locked for eleven days over a false copyright flag, right in the middle of his best-performing month. He lost that entire payout cycle with no appeal that moved faster than the deadline. If you're relying on this money for anything real, read why Twitter accounts get locked and how to avoid it before you build any plans around a payout you can't control.
Is it worth chasing?
For almost everyone reading this, no. Here's my honest breakdown:
- If you already have 500,000-plus followers and post daily anyway, turn it on. It's free money on top of what you're already doing, even if the amounts are modest.
- If you're building a business audience of a few thousand to a few tens of thousands, the time you'd spend chasing viral reply-bait is better spent on a newsletter, a lead magnet, or direct outreach, all things that convert to actual client revenue rather than pennies per thousand views.
- If your entire content strategy would need to shift towards arguments and outrage to hit the impression threshold, don't. It costs you credibility for a sum that, for most accounts, won't cover a decent lunch each month.
The platform itself has shifted so much since Musk's takeover that the ground keeps moving under this programme too. I wrote a broader look at that in what X looks like now, and how much has it really changed, and the creator payout scheme is a good example of that pattern: launched with fanfare, changed quietly several times, and never as reliable as the headlines around it suggested.
If you still want to try it
Do it as a side experiment, not a plan. Here's the practical route:
- Subscribe to X Premium (Premium+ if you want the extra reach it currently gets in the algorithm, though it costs roughly four to five times more)
- Post consistently, focused on useful content for your actual audience, not bait
- Check your impressions monthly in analytics; you need 5 million trailing over 90 days
- Once eligible, connect your payout details in the Creator Dashboard and complete tax forms
- Treat whatever arrives as a bonus, log it separately from your real business income, and don't change your content style to chase a bigger number
I keep this switched on for my own account purely out of curiosity. Most months it's a coffee's worth of money. Some months it's nothing. That's the honest range you should expect too.
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Every platform's pay rate in one place: the creator pay rates guide.
Frequently asked questions
How much does X pay per 1,000 views?
There's no fixed published rate. Real-world reports from creators put typical earnings between $0.01 and $0.10 per 1,000 views for average accounts, rising to $0.20 to $1 for accounts with a high proportion of Premium-subscriber followers, with occasional much bigger outliers for viral, reply-heavy threads.
Do you need X Premium to get paid for views?
Yes. You must be an active Premium or Premium+ subscriber, have at least 500 followers, and reach 5 million organic impressions in the trailing three months before you're even eligible to join the payout pool.
Why did my post get millions of views but almost no payout?
The formula weighs engagement from verified, paying subscribers far more heavily than raw view count from free accounts. Millions of casual scroll-past impressions from non-subscribers can pay very little, while a smaller number of active replies from other Premium accounts can pay more.
Is chasing X's creator payout worth it for a small business account?
For most small business or marketing accounts, no. The amounts are inconsistent and generally small, and the content style that performs best under the formula (arguments, outrage, bait) usually conflicts with the trust and credibility a business account needs to build.
