3M views on one X article. That's @0x_fokki, and it's the second time he's done it. "I told AI to stop being creative" is at 2.99M. His July piece did 5.6M. Amazing work and results. He tests every tool on camera before before writes a word about it, and he's still in the replies days later answering how he did it. Book him directly: celebex.notpeople.ai/celebs/… Running something bigger than one post? We plan campaigns across 300+ creators like him, brief them, and report every number back to you.

X paid one creator today about $213 per million impressions. that's the creator's cut of X's ad money, and advertisers paid X more than that. Brands buying posts from creators directly pay a lot more. 200 creators in our catalogue: median cheapest post $100 at a median 3,500 views. roughly $23,000 per million views. The clip lands in the same range from youtube: $15 to $50 per thousand views. If your plan is a payout screenshot, you're taking the smallest cut on the table. write a rate card.

Elon at the G20 on september 1: "everyone who's anyone in AI posts on X. that's how I get my news." That sentence is why an AI post and a gaming post with the same million views pay differently. Advertisers buying the AI topic are paying for the room Elon just described. A creator's payout is a share of that money. In our 13-creator sample the account with 8.6M views landed at the bottom of the payout table. The topic did that. Before you pick a niche, check who's already buying ads in it. The buyers were there before you posted.

This took one evening and no camera. The guy who made it was driving delivery routes two years ago. The first money that bought him a day off a shift came from a faceless youtube video. Two months later he quit. He's our founder. The numbers that convinced him: a short with 23M views paid 381 euros. A long video with 247k views paid $780. A hundred times fewer views, twice the money. Anyone can make the video now. Getting it watched is the whole game, and it's the reason celebex exists. His full playbook is in the article.

X paid one account close to $70,000 under revenue sharing. this week the same account applied to Original Content Rewards and got turned down for "unoriginal content". That's @0xSweep. A billion impressions lifetime, about 20 million on the ten posts he submitted. Nikita Bier, who ran product at X until august, on why the check moved to a person: "with LLMs basically at our fingertips, it's been extraordinarily easy for people to spam. where is the line?" The new program's answer: clear 500k impressions, pick ten posts, a human reads them. Memes, reuploaded graphics, screenshots with no commentary get a no. We read ten rejected accounts. All had cleared the old bar. None could show anything of their own in the ten.

600 million monthly users. Elon on where X is strongest: It tends to be readers people that read words. Where the X network is strongest is among people who think a lot and read a lot. among readers, writers and thinkers, I think X is number one in the world. Our data agrees, in money: long-form Articles were 4% of the posts we pulled and produced 37% of the paid views. one Article averages 10× a regular post. a beginner's guide to an X account that gets paid:

Paul graham posted on September 2 and X hid 34 of his 59 replies as probable spam. Nikita Bier, who ran product at X until august, checked: "95% are LLM bots." Bier already named where they come from. These blockchains were compensating people for talking about the token. and it led to a ton of bots and LLM spam in the replies. Paid mentions are the exact mechanic he's describing. That's the reply section under your KOL's sponsored post too, and nobody screens it before the invoice. We pull day-30 retention on every creator before a brief. When nobody screens, the industry number sits around 4%. Paul Graham got to see his hidden replies. Brands buying posts usually don't.

Nikita Bier, who ran product at X until august, on the new engine: The xAI team actually rebuilt the algorithm from scratch. That's like changing the engine on a jet mid-flight. It's running on tens of thousands of GPUs. The goal was: could engagement stay at least flat after the migration. it did and then it's been up higher than any time in history. What the new engine can see that the old one couldn't: whether there's anything of yours in the post. Ten rejected accounts we read had all passed the numbers. they failed the ten posts a human reads. The test, and what to do with your feed:

875 million impressions and 72 million video views. That's one NFL game the season opener on X last thursday, 739,600 posts in a night, per X's own numbers. The US open did 447 million, up 18% on last year. Here's the part advertisers keep scrolling past. X's ads engineering lead posted the summer shipping list this week: ads MCP, grok imagine ads, lead gen ads, a rebuilt shopify integration and mentions boost. Mentions boost lets a brand put money behind a post that mentions it. not the brand's ad. The creator's post, in the creator's voice, on the brand's budget. It shows up labelled "boosted", and the creator's organic reach stays organic. So a game night now looks like this: someone with 6,000 followers posts the reaction everyone's feeling, tags the brand, and the brand boosts that instead of a studio-made spot. The audience is already there on the night. The only question left is whose post the brand chooses to pay for.

90% of advertisers are back on X. Nikita Bier, who ran product there until august, on why: You get companies like Eight Sleep that have just built their entire brand and business off of sentiment on X. A lot of advertisers ignore that X is where sentiment and public opinion is determined, and everything else is downstream of that. the highest-agency, most influential people in the world are on X, and if you want to reach them you have to have a presence here. That ad money is what a creator's payout is a share of. Which is why a million views about a game and a million about an AI tool are different money the account with 8.6M views landed at the bottom.

X locked a lot of people out last week and asked them to prove they're human. The top three threads on r/twitter right now are all the same screen: scan a QR code with your phone. then download the app. then an email code. then a selfie or a hand gesture. then, for some, the loop starts over. One guy wrote: "they could have just deleted my account and told me so if they didn't want me." another cleared his cache, logged into an alt he hadn't touched since 2024, and got the same wall in under two hours. Here's why it's happening now. Paul Graham, september 2: X hid 34 of his 59 replies as probable spam. Nikita Bier, who ran product at X until august, checked and answered: "95% are LLM bots." So before the new payouts go out on september 25, X is sorting who's a person. If you got the wall, you're not being punished you're being counted. Pass it once, from the app, and post like a person on the other side. That's the whole test.

5,000 followers to close to 800,000. Nikita bier, who ran product at X until august, on how: If I really started understanding X, it was when I went two layers deep on the taxonomy of my interests. I saw Tech Twitter and then consumer internet and then social app builders. every niche is represented on X. If you could find that, that's the magic of the platform. We matched 13 creators to their real monthly payouts. followers didn't predict the money at all an account with 5,600 out-earned one with 23,500. the topic did. how to pick yours, and what X actually pays for:

An account with no followers got 110 million views on X in one day this week. Chamath asked the only question that matters on all-in: how? Sacks's answer, in the clip: within 15 minutes of the post going up, three policy accounts amplified it, and the wall street journal had a story ready to run. Skip the politics. The mechanic is what matters if you're building an account here. X in 2026 doesn't hand out reach by follower count. It hands it out by what happens in the first minutes who picks the post up and how long people stay on it. One post, three real amplifiers and a news hook beat years of follower-farming. The flip side is in the same story. Reach that arrives that fast gets looked at. the engine that can give you 110 million views is the same one a human checks before X pays you a cent.

Bier ran product at X from July 2025 to August 2026. The guy who ran product at X until august, on the oldest "hack" on the platform: When you view a link on X, the web view opens up, you read this article, and it actually blocks all the engagement buttons while you're reading it. X can't get any signals about whether or not that content was any good. So they rebuilt it: we saw link impressions go way up. now writers could post links. And you have to if you're building an audience, you're selling something." Our data on 1,190 posts says the same thing from the other side: "link in the next post" cuts reach by more than half. Put the link in the post. full breakdown of what X pays for, and what it doesn't:

Elon, on what the X algorithm counts: Attention is a big factor. So it is actually better to do things that are long form on the system, because it basically is totting up how many user seconds users were interested in this thing for how many seconds. If it's a link leading out of the system, which we're not opposed to at all, it just is gonna have fewer user seconds than if that article was posted on the X platform. He said that two years ago. We just measured it on 1,190 posts from 30 accounts: long-form Articles were 4% of posts and produced 37% of the paid views. One Article averages 10× a regular post. how to build an account around that, from zero:

A comms strategist said out loud yesterday what most brands in this space are afraid to admit: most of your "engagement" is coming from accounts that exist to inflate someone else's invoice. > Aug 12: Lulu Meservey, on companies paying for launch retweets - "You go to the engagement, it's completely fake... some random account in a developing country with no other tweets other than shilling products like this." > her verdict: "It's a fake company with a fake founder. I will never buy their product, I will never recommend somebody go work with them." > the clip hit 5,000+ retweets and 447K views in under a day - faster than most of the campaigns it's describing We screen for exactly this before we place a single creator on a brief. Not follower count. Not view count. Day-30 retention of the audience they actually bring - the number almost nobody checks before signing the invoice, sitting around 4% industry-wide when nobody's screening for it. The accounts Lulu's describing aren't hard to spot. They're just expensive to keep ignoring.

Most crypto/prediction market brands are burning influencer budget on the wrong metric. They optimize for views. They should optimize for retention of the audience the KOL brings. That 4% is the number that actually matters - and almost nobody checks it before signing a deal. What we screen for before we place a creator on a campaign: • Does their audience already engage with financial/trading content, or just memes? • Is engagement consistent, or spiked by 2-3 viral posts? • Do past brand posts show real replies, or just emoji reactions? DM if you want your next campaign screened the same way.

Meet The Sharps We're an influence agency built for prediction markets, crypto & AI brands. awareness → positioning → users What we do: > End-to-end campaign strategy & execution > A curated KOL network across niches - prediction markets, DeFi, AI agents, on-chain data > Content that doesn't read like an ad: real numbers, real workflows, real voice Right now we're building out our global KOL roster. Looking for creators in every region - US, EU, LATAM, MENA, SEA, CIS, and beyond - who talk crypto, prediction markets, or AI to an audience that actually listens. If that's you (or you know someone), DM us.