X has a new product chief. Peter Sellis, who was Snapchat's first product manager, said on Monday, October 26, that he is joining X to lead Product, taking over a role that shapes everything from the timeline to how creators get paid.
In his announcement post, Sellis wrote, "I'm joining the team at @X to lead Product," and added, "X is the best way to find out what's happening in the world right now and talk about it." He also said he is a believer in SpaceX's mission, joking that it is time to make posting multiplanetary. SpaceX now owns X.
Sellis brings a long consumer-product resume. He spent seven years at Snapchat, then ran product at Discord. At Discord, he managed Nikita Bier, X's previous product chief, after Discord bought Bier's startup. Bier stepped down in August, so Sellis is now, in effect, succeeding a leader he once managed elsewhere.
What he inherits most immediately is creator pay. Seven weeks ago, on September 8, X replaced its old revenue-sharing scheme with Original Content Rewards. Creators now earn for each "qualified impression," meaning a unique view by a Premium subscriber in the Home feed. In April, under Bier, X had already cut payouts by 60 percent for accounts that repost other people's news, a sign of the shift toward original posts.
Eligibility for the new program is demanding. A creator needs a Premium plan, 500 verified followers, and 500,000 verified Home feed views over 90 days. United States payouts now land in X Money, the company's own payments service. That paying audience is still small: X has about 4.4 million Premium subscribers against roughly 550 million monthly users, and X has not disclosed how much it pays creators in total.
Advertising will matter to his tenure, too. On a recent podcast, Sellis called ads the best fit for making money from consumer apps, while naming Snapchat's camera monetization one of his biggest failures. SpaceX reported third-quarter advertising revenue of 538 million dollars, up 18 percent from a year earlier, although revenue over nine months still fell 6 percent. By comparison, Twitter alone sold about 1.08 billion dollars of ads in a single quarter of 2022.
Neither Sellis nor X has announced any changes to creator pay, and his first moves have not been detailed. For creators and regular users, the appointment is worth watching for a practical reason: the person now leading Product will decide how the program he inherited evolves, which posts earn, and how hard X pushes the small Premium audience that currently funds those payouts.