From the very beginning, Civitai has been driven by a singular vision: empowering creators in the AI generation space to turn their passion into something more. Even before we introduced memberships or paid services, finding a way to help creators monetize their work has been at the heart of what we do. For those who might not know our history, Civitai started as my personal passion project—born from a love for this community and a desire to help it flourish. Even before Civitai was officially a company, I hoped that one day I'd be able to help creators earn for the work they were doing.
The Journey So Far
We took our first step toward creator monetization by introducing Buzz tips, hoping it would eventually evolve into a proper compensation system. As we expanded our platform to include generation capabilities and began charging for certain services, that dream seemed increasingly within reach.
Our initial Creators Program was straightforward: creators could exchange 1,000 Buzz for $1 (with a 30% platform fee, making it effectively $0.70 per 1,000 Buzz). We opened applications and welcomed as many creators as we could financially support—about 50 in total. The hope was that as our platform grew on our path to sustainability, we'd be able to expand the program and welcome more of the talented creators who had applied.
Facing Reality
Despite our best intentions, we've hit some hard realities. We wanted to make earning opportunities available to all creators, not just a select few. However, as detailed in our 2024 Transparency Report, we continue to operate at a monthly loss while working to ensure Civitai's survival. We've been optimizing expenses on both hardware and team fronts, and introducing new pricing structures like Additional Resource Fees to help cover the costs of power users. Even with these measures, we simply don't have the means to fully open the program in its current form without compromising Civitai's long-term sustainability—a conclusion we reached after months of careful analysis.
The New Vision
Rather than give up on our dream of creator compensation, we're evolving the program to make it more sustainable and inclusive. Here's how the new system will work:
Creator Compensation Pool
We're introducing a monthly Creator Compensation Pool, allocated as a portion of our previous month's revenue. This approach directly ties creator earnings to platform growth-when Civitai grows, creator compensation grows with it.
How It Works
Qualified creators with a Civitai Membership can "Bank" their Yellow Buzz to claim their share of the pool
Monthly pool distribution is proportional to each creator's banked Buzz
For example: If the pool is $35,000 and your banked Buzz represents 2% of the total, you'd receive $700
Earnings will be available for withdrawal through our Creator Payout Partner.
From Yellow to Blue: Understanding the Shift
To prepare for this new program, we're adjusting our Buzz reward system to favor Blue Buzz over Yellow Buzz. This change serves an important purpose: ensuring that creator compensation is tied to actual Buzz spending rather than simple engagement metrics. This helps prevent potential gaming of the system while maintaining the integrity of creator earnings.
We recognize this shift impacts content creators who focus on images and videos rather than models. To address this, we'll be introducing new ways for content creators to earn based on the Buzz spending they drive-for instance, rewarding them when their images are used in Remix generations.
Looking Forward
While this isn't the exact program I had envisioned when we started—and I genuinely hoped we'd be in a stronger financial position by now—we have to work within our current reality while still serving as many creators as possible in our community. This new structure allows us to open the program to thousands more creators while ensuring Civitai's continued operation.
The dream of fairly compensating creators remains very much alive. As we continue to grow and evolve, we hope to eventually offer something even closer to our original vision. Thank you for your understanding and for everything you've done to help this community flourish over the last two years.
We'll be sharing more details about the program's implementation in the coming weeks. As always, we welcome your feedback and questions as we work to make this transition as smooth as possible for everyone involved.