So this day was supposed to be Kuro's day and I wanted to celebrate one year of publishing models. Sadly this is now ruined by a new announcement regarding creator licensing fees. There is whole new site called creator studio, where you can see all the metrics and have the full control over your models....
Well at least if you have a paid Membership. Currently if your model gets used in the generator being it a base model or LoRA, you'll get a fixed compensation for it by default and can get a tip, set by the generating user, on top. This is now changed, you can set a custom compensation amount, if you have a Membership.
If you do not have a Membership, you'll get nothing (at least that's the current status) but tips. So every creator without membership will become a beggar basically.
I do not need the buzz for generation or training, I can do that pretty much locally, but it feels like my work is devalued just because I do not have a membership.
For other creators, who can't do stuff locally, this might be the end (well there are other ways to train a LoRA like collab, but I am not the one to recommend them).
And why should they stay, if their work is less important than that of other creators, who can afford a membership?
I planned to publish my own base models and try to put them up for generation with the buzz I saved from the compensation I was getting from my LoRAs and from the buzz generous people tipped on my articles/models/images. But given I won't get any yellow buzz anymore from compensation, the base models will never pay for themselves (you pay 1000 buzz per week per model to make them available in the generator) and I will shortly run out of it.
I know that civitai is not a very profitable enterprise (like probably most of the companies in AI business) and that there is not much financial room. However if this will come as planned I am thinking of making my models download only. I know it's not fair for the users who want to use them. But this is not fair for people investing a lot of time and care creating models.
I can't speak of other people and I don't want to boast, but I spent probably 100+ hours in making my Korra Ultimate LoRA alone (I am not stopping time though). So, yeah, end of the rant here. I hope there is a reversal and the compensation fee will stay at a default value large than zero, if you don't set them otherwise.
Update (30th of July 20:00 UTC): The cut of compensation for non membership owners has been reverted. Read more in this article.