TL;DR: A week ago we asked how image and content creators should be able to earn on Civitai. You gave us 240+ comments, a lot of them long and thoughtful, and we read all of them. Here's what we heard, what we're already shipping, and what we've decided not to do and why.
First, thank you
Last week's proposal was us asking instead of telling, and you showed up. The feedback was direct, sometimes blunt, and genuinely useful. This is us following through like we said we would.
What we heard
Three things came through loud and clear:
Discovery is the real problem. By far the most common message: fix visibility before anything else. Great work dies in a day, the featured page felt like a closed circle, and following an image creator did too little.
Blue Buzz should actually be worth something. A lot of you earn mostly Blue Buzz and feel like it does nothing.
Be careful what you reward. Anything tied to raw reaction counts gets gamed by bots and pays whoever already has reach. Don't reward the already-popular and call it a creator program.
We took all three to heart.
What we're shipping
Discovery: New & Upcoming (live today). We just launched feeds dedicated to new and upcoming creators, people who started publishing in the last 90 days, surfaced by their most popular work. They're on the homepage and as new feeds inside images, videos, and models. The whole point is to give creators without an established following a real shot at being seen. Go take a look. These work on civitai.red too (the feeds surface mature content, while the homepage stays SFW).
Remix galleries (coming). A remix used to mean reusing someone's prompt with a few tweaks. That's not really what remixing is anymore. With image-edit models, image-reference models, and image-to-video, a remix can be almost anything built on top of someone else's work, and there's no clean way to detect all of that automatically. So instead of trying to guess what counts as a remix, we're adding a remix gallery that a creator can opt to turn on for their content. You submit your remix to a creator's gallery, and if they approve it, you land in front of their audience. It's discovery and a way to earn in one: a creator can charge for a spot in their gallery, so popular creators might charge more and newer creators less, and they control it all the way down to the individual image. It's a real path for newer creators to get noticed by building on work people already love, and it sets the stage for the next piece.
Sticker placement (coming). You might have already started seeing stickers show up in comments. That's the start of something bigger. We're building the ability to place stickers directly on content, not just drop them in a comment. Placing a sticker on someone's work costs buzz that goes to the creator, so it's a new way to say "this is great" that's more than a reaction and lighter than a comment. Just like the remix gallery, creators control their own space: they turn it on, set a price to place, and choose whether stickers auto-approve or need their sign-off. And we've designed it so stickers never cover the art. You toggle them on as you browse.
Blue Buzz with real uses. Creators can now choose to accept Blue Buzz for their cosmetics, and you can use Blue Buzz to create cosmetics of your own. Accepting Blue Buzz for your models is coming too. We got a little ahead of ourselves announcing that one before it shipped (sorry about that, we've been moving fast), but it's up for review and looks like it's going live today. Either way, Blue Buzz has real spending power now, not someday.
What we're not doing, and why
We want to be straight about the asks we're not moving on:
Rewarding images by reaction count. You were right that this is too easy to game and mostly pays whoever already has reach. We're not building it.
Converting Blue Buzz to Yellow, or opening up mature generation on Blue Buzz. Blue Buzz already covers free generation, you can generate with it today. What we don't allow is mature generation on Blue Buzz without a membership or paid buzz. Gating mature generation behind paid access cut the load on our services dramatically, and it makes it much harder for people creating abusive content to keep spinning up easy free access. Turning Blue into a cash equivalent runs into the same kinds of problems. We'd rather keep expanding Blue's real uses, like the ones above.
Removing the one-month cap on reaction-earned buzz. We already cap daily payouts, and the one-month window is there to reward staying active rather than resurfacing an old back catalogue. The new discovery feeds are the better answer to older work getting seen.
Keep the feedback coming
This is the conversation we want to keep having. A few things we'd genuinely like your take on in the comments:
Try the New & Upcoming feeds. Did they surface creators or work you hadn't seen before?
For remix galleries and sticker placement, would you actually use them? What feels fair to charge for a spot or a placement, and what would you pay?
What would make these worth it for you as a creator?
Especially you newer creators, since you're a lot of who this is built for. We'll keep building in the open.
Update - Aug 7
A couple of follow-ups from your feedback on New & Upcoming:
Eligibility catch. A commenter flagged that the "new creator" rule looked gameable. The specific method they described didn't turn out to work, but it sent us looking and we found a real one next to it: on the models side, unpublishing your oldest version moved your first-publish date forward and kept you eligible. That's now fixed, we count a version that was ever published, so unpublishing can't reset the clock. Worth clarifying while we're here: "new" is based on when you started publishing, not when you signed up, so a long-time lurker who just started creating is exactly who this is for. That part's intentional.
Buzz-beggar content. We've started filtering Beggars Board submissions out of New & Upcoming. The existing board content is excluded now, and newly-submitted posts get auto-excluded after our next deploy. This filters that content, not the creators, so beggar posts can still affect the images-new leaderboard for now, a known separate limitation. It also doesn't yet cover daily-challenge posts or add a photorealism filter, both of which we've heard.