Quintupling Creator Revenue and Becoming Sustainable

Just over 3 weeks ago, we launched our new ads powered by Aditude. These ads have allowed us to improve creator revenue drastically and become sustainable. Read on for more info!

Creator Revenue

We’re excited to share we have been able to increase creator revenue by 5-8x what it was before!

There’s a couple changes to how revenue is distributed out to creators coming with this increase.

First, revenue is no longer entirely paid out the day they are earned. Previously, we used our own in-house advertisement deal which paid us in advance for the entire month, and we divided that among each day in the month, as the month progressed. With the switch to a more traditional ad network, we are paid on a NET 60 basis, which is fairly standard with ad networks. What this means is that some of your revenue may be pending until the ad network pays us out. Exactly how this works is explained further here.

Second, the revenue split between Modrinth and Creators has changed. See the next section on sustainability for more on this.

Becoming Sustainable

We have updated the Modrinth creator revenue split from 90/10 to 75/25. However, all of the increases listed above are with the new rate included, so while the percentage is lower, the overall revenue is much, much higher.

While 90% is a more remarkable figure, we changed it in order to ensure we can keep running Modrinth and continue to grow creator revenue without having to worry about losing money on operational costs.

Through these changes, we are proud to announce Modrinth is now fully sustainable with the new income, with all hosting and operational costs accounted for (including paying our developers, moderators, and support staff!) With the new revenue, users will see reduced support times and we will be able to ship bigger and better updates quicker to you all!

In an effort to be more transparent with our community than ever before, we are opening up as many of our finances as possible so you all can know how we’re doing and where all the money is going. We’re working to develop a transparency page on our website for you to view all the graphs and numbers, but it wasn’t ready in time for this blog post (for now, you can view our site-wide ad revenue in the API here. We also plan to publish monthly transparency reports with more details about our revenue and expenses, the first of which should be available in early October, so keep an eye out for that.

For now, we can tell you that creators on Modrinth have earned a total of $160,868 on Modrinth to date (as of September 13, 2024), and here’s a graph of our revenue from the past 30 days:

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If you’ve made it to the end of this, you’re welcome to fill out this survey to be considered for a small closed beta experimental release of something coming soon:

We have a lot of exciting things coming up still, and of course, we greatly appreciate all of your support!