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Frequently Asked Questions
Let's take an example to make it
easier...
You open a web site with us like the ones
you can see there already. They include a way for customers to pay a
subscription and receive access to a password-protected area where everything
except your previews is kept. The customer has paid to access your members area
for one month. After that month, unless he cancels, his credit card gets
charged again and he continues to have access. If he cancels, access is revoked
when the membership expires. That's the basis of any pay site you see online.
That's how ours work.
Now, the example (just using round figures
because they make easier examples) :
Joe pays $10 by credit card and gets
his password to your site. $5 of that is yours.
A month later, Joe hasn't
cancelled, so he gets charged a reduced amount (because he's a loyal customer).
Say he gets charged $8 for his second month of membership
$4 of that is
yours
Meanwhile, Fred, Bert and John have all paid for their first
subscriptions. That is three people at $10 each, paid by credit card. Total $30
$15 of that is yours
OK, in simple terms, every time someone pays
a subscription, half of that money belongs to you.
Once a week we get data off the credit card
processor which tells us how many visitors paid money to each of our
artist/writer sites for new memberships and for continuing memberships. So we
can look at the data for your site and see, during the previous week, X number
of new memberships, Y number of rebills. We transfer that data to our own
payments system, so every week, assuming there has been any activity, you will
be able to log in and see a statement that says:
- X new memberships @ $... (50% of the actual charge made
to the member)
- Y rebills @ $... (50% of the actual charge made to the
member)
- Date due for payment to you
Pretty simple really. You can look at individual statements
or you can look at a cumulative statement of all activity. All the money listed
is money we have collected for you. All our operating expenses and profits come
out of the other 50% of the money paid by the customer.
So the quick version of the above is:
- Every time your web site makes a sale, you are due to
collect half of that sale, right from the first one
- All sales are recorded so you can see how many sales and
how much money you have made from them
The second factor is that we do not get the money from sales
immediately. The credit card processor pays us every two weeks by check. They
have to post that check, it has to be delivered to us, paid into the bank, and
cleared. All before we have your money and our own. So we have to allow for
that in a delay between your making a sale and us sending you the money from
it. For that reason all statements of sales made on your web site include a
date when we are due to pay you for those sales.
Now, some web sites sell a lot of memberships, others are
less popular. Most sites need time before they start attracting an audience. So
during a week, one site may sell 100 memberships, another may sell two, and a
new site may not sell any. If we had to pay out every one of the 200+ artists
and writers every week, irrespective of whether they had made $500 or $5, it
would make a lot of work for us. The artist who had made $5 wouldn't be able to
do much with it. And depending on the payment method, either he or us would
have to pay the charges involved with that payment.
So it could cost us maybe an additional $5 to pay an artist
$5. That isn't good business obviously. So what we say is that we will pay you
once the amount you have made in sales adds up to at least $50 and has become
due for payment (see above). If you make more than $50 in a week, it's paid as
soon as the due date. If you make less than that, we wait until subsequent
sales take the cumulative total above $50.
The quick version of this is:
- Your 50% of a sale is due to be paid to you after a
period of time that allows that money to actually reach us
- To keep down excess work and transaction fees, we wait
until you are due to be paid at least $50 to make it worth doing a
transfer
So perhaps a summary of the important information would
be:
- Every time a sale is made, you have earned half of that
money
- Weekly summaries show you how many sales have been made
and how much money you have earned
- There is a delay before we can pass that money on you,
because it takes us time to get the money into our bank
- To keep it simple and to keep costs down, we wait until
we are due to pass on at least $50 that you have made from those sales
If you were to open up your own pay site,
you would need to register a domain, find and pay for web hosting, promote
yourself, and arrange for someone to take credit card payments. All of this
takes time and money. For example, registering as a merchant with a processing
company to take Visa payments will cost you $750 plus $375 per year. The
processor will also take up to 20% of your memberships in charges.
Then you will need to either design the site
yourself or pay someone else, find a host, get it registered with search
engines, take time to do the updates and deal with customer complaints and
generally try to get visitors to your site and keep them happy.
For a small one-man operation you could
easily be spending 40% of your income on overheads and still have to do all the
work yourself. By taking advantage of our expertise, you not only solve all
your problems but gain wider access to your work because of our larger presence
on the Internet. This brings extra exposure and the extra memberships that
follow.
Add that to the fact that you have no
financial risk and no time taken out for the mundane jobs, and we believe it
makes sense all round.
Of course we don't just do it because we are
philanthropists. We run our own server and take advantage of the scale of the
operation to reduce our per-artist cost as compared with hosting and
maintaining individual sites. We don't make nearly as much as you do, but
that's only fair because you are the creative talent.
As an artist, you don't give up copyright to
your work and you are not a partner in the business. So, subject to 30 days
notice so memberships can expire, you can pull all your work and leave with
absolutely no restrictions or liabilities.
What sort of guarantees? Do we guarantee you
will get a set amount of money? No. The public decides if they like your work
enough to pay for it. The more who like it, the more money you make. The more
you keep members happy, the longer they stay and the more money you make.
That's free-market capitalism in action ;) We have plenty of incentive to help
you. The system is set up so we only ever make money in direct relation to you
making money. The more you make, the more we make too (though the more work we
get as a result).
Ideally you will be an artist, animator,
model, photographer, moviemaker or writer who has been around for a while. So
you will probably have some older material to bulk out the site at startup.
This can have already been distributed to free sites and may be included in
your paysite as archives. Then you'll need some new and exclusive works that
will only be available by joining your pay site. That is what people are paying
for, after all. Exactly how much you start with depends on the complexity of
what you do.
Someone who makes long animated AVI's would
obviously spend a lot more time on each one than someone who made photomanips,
so that is taken into account when deciding how much is a good starting point.
For a Poser artist, for example, something like 50 images would be a good
start. If we don't think you have enough, we'll tell you.
Many artists and writers have a crossover of
the subjects they cover. But normally it is possible to find a predominant
theme which will tell you where best to have a presence. The page you started
from has a brief description of the theme of each site and if in doubt, just
mail Artist
Liaison.
We don't set requirements or targets for
doing updates. That is your decision and will be defined by the time you have
available. Of course, some sites will need a large addition of material in the
first few weeks to bring the quantity level up, but in general small frequent
updates are better than occasional large ones.
Either way we don't specify any
requirements. You decide what you can do and what you want to do.
Not everyone is going to like the design
used for our sites. They are kept rather simple in appearance because they are
aimed to be viewable by as many different visitors as possible, whatever sort
of connection and browser they use. Because sites need to be accessible so as
to maximise income, because we have to maintain sites for dozens of artists and
writers and because we need to have a common feel to the structure, we can't
allow artists to get creative on the pages we control.
We have space available for artists to
create a free site so long as they maintain a paysite and we don't lay down any
guidelines on design for those, so you can get as inventive as you want
there.
The exception is for Archive Sites that
won't be changing. If, for example, you have been running your own web site and
you wish to move it over to us, we can install your site under one of our
domains just as it is, providing it is not going to change with updating
in the future. The reason for this is that we can verify your HTML once. We
can't verify the HTML from 50 artists, twice a week.
If you want to do commission work you can
advertise this within the member's area or in your free site. Reference may be
made to it from the preview pages.
No problem, providing it's in the members
area or in your free site. We are here to sell memberships to sites, not give
out loads of free alternatives. With selected sites we arrange a reciprocal
link to the umbrella as a whole rather than to individual artists and in
special cases we can place one or two links on your actual preview page.
Some artists want to have a pay site with us
as a repository for work they did in the past, but they don't plan to do any
new updates. That becomes an archive site and is listed as such.
Archive sites will tend to attract less
members but they provide an ongoing income without doing any more work. And
because they don't change, memberships are set to not renew. Subscribers pay
for a one-month access and then their membership ends automatically. Live sites
are ones that plan to be updated periodically by the artist, and memberships
renew until cancelled by the subscriber.
Live sites and Archive sites can be changed
in status from one to the other at any time after they have been created. So if
an artist has a live site and in the future loses the ability to update, it can
be changed to an archive so s/he continues to gain income without needing to
update. And of course, it works the other way around too.
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