Update1:
Recent choices made by the admin have lost my subscription permanently, Licensing fees are off indefinitely.
original text
Greetings creator program members. If you're a paid creator program member or you've banked buzz in the past 12 months you should have received an email about the new changes to what buzz can be banked starting Nov 1. I'd like to point out that the math doesn't add up.
It claims
- Generation compensation: Civitai creates Buzz equal to 25% of what the person paid, and splits it between the creators of the models they used. Nobody pays for that Buzz: Civitai creates it.
- A licensing fee: a price per generation that you set, paid by the person generating. (It's a fee you charge, not one you pay.)
Let's test the claim that buzz is "added on top" of the cost paid for generations using compensation vs. licensing fees.
Here is a screenshot of the cost of one image on my Icebergmix v3 with no fee set
As you can see the total cost is 4 buzz and I would receive 25% of the cost or 1 buzz in compensation.
Now here is a screenshot of the same model and settings with a 1 buzz per image licensing fee.
Hmm, now that's strange, still a total cost of 4 buzz with 1 buzz going to me. It seems they aren't "creating buzz" for the compensation path but are actually charging 33% more to cover the compensation, Or more accurately, they are charging 25% less of a base cost on checkpoints with a licensing fee. So this change isn't about curbing buzz inflation from "created buzz" because there isn't any. But it would make license fee buzz more valuable by removing competing buzz sources from the bankable pool.
Note: there was a bug that was apparently applying the 25% compensation twice, but that appears to have been fixed around Sept 26.
Considering Justin seems dead set on making compensation buzz unbankable regardless, I will begrudgingly be setting all of my checkpoints to a fee of 1 buzz per image.
For anyone using my models
if the cost for you was:
higher than 4 buzz image you should see a decrease in overall cost.less than 4 buzz image you will unfortunately see a small increase.exactly 4 buzz image you will see no difference.
I am only doing this on the very slim chance they somehow win me back as a subscriber.
This is hopefully going to be my last article on the subject.
There are two ways Civitai can make this article obsolete
Reverse course on the compensation change (extremely unlikely, I know)
Lower the base cost of generation with a model with no licensing fee by 25% to match the base cost of ones with the fee so that the "created buzz" claim is actually honest.