Where every cent goes
Slopify is a test of whether very small automated payments can fund creative work. The mechanism is simple enough to check line by line, so here it is in full.
LIVE LEDGER
What has actually moved
- Payouts to creators
- … the number that matters
- Creators paid
- … real people, real cents
- Subscriptions
- … $0.25 a month each
- Distributed
- … we report this last, on purpose
THE MATH
One subscription, followed all the way down
- You are charged
- $3.00 once a year $0.25 / month, collected annually
- Creators receive
- $2.10 70% of it, held as a pool
- Slopify keeps
- $0.90 30%, before card fees
- Each play releases
- $0.0021 drawn from the pool, per attributed play
- So one subscription funds
- 1,000 separate payouts before it is spent
The pool can never pay out more than was collected for it. When it reaches zero it stops, and plays against an empty pool pay nobody and say so.
WHY IT LOOKS LIKE THIS
Two questions people ask first
- Why bill yearly if the price is monthly? Card networks cannot carry a 25c charge — the minimum is 50c and the fee alone is 30c. Billing once a year keeps 87% of the money in the economy instead of 63%. The monthly price is the honest unit, so it is the one quoted.
- Why report transactions instead of revenue? Revenue at this scale is noise. What is worth knowing is whether money moves at all, repeatedly, without anyone touching it. A thousand payouts of $0.0021 says more than one large number.