How contributors are paid
The whole calculation, with the real numbers this site is running on today.
One subscription, followed all the way through
A listener pays $10.00 a month. Here is where every cent of it goes:
| What the listener pays | $10.00 |
| Less what the card processor takes | − $0.59 |
| Net — the figure everything below is worked out from | $9.41 |
| Into the contributor pot (50%) | $4.71 |
| Into the marketing pool (20%) | $1.88 |
| Kept by So So Boring — hosting, bandwidth, review, the site itself | $2.82 |
The processor's fee shown here is the published rate. In practice we use the fee the processor actually charged on each payment, so the pot is worked out from real money rather than from an assumption.
Dividing the pot
Every contributor's pot from every subscription that month is added together. That total is then divided by qualified listening seconds — every second that anybody spent actually listening, across the whole library.
That gives a rate per second. Your payment is that rate multiplied by your own seconds.
A worked example
Round numbers, to make the shape of it obvious.
- 1,000 subscribers pay $10.00 each.
- After processing, the month's contributor pot is about $4,710.00.
- Across the library, people listened for 40,000 hours — 144,000,000 seconds.
- That works out at roughly 0.003271 cents a second, or about $0.12 an hour listened.
- If your recordings accounted for 400 of those hours, you would receive about $47.10.
The rate moves every month. More subscribers push it up; more listening across the library pushes it down. Nobody is promised a rate, because nobody can honestly promise one.
What counts as listening
Almost everything does. Three things do not:
- Your own recordings. Playing your own work earns you nothing. Otherwise the cheapest way to earn would be to leave your own reading running all night, and the pot would go to whoever had the most patience rather than the best recording.
- The same listener, the same recording, all day. One person can make one recording earn up to 2 hr in a day. Beyond that it still plays normally — it simply stops adding to the total.
- Time nobody actually listened to. The player reports real playback progress, and the server checks every report against the clock. Dragging a scrubber forward, or a script claiming an hour a second, adds nothing.
Your own earnings page shows “listened” and “counting” side by side for every recording, so you can always see the difference and why it is there.
When you get it
A month is settled shortly after it ends. At that point the estimate becomes a real figure, it goes into your balance, and it cannot change again. Sub-cent remainders are carried forward into the next month rather than rounded away.
Once your balance passes $25.00 you can request a payout from your earnings page and we send it to the account you have given us.
Refunds
If a subscriber is refunded before their month is settled, that subscription does not fund the pot. If it is refunded afterwards, the settled month stands — money already credited to a contributor is not clawed back.