Hi Authors,
We’ve responded to some similar questions and concerns around earnings in Elements, so we wanted to revisit the way that we explain how earnings work for authors who are new to Elements in this forum thread here.
We want to address that the recent video earnings that have been shared on the forums do not accurately represent what you can expect to receive as an author on Elements. This is because these earnings were generated from a very small portion of beta test subscribers, at the tail end of the monthly cycle and prior to any Marketing activities that kick-started the launch of Video Elements at the start of June. They also do not include the monthly contributor bonus.
As spacestock & creattive have noted, due to the nature of how subscriber share earnings are calculated, Elements payouts are on a delayed cycle – the payout that was processed this month in June is only for subscription periods that started in the month of April, before the official video launch.
Next month’s payout for all subscription periods that started in May will be substantially higher, although it will still only reflect a partial earnings period for video. The following month payout (processed in August, for subscription periods starting in June) will be the first full earnings period for video following its launch, and will be a much better representation of what you can expect to earn on Elements. It should only get even better from there as the subscriber base continues to grow.
We know that this has caused some confusion and for that, we apologize. Hopefully, this will now help to clear things up. Earnings will increase as you move through full payout periods and as we’ve seen with other launches, we think that more subscribers will be attracted to the offering, further increasing author earnings over time.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out below or visit the Author Help Center for more information. We will do our best to answer your questions as soon as we can. Thanks.