CititAI and the Road to Stability

When it comes to AI models and how to monetize them, it can be a challenge, there are many different ways you can sell a product, but in the long run, many of those ways can lead to people not trusting you after if they notice you're just trying to milk them for every penny they have.
At the same time, people tend to prefer things to be free, so much so they tend to ask for hours and hours of labor without paying those who worked on the things they enjoy and ending up asking you work for hours of your life and expect nothing in return.
Overall, it's hard to find a good balance of paying your bills, respecting the customer and giving into the urge to build things for free, but I think I've thought of a way that can handle everyone's needs in a fair way.

General Audience:

A general audience doesn't tend to know the costs or take them into account when interacting with a product, often making them feel as though everything is a scam or not fair to them, which is why you need to give them something to bite into, so they can enjoy the product, but not go so far as to be hemorrhaging money to try and appeal to a crowd that doesn't know the fees.

Window Shopping:
When it comes to people dropping by to view CivitAI and if they want to spend money on it, the general audience isn't looking for creative tools, they're looking for the fastest and cheapest way to get what they want while grabbing things they'll find that they weren't aware of what they wanted along the way.
For this group of people, you need to offer a good reason to be on the website and a good reason to interact with the community, for this, free generations and a limit to them comes into play.
For that, you'll need to create a limit, people will drop in, do a few generations or batch generations, check a model and move on, but you need to balance the value of the generations and buzz to limit them to half a month, but reward them for coming back by giving them an allowance per month, limiting how much free buzz they can hold.
This keeps into account that people are busy in their lives and won't be on the website constantly, which should give them enough to not feel restricted in generations but limits those who have more spare time and funnels them into other means of helping the website, like earning buzz or buying buzz, however, buying buzz will only lead to small purchases when needed rather then giving the audience the value they'd appreciate.


Subscriptions:
When it comes to the general audience, a subscription needs to give them a reason to be on the site almost every day to really feel as though they have value for the money their paying per month or per year, which is hard when you mostly deal with things outside of your control as a hosting site or even as a generation service, given creators are giving most of your value and you can't tell them what to do.
Subscriptions and their value can be really hard to place, but for a general audience, I think the best way to offer a subscription with some value would be to allow them to passively earn buzz per day, giving them the option to do a lot of generations, limiting it so they can't over work your servers while still gaining a very large pool of generations, but at the same time, realize that isn't enough for the fee and the average person and will seem more like gated value.
To give more weight to the subscription is to allow people to pick where their money is going to, more so, instead of a generalized subscription, you allow people to subscribe to a creator and take 10% or 30% of the cut, but apply any subscription to a creator as a generalized subscription, as in, give anyone subscribing to their favorite creators a free Supporter Tier subscription for giving their favorite creator money and taking some of the money.


Overall the general audience is the biggest source of cash flow, but the hardest to actually get to spend money, they need assurance that their money will be well spend and gives them actual value for spending it, which they'll visit for the idea but stay for the creators and the community.

Creative Audience:

The creative audience tends to not take into account the costs of hosting and generations, while at the same time, experiencing the loss of value from spending hours of their life on something, then gaining nothing in return, which works to bring people in, but you start to realize you could have spent those hours doing something else that would benefit you more.

Creative Value:
To give creators a sense of value for being on the site, they need a few things, publicity and money.
While publicity seems easy, it can be hard to be noticed in a big pool of creators, giving them a pay to win option also makes it hard for people starting up, but you can give them something that would help by taking advantage of buzz, putting a community spotlight with sprinkles of models that were recently given buzz, which will help them pop up to the general audience, you can give these models a gold outline to stand out and make others aware that this is a buzz advertised model.
Money is a simple one, but very hard for the creator, given they have to convince people to spend money on them, all CivitAI needs to do is allow people to have people give them money to their creator page, acting like patreon or subscribestar, this will give the website money to run while at the same time give the creator more of a reason to turn boosting the site as a full time job with content and giving the general audience a reason to stay on the platform and the creators have a reason to produce for the platform.


Overall the creative audience enjoys producing stuff for people to enjoy, but lacks the ability to do it regularly unless they can turn it into a job, which is why creators turn to the businesses that allow them to turn their hobby into a job, but even then, they always run into the issue of not being able to get noticed, sadly making a website and hoping people just walk into it doesn't give you the best success, but pulling people from a more popular website does.
Which is why, any place that notices it has a massive audience needs to use it's population to it's advantage and get money from those who seek to use it, which the best way to do that is to offer a better deal, you have the population, you have the ability to control the spotlight and with more money being offered to the creator, or in the cases of other sites, not being banned for producing AI models, you offer them a place they can work and earn in peace while building up their fandoms which will want to pay more money into them and by hosting this, more money into you.

Commercial licensing:

In order to handle a commercial license for models, there needs to be a very strict set of rules for any model made to ensure any company that uses it won't get in trouble, last thing any company wants is to be dragged into a bunch of legal battles, including CivitAI.

Step 1:
In order to have a commercially available model, it needs to be handled by CivitAI, you'd need creators for sure, but you need to test them and examine every item they submit, ensuring it doesn't link to any copywrite images or content, then compile them into the model yourself to ensure nothing is put into the model without your knowledge, once you get a set of creators and test every image that comes in, you can set a list of trusted creators who you can let handle more of the burden.

Step 2:
Once you have a set of people working for you, then you'll need to start paying them per commissions and putting bounties based on the needs of the companies asking for a model, ensuring they can get one made fast and to their needs without legal issues. Mess up here and companies won't want to do business with you unless you can find the person who messed up and properly have them reprimanded and removed.

Step 3:
Once you've finally gotten into the markets, your team is producing fast and efficiently and not using legally conflicting images, you need to advertise your services so that companies, be it large or small, will seek you out and contact you, waiting for them to ask you won't be as effective unless you have many people seeking out your services and trying to beat each other out in bids to get them


Overall, commercial licensing is going to have a whole lot more control and CivitAI would be much more responsible for what is inside the model, meaning precautions would needed to ensure that no one can sue you for damages caused by a company endorsed product.
You'd need to check every image and be the ones who put the models together to ensure no one could sneak anything in without you knowing, which makes it much more of a full time job and is gonna require a lot of manpower to be done right.




Legacy and killerspace from my server helped me go over this to refine it a bit and make the text more digestible.