Hello everyone,
Sorry for the miscommunication. I had incorrectly stated that the requirement for Tipping activation was 500 subscribers, when it is actually 250 subscribers. This was due to a bug on my dashboard that displayed a 500 subscriber requirement, the article has been updated with an editor's note appearing at the bottom.
Thanks for your input, and I'll do my best to clarify on some of the changes made and why things operate the way they do on Tapas.
So, when we first rolled out the Tipping Program back in December 2016, it was a smaller scale operation. Back then, I was manually activating each and every account for tipping (https://forums.tapas.io/t/got-a-tipping-comic-share-here/16326) and as you might have guessed, I wasn't able to keep up with the demand.
We decided to automate this process by including Tipping and Ad Revenue activation on the Creator Dashboard with subscriber requirements which we found to be necessary to combat bot accounts. We've been dealing with coin funneling accounts for quite some time, and needed to introduce a higher threshold for subscriber count in order to mitigate this - this was partially responsible for the lack of video ad inventory on the app which negatively impacted the ability for readers to earn coins to tip creators. The current subscriber count requirement is 250 (improperly stated as 500), and we've found that this has helped to weed out some of the bad actors. We understand that the requirements are quite steep, especially for creators that are just starting out, but unfortunately, we have found that this is a necessary step for us to keep the program as open to as many creators as possible without the use of manual curation.
As for differentiating novels and comics, that is a difficult undertaking. So, Tipping is account based and not series based - so if you have multiple different series, we tabulate your unique subscriber count (if you have a reader that is subscribed to multiple different series, they'll only count as one unique subscriber). But, the difficulty arises when a creator has both a comic series and a novel series, the system currently is unable to identify this case. So, if we were to theoretically lower the subscriber count requirement for novels, an account with a comic series can potentially create a novel series and circumvent that requirement. So, while creating two separate requirements makes sense, our system is unable to support that currently. Hope that clarifies that issue.
That being said, whenever we host a Tipping Event, you can reach out to me and I will manually activate tipping for your account. We try to limit these events to a set period of time so I don't get overwhelmed by requests (the last event saw over 900 requests which were fulfilled in a week).
Again, I apologize for the inconvenience and the miscommunication.
As for questions regarding why we have a $25.00 minimum to withdraw, this is primarily related to all of the fees associated with payouts (https://www.paypal.com/us/brc/article/understanding-merchant-credit-card-processing-fees). So, each with each transaction, the creators and Tapas are charged a fee. In order to ensure that creators see the most of their revenue and to mitigate costs to Tapas, we've had to establish that $25.00 baseline.