Dashboard update: revenue tab and balance details

We rolled out some updates to the Revenue tab and Balance details on the Creator Dashboard today, in order to reduce confusion and improve transparency. If you’re a creator enrolled in the Ad or Tipping revenue programs on Tapas, you’ll notice the changes the next time you check your balance.

Want the tl;dr: highlights?

1. We’ve updated what info is shown on the Revenue tab and Balance details pages to make your earnings and fees more clear, particularly for creators with revenue from tips.
2. Your share of ad revenue and tips remain unchanged. The Google, Apple, and Braintree/PayPal fees are the same as before, as is the share Tapas keeps.

Want more detail? Dive in below for a recap of the problems that motivated the update, or skip down to check out what’s new.

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Previously, on Tapas…

Until today, we showed your “Current Balance” (the total current earnings before fees, including those less than 30 days old), alongside your “Available Balance” (the actual amount available to transfer to PayPal that day, after fees).

This worked okay for ad revenue, but once we added the Tipping program it made things a bit confusing due to a difference in the way fees were displayed.

Fees were calculated and shown for ad revenue each day, but for tip revenue fees were calculated for the total amount and only shown when requesting a transfer. This was due to the relatively low value of individual coins, along with the difference in potential fees depending on the source of coins used. Unfortunately, the end result was inconsistency and a lack of clarity.

Some creators waited (and waited, and waited) for all of their Current Balance to become available, and were left wondering why some portion of their money appeared to be stuck in perpetual limbo… even after it was more than 30 days old. Since the Current Balance was shown before fees and the Available Balance was shown after fees, the tipping-related fees portion would always appear to be missing in a side by side comparison.

The amount earned and the fees taken were both correct, and there was nothing underhanded going on, it just wasn’t always exactly clear what was happening, or when.

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What’s New

We’ve made several changes to the Revenue tab and Balance details to address the potential for confusion detailed above.

On the Revenue tab of the Dashboard, the “Available” balance is the same as before, and still shows the earnings after fees available to request today. The “Current” balance has changed to “Pending,” and now shows the proceeds we estimate you will receive that are currently less than 30 days old (therefore, still pending). Just like the Available Balance, the Pending amount is shown after fees, which means what you see there will all eventually become available over time.

The Balance details page also received a tune up. Estimated fees are now shown for both ad and tip revenue, along with your estimated share of revenue each day. The (?) tooltips now provide more useful information, including a breakdown of the potential fees and share Tapas keeps.

Revenue entries less than 30 days old are now marked as “pending,” so you won’t have to count backwards to figure out which days are available and which ones aren’t. Please note: the total Pending amount may not exactly equal the sum of the individual pending ad and tip revenue entries in the table, as your share and fees are only estimated for each row. The result is that some smaller values may appear slightly different due to rounding.

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We hope these updates make the revenue, balance, and fees on Tapas easier to understand, and give you a better overview of the money you’re earning.

Happy holidays!

Tapas Team