What happens when creators keep 85 percent of the revenue
A creator messaged us three weeks after launch. She'd uploaded fifteen pieces to Intentr. Not one of them was designed to go viral. That sentence stayed with me.
The moment we committed to 85%
When we were sketching out Intentr, the revenue split felt like a technical detail. It wasn't. We kept coming back to a single question: what does a creator actually need to care about their work on your platform?
Every platform we'd used paid creators pennies. YouTube, Medium, Substack with their referral schemes. The math was always the same. If you're making £2 a month from a thousand engaged readers, you're going to optimise for something else. Viral moments. Controversy. The algorithm's mood.
So we didn't split 70/30 or 80/20. We gave creators 85 percent. Not because it's generous (it is), but because it's the only split that makes sense if you actually want people to create work they believe in. We absorbed the margin. That was the decision.
The first week, we held our breath. Would creators think it was a trick? A loss leader that would collapse into ads later? No one believed it at first. Then someone did. Then more. And the quality of what appeared in Intentr shifted.
No algorithm means creators stop performing
Intentr has no algorithm. Users set an intention before they start a session, then they see a curated feed from channels they've chosen. Nothing is surfaced to you that you didn't opt into. That's the platform design.
What happens next is quiet but unmissable. Creators stop trying to game the feed because there's no feed to game. There's no algorithm to appease, no trending tab to chase, no viral moment to engineer. You can't trick your way onto someone's screen.
Instead, creators ask themselves a different question. Not 'how do I get more views' but 'what do my actual subscribers care about?' The difference is enormous. One creator told us she'd spent three years making content for an algorithm, always one update away from falling off. On Intentr, she started publishing work she'd been sitting on for months because it was 'too niche'. Within weeks, 40 percent of her new subscribers were people who'd subscribed specifically for that niche work.
The revenue share helps. But the missing algorithm is what makes it stick. If creators knew an algorithm would bury thoughtful work in favour of sensationalism, 85 percent wouldn't change anything. You'd still chase the algorithm. Instead, with no algorithm, that 85 percent is a real reward for work that resonates with people who actually want it.
What an attention ledger teaches both sides
We built the attention ledger because we needed to know if people were actually reading or just scrolling. Every session in Intentr has a bounded timer and a ledger that tracks where your time went. It's visible to you. It's also visible to creators, in aggregate.
Creators see how much attention their work is getting and from whom. Not names, but real numbers. Session length. Return visits. When someone comes back three times in a week to read your work, your creator analytics show that.
That changes things. Not because creators are chasing metrics (they're not), but because they finally have honest feedback. The algorithm told them 'this did 50,000 impressions'. The ledger tells them 'fourteen people spent an average of nine minutes with this piece, and three came back'. The second number is worth infinitely more.
On the reader side, the ledger does something equally important. It makes you confront what you're actually spending time on. You open Intentr with the intention to read about design trends. You set a 30-minute session. The ledger shows you spent 28 minutes on one article. That's honest data. Most people find that clarifying. Some change their habits. Some just feel less guilty about what they're reading.
When creators own the outcome
There's a moment in every platform's lifecycle where you realise the creators have figured something out before you have. We hit that moment around week six.
A group of four creators started coordinating their release schedules. Not to game anything. They just wanted to make sure readers had something new to find each day across their channels. One of them wrote: 'On other platforms, I'd never tell competitors when I was posting. Here, we actually want people to have good things to read from each other.'
That wouldn't happen on an algorithm-driven platform. Coordination would be pointless. It happens here because creators realise they're not competing for an algorithmic slot. They're building something together. The 85 percent revenue share means they're invested in the platform's success, not just their own reach.
The work that gets made reflects that. It's more thoughtful. More specific. Less designed to appeal to everyone and more designed to matter to someone. A creator who knows they'll earn 85 percent from her engaged subscribers has very different incentives than a creator trying to crack an algorithm's code.
The readers who notice the difference
We also made the revenue share visible to readers. When you open Intentr, you see 'creators earn 85% from subscriptions'. It's right there. No hidden ad network. No sponsorship deals burying real work. Just creators and readers, and a clear exchange.
Something unexpected happened. Readers started talking about it. Not in a PR sense. Genuinely. People who'd been exhausted by algorithmic platforms said it felt different. One user told us 'I'm not trying to beat the system. The system isn't trying to beat me. I can just read.'
That safety matters. When you know the creator earned most of what you paid, and you know the algorithm isn't choosing what to show you next, and you know you can see exactly how much time you spent, you're in a different relationship with the content. It's not suspicious. It's not designed to trick you. It's just work that someone made, and the economics of it are clear.
The irony is that clarity is what allows better work to thrive. Creators don't have to be mysterious or manipulative. Readers don't have to be cynical. The best work rises because people actually want it, not because an algorithm decided it would go viral this week.
The question we ask creators now is simple: if you knew 85% of what you earned came from people who genuinely chose to read your work, would you make different things? Everyone says yes. Most of them already are.
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