Black Executive JournalContributors

Contributor payout policy

These are the rules every contributor’s earnings follow. They are written without prices, so they stay true when membership prices change.

  1. Share. You earn 75% of the net amount of every membership payment made by a subscriber credited to you. Net is the payment minus Stripe’s processing fee and any sales tax collected on it.
  2. Credit. A subscriber is credited to the author of the article they were reading when they started a paid membership. If they started on a page that isn’t an article, credit goes to the author of the last article they read first. If no article can be found, they’re credited to the journal. Only members who start paying after the program launched are credited.
  3. Co-authors. When an article has more than one author, each author receives an equal part of the 75%.
  4. Duration. You keep earning for as long as the subscriber keeps paying, on monthly and annual plans, including after price changes and plan switches.
  5. Credit is permanent. Once a subscriber is credited to you, that credit doesn’t move, even if they later read other contributors’ work.
  6. Free-to-paid upgrades. If a free member upgrades, credit goes to the article where they started paying.
  7. AI licensing. When an AI company pays the journal to license its archive, the net amount is split 50/50: half is shared among contributors who have opted in and half stays with the journal. Where the licensee reports which articles were used, the share follows that usage. Otherwise it follows each article’s share of the licensed archive by length. Co-authors split equally.
  8. Payment schedule. Earnings for each calendar month are paid in the first week of the following month to the bank account you connect through Stripe. There is no minimum.
  9. Refunds and chargebacks. If a credited payment is refunded or disputed, your share of it is deducted from your next payout. A negative balance carries forward and is never invoiced to you.
  10. Privacy. You see each subscriber as a number, never their name or email, and you may not try to identify them.
  11. Taxes. You are an independent contributor. Stripe collects your tax details when you connect your bank account and issues a 1099 where required.
  12. Records. Every payment, share and transfer appears in your dashboard with its Stripe reference, so any payout can be checked against your bank deposit.

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