Each month, Flightsim.to provides a Donation Pool that is shared among active Creators Program members. The distribution is based on your activity and community response during the previous calendar month — calculated automatically using clear, consistent criteria.
1. Who is eligible?
To qualify for a share of the pool, you need to have been meaningfully active during the previous month. This means you must have either published a new add-on or updated an existing one, and the newly published or updated content must have received at least 100 downloads in total. Alternatively, you are also qualified if you have reached at least the Platinum Tier of the Creators Rewards Program.
This ensures that the pool rewards creators who are actively bringing new value to the community, rather than simply benefiting from older, inactive uploads.
2. The Guaranteed Base Share — 50% of the Pool
Half of the Donation Pool is divided equally among all eligible creators.
Whether you are a smaller creator or one of the platform's largest, everyone receives the same base amount. This is intentional: the system is designed to support smaller and emerging creators as well as established top performers.
3. The Performance Bonus — 50% of the Pool
The other half is distributed based on your performance during the month. Rather than looking at downloads alone, the calculation takes several factors into account:
- Downloads — how often your content was downloaded overall. Downloads are weighted on a compressed scale so that very large creators do not automatically dominate the entire pool.
- Community engagement — how many ratings, bookmarks, collection additions, and new followers your content generated relative to its downloads. This is designed to measure the quality of engagement, not just its volume. An add-on that genuinely resonates with users and encourages them to interact is rewarded more than one that simply generates a large number of passive downloads.
- New uploads — an additional bonus for publishing new content during the month. The more new content you publish, the higher your bonus.
- Scenery & Airports — new uploads and updates in the Scenery and Airports categories receive an additional bonus. We recognize that creating and maintaining scenery and airport add-ons typically requires significantly more time and effort than content such as liveries. This additional weighting helps ensure that the level of work involved in producing more complex add-ons is appropriately reflected in the distribution.
- Your Tier — Earn more XP through the Creator Reward Program and reach higher tiers. Platinum Tier Creators receive a +1% bonus and Diamond Tier Creators receive a +2% bonus.
One important safeguard: a very new creator with only a small number of downloads should not receive a disproportionate advantage simply because of statistical fluctuations — for example, a single five-star rating. To prevent this, engagement scores are slightly adjusted toward the average across all participating creators, using an approach similar to the weighted rating systems used by major platforms such as IMDb.
4. Fairness Limits — Cap & Minimum Payout
- Maximum share: No creator can receive more than 10% of the total Donation Pool in any given month. This keeps the pool more broadly distributed, even when one creator has an exceptionally strong month.
- Minimum payout: Amounts below $1 are not paid out, as they are too small to be meaningful. Instead, they are returned to the pool and redistributed among the other eligible creators.
In short:
If you publish or update content that generates meaningful downloads and genuine community engagement, you receive a fair share of the Donation Pool — with a guaranteed base amount for every eligible creator and safeguards to prevent extreme outcomes in either direction.