Discovery Circle Credit Terms

Creator Credits are one balance, earned three ways: verified reviews completed under the Discovery Circle Terms, competition rewards under the Reward Rules, and qualifying referrals. However it was earned, every amount obeys the same rules below. It is a discount against CreatorBoard listing fees. It is not money, cannot be withdrawn, and cannot be transferred to another member, another account, or a bank account or payment method by any means. There is no mechanism to convert Creator Credits to money, and none will be built.

Review credit is earned under a published curve: 15, 20, 25 reviews for the first three dollars, then a flat 25 reviews for every dollar after that, without further increase. Review credit is bounded, per member, by two limits that apply together:

• a daily cap of $10 per member — reaching it does not lose any milestone in progress; the counter simply resumes the next day from exactly where it stopped; and
• a review pace of up to 60 reviews a day and 250 a week.

Credit is also drawn from a shared weekly pool of $1,500, allocated first come, first served across every member. The whole amount is available from Monday 00:00 UTC and reduces only as members earn from it; any part of it not earned by the end of that week is not carried into the next, and a fresh $1,500 opens each Monday regardless of how the previous week finished. When the pool for the week is exhausted, reviews keep counting toward Circle Board position, but credit earning freezes rather than being lost: nothing already earned is affected, and a member part-way to a milestone resumes exactly where they stopped when the next week’s pool opens.

Each amount of credit expires 40 days after the day it becomes spendable, independently of every other amount. For review and referral credit that is the day it is earned. A weekly competition reward is held until the month it was won in has closed, so its 40 days begin on the day it is released rather than the day it was awarded — a credit nobody may spend is not one that should be expiring. Credit is not shown or spent as separate pieces — it is a single running total, with the individual expiry dates tracked underneath it.

When credit is spent, it is drawn from the oldest amount first, always — the amount closest to expiring, then the next, and so on. This rule is fixed and always in the member’s favour: spending newest-first would silently let older credit expire unused, which we do not do.

Each amount has one life: 40 days from becoming spendable. A membership ending does not shorten it and buying a new membership does not extend it; credit that has already expired is not restored. Spending it, however, requires a running membership — see Section 4.

Creator Credits may be applied to any listing on any of the five surfaces we support — YouTube channels and Shorts and videos, and the equivalent surfaces on the other network. Credit may fund at most 50% of any one listing’s price; the remainder must be paid in the ordinary way. Every credit dollar spent is therefore matched by at least one dollar actually paid.

Credit is spendable only while a membership is running, and only by the member signed in to the Circle with the address the credit was paid to. Credit cannot buy a membership, or an extra channel slot — both are paid by card through our payment provider. Credit reduces the price of a listing and nothing else.

Weekly and monthly competitions can pay a reward — credited as Creator Credits, never cash, under the Reward Rules, and in the case of a weekly reward held until that month has closed — to a listing’s winning position. For any listing part-funded by Creator Credits, that reward is capped at the amount actually paid for the listing. A member can never receive back more than they paid in. This limit applies only to the portion of a listing funded by credit; a listing paid for entirely in the ordinary way is unaffected.

None of the limits in this document reduce a member’s position on the Circle Board, which is ranked purely by reviews completed and is never reduced by a frozen credit counter, an exhausted pool, or a daily cap being reached.