It's been a little over a year since Society6 announced the introduction of paid subscription plans for artists. Following up on the success of my blog post titled "Is getting started with Society6 still worth it", I'm going to be reflecting on the past year and my Society6 paid subscription experience.
Having been selling on Society6 since 2017, I had accumulated well over the 100 designs that would put me in the Basic plan and had to go straight up for the Pro plan, the one that cost 12.99$ a month. Since several of my designs are also available to wholesale partners via S6's sister site Deny Design, I found myself in a position where the investment made sense to begin with even if there was a bit of doubts about how sound an investment that was going to be.
Before the move toward a paid subscription model, I was making over those 12.99$ pretty much every months but it was always riding in the same 2-3 designs that kept selling on repeat, with a wide percentage of my portfolio not even showing up in organic search on the platform, at least not in the 5-6 first pages which are the ones that matter the most. All thanks to a super saturated platform full of spam, low quality artwork and AI art.
Society6's move towards a paid subscription model last year was first and foremost to flush out all the bogus accounts belonging to people only in it to make a quick buck.
The question a year later is :
did it work?
From my experience, it did pay out, but it was a bit sluggish, especially in the first few months after the introduction of those paid plans. Right after the move was fully enforced at the end of November 2023 I saw a slump in sales. November and December are usually high sales months for me on all platforms, but suddenly I saw only one sale in December that totalled about 1.70$ followed by ZERO sales in January and February. In March, the sales were back and started trending upwards not with more numbers of items sold, but all of them were bigger items like comforters, bigger art prints and curtains, basically items that all bring about 10-15$ a sale on average.
The biggest change however wasn't in the sales, it was in the exposure on the platform. Society6 featured 2-3 of my artworks in their curator's pick and newsletter this past year and featured one of my pattern on their Instagram handle a few weeks after I published said design : Autumn Chintz Flowers.
What's more, my other designs are now showing up a lot more frequently in searches on the platform, and usually always within the first 2-3 pages and several have been included in curated collections they run every couple of weeks. My sales reflect this sudden increase in exposure too with several designs that haven't been selling for years suddenly catching people's attention, probably because for the first time since I started selling on Society6 they are no longer buried deep in search results including a million stock photos and generic designs.
Then there are some perks for paid members too...
No idea if Society6 favors the visibility of those who pay a subscription as such, but one of the most helpful perk is having webinar sessions on upcoming trends. So far Society6 has organised two such webinars, one for the Summer and Fall of this year and one for the Spring and Summer trends of 2025. Along with pointers on design trends and color palettes, they share special tags that paid members can include in their artwork's tag list when they upload new work. Those tags will then be used by the Society6 curators' team to look for content they can include in their promotion and curated picks on the website. With this move, it's clear that they want their artists to show up and produce quality work they can use. The more on trend and quality content you tag, the more likely it is they will remember your name and the more likely it will be for you to show up in searches it seems.
My take for the future
All in all, the decision to move toward the Pro plan has been worth it for me, and I think it will continue paying off in the years to come. It was a very bold move from Society6 to introduce such steep fees, and I will stick to what I said last year. The good old advice of producing quantity over quality no longer applies, and while the free plan is very restrictive when you are just starting, I think the Basic plan at 4.99$ a month would be a sound business investment for all artists that are SERIOUS about building a business in the industry. yes it might take a while to recover that cost in the beginning, but in the long run it is clear that if you are a genuine artist that produce quality work that isn't just stock photos and free vectors that you slap on a mug there is a future with Society6. If you are still just testing the waters and approach art and design as a hobby, that platform might not be the best place to start and you are probably better off starting with Teepublic and Threadless which are both without any fees. Though Teepublic has an artist account tier system and different pay structures for each.
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