# Creative Compensation (CC): Future of Jobs with Creative Works in 3D
Printing

Chen Liang<EMAIL_ADDRESS>University of MichiganAnn ArborMichigan ,
Nahyun Kwon<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Texas A&M UniversityCollege StationTexas and
Jeeeun Kim<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Texas A&M UniversityCollege StationTexas

(2018)

###### Abstract.

With the continuous growth of online 3D printing community and the
democratization of 3D printers, growing number of users start sharing their
own 3D designs on open platforms, enabling a wide audience to search,
download, and 3D print models for free. Although sharing is mostly for
altruistic reasons at first, open platforms had also created potential job
opportunities to compensate creative labors. This paper analyzes new job
opportunities emerged in online 3D printing social platforms and patterns of
seeking compensations, and reveals various motivations for posting creative
content online. We find that offering exclusive membership through
subscriptions, selling final products or printing services through web stores,
and using affiliate links are primary means of earning profits, while there
exist gaps between creators’ expectations and realities. We show that various
socio-economic promises emerged, leading to a win-win situation for both
creators to gain extra income and audiences to have access to more quality
content. We also discuss future challenges that need to be addressed, such as
ethical use of opensource content.

Compensation, open contents market, creative designs, 3D printing, content
sharing, online communities

††copyright: acmcopyright††journalyear: 2018††doi:
10.1145/1122445.1122456††conference: Woodstock ’18: ACM Symposium on Neural
Gaze Detection; June 03–05, 2018; Woodstock, NY††booktitle: Woodstock ’18: ACM
Symposium on Neural Gaze Detection, June 03–05, 2018, Woodstock, NY††price:
15.00††isbn: 978-1-4503-XXXX-X/18/06††copyright: none††ccs: Human-centered
computing Human computer interaction (HCI)

##  1\. Introduction

As 3D printers become increasingly accessible to individuals and small
organizations in the past decades(Mota, 2011), 3D printing communities also
keep expanding. While designers may share content online because of altruistic
reasons or the rise of maker culture, it has been shown that financial
compensation also becomes one of the common motivations to keep creators
sharing and exhibiting their creative activities through open platforms
(Regner, 2020). As the community becomes increasingly inclusive, it has been
observed that a new online gig economy appears. Various methods of financial
transactions occurred among individuals, including providing on-demand
printing services, accepting tips, providing paid membership to offer
exclusive designs, and selling 3D printed final products. Designers could
utilize these methods to make additional profits from 3D printing social
platforms. For example, freelancers could spend more time on creation and can
possibly reduce the length of their day time jobs, retirees could started to
turn their hobby projects to receive credits, and entrepreneur could launch
startup projects on these communities. Especially with the current economic
downturn impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had many people sheltered at
home and work remotely, online gig economy can present potential to supplement
decreasing income caused by being retreated from their regular jobs (UpWork,
2020). In addition, crowdfunding and sharing platforms in general can also
contribute to the growth of the 3D printing innovation ecosystem (Kwak et al.,
2018).

The goal of this research is to have a closer look at different methods of
compensation that support creators in 3D printing communities based on their
digital contents that are shared for free, and to summarize potential new
socio-economic and socio-technical impact. Although creative compensation
becomes increasingly popular in 3D printing communities, the understanding of
what are specific type of jobs that 3D printing enthusiasts can participate,
what are promising application categories, and what services or technology
help creators online get paid remains limited. Specifically, this study will
focus on how implicit job opportunities have been emerged within 3D printing
community and how participating members are compensated, what are creators’
motivations and expectations, and what are the realities. Through this work,
we provide answers to the following research questions:

RQ1. What are new economic opportunities sparked by 3D printing technology and
open 3D content sharing platforms, and how do existing services help creative
workers get paid?

RQ2. With what 3D models do creators have more opportunities to get paid, and
what are motivations and aims of creators for seeking profits?

RQ3. What are unique challenges and implications associated with this
community and technology support?

To achieve this goal, we take three methodologies, netnography, data analysis,
and an online survey. We primarily focus on Thingiverse, which is the biggest
3D printing community(Wire, 2015), and as we noticed that many 3D contents on
Thingiverse implicitly or explicitly solicit compensation , we collected all
designs on Thingiverse and analyzed different methods for making a profit from
their shared designs, including direct ways of seeking compensation (e.g.,
donation, selling products) and indirect ways (e.g., affiliate links). In
addition, we also conducted a survey on Thingiverse to gain in-depth
understanding about creators, how the revenues they received influence their
will to continue producing creative works. The collected information provides
additional insights to understand creative workers in 3D printing community,
which helps us discover unique challenges to shape future jobs to bring our
attention to the real impact by imagining the future of jobs.

Our contributions are as the following:

  * •

We provide the list of opportunities that creators in online 3D printing
community can make money from open contents

  * •

We show the type of contents that 3D printing enthusiasts can jump in to
participate

  * •

We reveal creators’ motivation, expectation, and the gap with the reality

  * •

We discuss emergent issues, concerns, and implications in expanding the
opportunities where some of them can be potential jobs

##  2\. Background

###  2.1. Sharing Creative Talents via Social Platforms

During the recent blooming of the internet culture, creativity has been
playing a role in generating and sharing contents. With the rise of public
platforms that engage people’s broad participation into Twitter, YouTube,
Instagram, Reddit, and many more, increasing numbers of users share ideas,
thoughts, troubleshooting tips, design portfolio, icons, and even how-to
videos online (Cook et al., 2009; Settles and Dow, 2013). Since the ‘Expert
Amateur’ in DIY communities has been proposed in 2010 (Kuznetsov and Paulos,
2010), broadened accessibility to personal fabrication machines and online
communities have revealed new opportunities for bidirectional communication
via contents. Participating in the development of free and opensource content
seems to be highly voluntary, particularly in opensource software community
(Lakhani and Wolf, 2003). Internet users might be motivated by internal &
external factors, such as the enjoyment of creating new contents, the sense of
rewarding that they are helping others, and the social reputation they
received from these communities (Von Krogh et al., 2012). Albeit absence of
direct compensation, these motivators have undoubtedly enriched open source
communities (Alexander Hars, 2002) including Thingiverse, which recently
became the largest online 3D modeling community (Wire, 2015). Firstly
established to promote the use of desktop 3D printers with fun and exciting 3D
models, Thingiverse is now a much more diverse platform that allows people to
share assistive devices (Buehler et al., 2015), artifacts to augment everyday
objects (Ashbrook et al., 2016), tangible literacy materials for children (Kim
and Yeh, 2015), 3D scanned models of artistic sculpture from museums, and many
more.

###  2.2. Beyond Free Contents: Contents Markets that Create Financial
Transactions

Thinking beyond open contents market, users start to realize their creative
invention that were shared and admired by many others can be converted into
real products. Although free content and the collaborative nature of open
source culture are main drivers for innovation today (Raasch and Von Himmel,
2013; Lakhani and Wolf, 2003; Roberts et al., 2006), it also shifted to
platform-oriented self-employment market where people were often paid for
their labors online (Drahokoupil and Fabo, 2016; Farrell and Greig, 2016;
Kässi and Lehdonvirta, 2018), for example, cooking classes and coding
workshops on Fiverr 111https://www.fiverr.com/,
Chegg222https://www.chegg.com/tutors, or Upwork333https://www.upwork.com/.
While creative workers seemed upset at sharing secret know-hows for free that
they thought it will reduce their revenues, they realized that platforms can
serve as a playground to showcase and market their expertise, thus they are
granted more opportunities to sell their unique talents by attracting more
viewers (Lipson, [n.d.]; Kim et al., 2017). With growing number of patents
that introduce the concept of monetization of online and digital contents
(Brougher et al., 2009; Tran et al., 2014), many creators make a living from
supporters by accepting tips and donations and bit cheers (MediaKix, 2020),
contract for projects (Kenney and Zysman, 2019), consulting (Wang and Li,
2017), even establishing startups or local studios supported by crowdfunding
(Macht and Weatherston, 2014; Regner, 2020) (e.g., Kickstarters, IndieGogo).
Established with the opensource culture, Makerbot also set up opensource
community Thingiverse to share their know-hows, models, and more, and the
prosperity of user-generated contents and the increase of people’s interests
positively affected sales of their products (West and Kuk, 2016). 3D printing
communities are so special in that (1) it was fostered by democratization of
3D printers with 16 key patents expired in 2013-2014, so more and more people
can afford quality printers at home (Hornick, 2016), but (2) audiences still
might not approach those contents directly due to lack of expertise or cannot
afford machines, wanting someone to do it for them (Berman et al., 2020).
Therefore, 3D printing stores/services also became much popular, empowering
everyone to print custom designs that either they self-designed or customized
from the free models downloaded online (Pryor, 2014; Mai et al., 2016). This
service can be supported by anyone who owns 3D printers everywhere in the
world, and it redefines manufacturing by inviting many home-manufacturers with
low-cost printers to participate in the manufacturing industry. Our focus here
is what unique opportunities and challenges are newly created with abundant
and diverse public 3D contents and open platforms that call for participation
from creators, manufacturers, customers, and even distributors.

###  2.3. Technology to Help Individuals Participate in Online Gig Economy

If we zoom out, there are flourishing platforms that help people gain profit
from extra utilities and time by enabling people to easily freelance.
Platforms such as Uber, AirBnB, and UpWork have showed the potential of this
method (Sundararajan, 2017). In addition to the platforms that help forming
gig economy even without expertise, such as Amazon Mechanical Turks for
completing very simple tasks (Lakhani and Von Hippel, 2004), growing numbers
of platforms and services have been assisting financial transactions between
individuals through emerging markets. These platforms offer individuals who
need more flexibility a chance to be paid. Some platforms are specifically
designed for supporting creative works, such as Patreon
444https://www.patreon.com/, which mainly provide membership services. Through
membership platforms, creators and crowd supporters are connected in a direct
and continuous manner, such as monthly subscription (Regner, 2020). Although
revenue that creators get could be highly skewed (e.g., $2,500/mon. for top 1%
campaign vs. pennies for the majority), the monthly subscription mechanism
still brings a substantial number of creators a steady revenue stream that
presumably big enough to let them focus their time and energy on their
creative work(Regner, 2020). It also gives a chance for creators to improve
their work and for supporters to access more quality contents (Regner, 2020).
In addition to small amount of revenues, Kickstarters and IndieGogo served as
platforms to support initiating small business from creative idea. Researchers
have analyzed this specific user-entrepreneur business models in 3D printing,
which is defined as the commercialization of a new product and/or service by
an individual or group of individuals who are also users of that product
and/or service (Holzmann et al., 2017). They could provide a wide range of
services including 3D printing, consulting, and prototyping, to accommodate
customers’ diverse needs in 3D printing due to their insufficient design
skills, expertise, the technology barrier to setup the 3D printer, and more
(Holzmann et al., 2017).

Examining currently existing data will also provide additional insights on
creators’ expectation of how projected earnings will potentially influence the
creators’ future path, and what are critical challenges to craft the future of
job growth especially with 3D printing.

##  3\. Methods

###  3.1. Netnography: Studying Thingiverse as an Open 3D Content Marketplace

Netnography is an online research method that follows ethnography, conducted
to understand social interaction in modern digital platforms and
communications (Net, [n.d.]). With netnography, we were able to focus on
reflections from existing data provided by the largest online 3D printing
community Thingiverse, with largely inclusive, but not intrusive data. First,
we manually looked into popular Thingiverse designs that are published as web
documents, consisting of textual information (title, tags, categories,
description about the design) and images. From the initial investigation, we
found that many 3D designers are seeking profits by inviting audiences to
visit external URLs of their exclusive membership service accounts and web
stores, PayPal or Bitcoin accounts to donate tips, Shapeways stores to get
paid for design, and more. Often these compensations were asked with the words
of ‘support’, ‘donation’, and other similar words. Thingiverse platform also
supports ‘tip designer’ feature that audiences can voluntarily send their
credits, and creators who want compensation might enable this feature. Our
observation led us to design a detailed data analysis plan, to understand
behavioral patterns of creators in compensating seeking, that we will detail
more in the following section. Second, to gain insights about people’s
experiences and honest thoughts of participants, we also collected existing
conversations around ‘Thingiverse tip designer’ from Thingiverse forum as well
as Reddit, and followed traditional qualitative research methods to extract
patterns and insights.

###  3.2. Analytics on Thingiverse Data: Data Collection and Inclusion
Criteria

It has been observed that creators may seek compensation by either (1) posting
external URLs that lead to certain financial transactions or (2) enabling ‘tip
designer’ feature in their designs, which is published as a web document in
Thingiverse. Therefore, we started by retrieving relevant designs that are
posted publicly on Thingiverse, among all possible data available by May 2020
(n=1,770,286, unique thing555We will refer each design entry as ‘thing’
following the Thingiverse community convention, with its unique ID as thing
number (#). ID from 2–4,360,000, excluding private designs and designs with
404 response due to post deletion), then classified into three categories
below, also summarized in Table 1:

|  Donation (C1) |  Webstore (C2) |  Affiliate Links (C3) |  Total
---|---|---|---|---
Thing Count |  169,545 |  7,102 |  5,886 |  176,716
|  (9.57%) |  (0.40%) |  (0.33%) |  (9.98%)
Creator Count |  13,387 |  2,361 |  1,828 |  16,390
|  (3.67%) |  (0.64%) |  (0.50%) |  (4.49%)
Table 1. Frequency and ratio of things and creators in each category (Total
thing count: 1,770,286; Total creator count: 364,755)

C1. Designs Seeking Donation or Tip. A thing (i.e. a design on Thingiverse) is
considered as donation seeking if the creator of that design (1) enabled ’tip
Designer’ function on Thingiverse, or (2) explicitly asks for donations in the
thing description and provides some methods for users to donate, such as links
to the creator’s PayPal, buymeacoffee account, or bitcoin address. First, we
retrieved designs with ‘tip designer’ turned on using Thingiverse API (i.e.
return creator.accepts_tips field is set to True in API response, with the
given unique thing ID), and it returned 163,069 things (made by 11,545 unique
creators). To discover designs asking donation in the thing description, we
collected all designs that contain keywords ‘donate’, ‘tip’, ‘support’,
‘gratuity’, and retrieved domains of URLs that are in the description, and
merged hostnames of same websites to get unique websites. We finalized seven
major donation sites, including paypal.com/paypal.me, patreon.com,
buymeacoffee.com, yandex.ru, ko-fi.com, tipeee.com, and gofundme.com. Due to
the variety of URLs, we only considered the major donation or money transfer
sites, and the hostnames that appeared less than 50 times are not included.
This process discovered 12,561 designs.

To cover more potential donation seeking designs that do not have URLs in the
description or do not have ’tip designer’ function enabled, we performed text
classification on thing description using fastText(Joulin et al., 2017) to
find more potential designs. We collected the textual description in things
containing the 7 domains mentioned above. Creators often display their
intention of seeking donation by the sentence like ”If you like this, please
donate/buy me a coffee via [e.g., paypal/patreon URLs]”. To train a
classifier, we extract 1,552 sentences right before the URLs of two major
sites PayPal and Patreon to be used as training data. By adding the same
amount of random sentences from other random designs on Thingiverse as the
negative cases, the text classifier is trained and used to detect additional
potential donation seeking designs, which returned 35,469 more potential these
things. To validate these potential results, we used an interactive learning
method similar to an existing work for image processing (Fails and Olsen,
2003) to bring human intelligence in the loop and iteratively update the
results666For each loop, we reviewed and labeled only the top 20 of the
results , and these 20 labeled results will then be used to update the model.
The model will then run again on the detected results and remove negative
cases. This process repeats until all results are either verified by human or
removed by updated classifier., which returned 3,437 new donation seeking
things found. Summing all these designs we discovered and removing duplicates,
we finalized 169,545 donation seeking designs in total.

C2. Designs Promoting Merchandise Sales or Services A thing is considered as
compensation solicitation if the creator (1) sells his/her design, product, or
related works online on e-commerce web stores (e.g., Etsy) or personal
websites, or (2) gets compensation by directing people to print design posted
on 3rd party 3D printing services (e.g., Shapeways or Sculpteo) per each
successful order. We discern this case based on whether the customers will be
guaranteed to receive additional rewards, including finished prints as
product, and other services. Notice that some subscription services, such as
Patreon, also provide exclusive content for patrons. However, they are
included in C1 but not C2 due to the fact that people can still donate a
random amount of money, and those who donate an amount less than the
subscription level may not be guaranteed to get additional content.

For this case we used a similar approach, where we started by collecting
sentences before Etsy and Shapeways URLs in description as these are two
common web-store and 3rd party printing service, then trained a text
classifier to discover more potential designs in this category. The classifier
detected 31,820 designs. Using the similar validation approach using human-in-
the-loop, 409 out of 31,820 are confirmed to be in this category. We then
retrieved domains of URLs, manually investigated their identity and service
types, then classified into (i) webstores (Etsy, Cults3d, Myminifactory,
Kitronik, RatRig, Wargaming3d, Myshopify, Miiduu, TheShop, Makershed, Gumroad,
Fiverr, Cgtrader, 3d-mon) and (ii) 3rd party 3D printing services with
original designs (Shapeways and Sculpteo). We finally extracted 7,102 things
in this category in total.

C3. Earning from Affiliate Links It is also observed that creators may
advertise affiliate links via shared designs on Thingiverse, as they can get
certain percentage of sales as payout for each successful order placed through
these links. We put this in the separate category because creators do not sell
or give additional products back to customers. Shopping through the affiliate
links is more about a ’kind’ behavior instead of exchanging money to product
or direct donation for contents. Due to the diversity of format, we picked
four most popular online shopping sites found in things ( based on URL count)
that support affiliate links - Amazon (count: 27719, top 3 among all hostnames
of URLs in description), Aliexpress, (count: 10801, top5), Banggood (count:
6089, top 6), and eBay (5915, top 8). We first found a pattern in URLs which
indicates affiliate links by detecting a specific format, for example,
‘amzn.to’ link and ‘amazon.com’ links with ‘tag=’ indicating the link is
affiliate links. Similarly, ‘rover.ebay’ indicates eBay compensates certain
accounts with successful purchase order. For Aliexpress, we collected things
with ’s.click.aliexpress’ or links that contain ‘aff_platform=’, and for
Banggood, we collected URL that contains ‘p=’ in it. This discovered 5,886
unique things in total777Count for each website (i.e., has duplicates for
things contain URLs for more than 1 site): Amazon: 4,185, Aliexpress: 1,072,
Banggood: 755, and eBay: 490 things respectively.

###  3.3. Online Survey: Participants, Procedure, Responses

Aiming to get a deeper understanding about honest thoughts, motivation, and
expectations, we created an online survey asking a variety of questions
covering their motivation of sharing models in the open market, the methods
for getting the compensation they have tried, the satisfaction of the current
profit and the expectation, and how compensation from all sources help
creator’s continued creative labor and life. All questions were left optional
in case participants may not want to reveal certain information. We randomly
selected 700 creators from all the creators of things we collected in the
above three categories and sent them the online survey invitation via private
messages. To avoid biases, we intentionally did not choose from active
creators (i.e., we ignored known information in the recent log-in record).
Participation was completely voluntary, no compensation has been promised. 44
forms were returned (6.3%), with 43 valid responses left by removing a
duplicate submission.

##  4\. Results & Finding

###  4.1. Frequency, Rate, and Trend: Compensation Seeking Designs over All
Designs

In general, at least 9.98% (176,716 out of 1,770,286) designs showed some
intention of seeking compensation for their creative labor. Among creators who
seek donation (C1), 86.2% of them use the built-in ‘Tip Designer’ function,
and 21.03% of them asked for donation or monetary support, for example, by
adding a PayPal account to the description field. 7.27% (n=974) of them
utilized both methods to ask donations. For all creators who seek
compensation, 7.23% (n=1,186) of them utilized at least two of the three
methods (C1-3). We also retrieved the dates these things were posted to
Thingiverse, and counted the number of them compared to all designs (October
2008 - March 2020, per quarter), to see the trend. As shown in figure 1, the
percentage of compensation seeking things has been increasing, with the only
exception near 2012 Q4 where the proportion diminished. This could possibly
due to the rapid increase of non-compensation-seeking designs, especially
customized designs from existing designs, as we also observed that the first
customized thing made by Makerbot Customizer was posted on January 08, 2013,
which is very close to the starting point of the decreasing trend of
percentage of compensation seeking designs on Thingiverse. Except for this
case, we can see the compensation seeking behavior is also getting very
popular.

Figure 1. Cumulative count of all things and compensation-seeking things and
percentage of them by a quarter of the year. As the data for Q2 2020 is not
complete, it is not included in the graph.

The count of affiliate links also shows the popularity of utilizing this
method to get additional compensation. There are 5,886 unique things in total
that contain affiliate link, where 4,185, 1,072, 755, 490 things have Amazon,
Aliexpress, Banggood, and eBay affiliate links,respectively. 19631 things
contain Amazon links in description, and 21.31% (4185 out of 19631) are things
that contain Amazon affiliate links. This percentage is 18.03% (755 out of
4186), 16.15% (1072 out of 6635), 8.35% (490 out of 5862) for Banggood,
Aliexpress, and eBay, respectively. This shows that using affiliate links is
also a popular choice for creators to receive extra compensation, both
explicitly (i.e. mention in description that links are affiliate links) or
implicitly (i.e. directly add them to description without saying they are
affiliate links).

###  4.2. New Opportunities Featured by 3D Printing Community: How Creators
Make Money?

Besides accepting tips using built-in Thingiverse function, there are various
methods of getting compensation that creators can use to receive additional
earnings, which could be advertised by their shared 3D contents via open
platforms.

####  4.2.1. Type 1. Subscriptions and Paid Memberships for Exclusive Contents

One common way that creative workers gain additional earnings from their
content and labor is through a monthly subscription or a paid membership, and
it also appeared to be a very popular method among creators on Thingiverse.
One typical site of this subscription-based donating mechanism is Patreon. It
is one well-known platform to support indie-creators (Osworth, 2017), and also
served as a platform for supporting designers and providing subscribers (also
called ’patrons’) with exclusive contents and rights; and it claimed to have
paid out over 2 billion dollars to Patreon creators since 2013 (RN5, 2020).
Although audiences have the freedom in setting amount and method for
supporting each creator, they often pay the membership fee at pre-determined
levels set by the creators. Fees also vary, from $1 per month for entry level
and $10 per month for a more advanced level, to some even higher levels that
are set by creators. Subscribers can get rewards, including exclusive content,
access to the community, and private services such as consulting, depending on
the level of subscription they chose. Many creators on Thingiverse put the
link to their Patreon creator profile in the description section (7,799 things
in total), to encourage people to visit and discover more similar contents and
high quality contents (e.g. high resolution model).

Although Patreon does not represent all subscription business, as it is one
the most popular creator-supporting service found in Thingiverse (by count),
we chose this to understand how Thingiverse creators utilize subscription
method to compensate their work. We retrieved all Patreon links in the
description of all designs on Thingiverse, and identified 414 unique Patreon
accounts. Excluding invalid accounts (e.g. returns 404 or account under
review) , we found 264 unique Patreon pages. We then manually collected
details about their Patreon page, including membership levels, membership
benefits, goals, number of patrons, and current monthly donation, as an
example shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Example creator’s Patreon profile page. Many creators set membership
levels, set various goals, for subscribers to know more about their increasing
benefits and support creative endeavors

These fields are all optional depending on user’s setting. Based on the
available data, we analyzed the distribution of membership levels, and the
type of extra benefits that subscribers can get from the creators.

Creator Profit Creators on Patreon, though not required, can have
predetermined membership levels and the corresponding benefits on their page.
Subscribers can choose from one of these membership levels or donate a random
amount of money. Of 264 unique creators, 239 of them have pre-determined
membership levels ($mean=\$21.35,median=\$7$). Some creators may set a very
high subscription level (e.g., $1,000 for the highest subscription level), but
majority of the subscription levels are under $60, and thus the distribution
of cost is right skewed.

Rewards Types |  Creator Count |  Examples
---|---|---
Exclusive content |  177 (67.04%) |  Member-only designs, weekly updates
Community |  162 (61.36%) |  Joining members community (e.g. Discord), polls and votes for next design, early access, FAQ, chat with creators
Licensing |  71 (26.89%) |  Permission to sell prints (but not original design)
Credits / appreciation |  47 (17.80%) |  Name on YouTube video, gifts, personalized Thank You video/audio.
Discount |  44 (16.67%) |  Discount or free access in creators’ own web stores (e.g. Etsy, Shapeways)
Additional format |  35 (13.25%) |  Editable source file (original design and source code), high resolution files, modified version of free designs
Personal service |  35 (13.25%) |  Consultation, mentoring, accept personal modeling request, modeling/design lessons and tutorials
Table 2. Classification of Patreon Membership Benefits. % refers to ratio of
224 creator profile.

Member Rewards In return to patrons’ subscriptions and donations, creators may
provide additional rewards to these subscribers based on levels. This covers
various benefits from exclusive content to one-to-one consultation. Also,
creators may release new content monthly instead of all at once, to get a high
retention rate of the patrons to make the income from subscriptions stable. In
general, the higher the level, the more benefits the patron can get, such as
limited edition or personalized design. To understand customer’s motivation to
pay extra money to creators with higher membership, we summarized these
benefits that are found from creators’ profile pages as shown in the Table 2.
Exclusive content and community related benefits are found out to be the two
most common benefits, which shows that exclusive content and more involvement
with creators are relatively more attractive to subscribers who are willing to
pay creators. The result also shows that creators are willing to sell services
(e.g. provide more personalized benefits) instead of providing products (e.g.
exclusive designs) as this might result in one-time payment, and utilize their
skills and expertise to attract more patrons and keep stable revenue.

####  4.2.2. Type 2. Merchandise Sales Related to 3D Design

Another common way of gaining extra earning through 3D printing is to sell
finished prints of models (for those who have no easy access to printers),
prints in special materials, assembled products with 3D printed parts and
other components, or a kit of parts/components that are used in the design.
Things that fall into this category usually have links to the creator’s web
stores (e.g., Etsy) in their designs’ description part on Thingiverse, or
links to the creator’s printing store on a 3rd party platforms (e.g.,
Shapeways) to receive commission for their design from successful print
orders. We categorized three main patterns as follows:

Figure 3.  Example in each classification of compensation type (A) full
assembled design and all required components, (B) selling hardware kit that
are required to assemble components in 3D, (C) full print via 3rd party
printing service using special materials, and (D) full set of models and
components where opensource design is only the small part.

Finished prints This is the most frequent case, where creators include the URL
to their personal web stores (e.g. Etsy, Gumroad, etc.) in their designs’
description on Thingiverse. Creators get financial gains from their printing
capability in addition to the designs by selling finished prints of their own
designs.

Final Products with Print and Assembly Many creators share complicated designs
that require intensive assembly, and some creators may sell assembled products
in store so that people can directly purchase a ready-to-use product. For
example, a mechanical walking toy (Thing#2573542, Figure 3A) consists of 11
files. Audiences have the choice of either printing them all and assemble
them, or directly purchase an assembled one from creator’s store on Etsy.

Kits and Tools While for some other designs, creators usually sell a kit of
the design instead of the assembled products, and this can be found in many
DIY designs, especially for those that require additional components that
cannot be easily printed, such as electronic components or metal parts. One
example is a dart blaster (Thing#2846629, Figure 3B). The design requires both
the 3D printed part, such as shell and handle, and other additional hardware
components, such as spring and screws. Users can either print the necessary
part and buy other hardware components separately, or buy a kit that contain
all hardware needed to complete assembly, which could potentially save time
and expense on purchasing the right components for the design and also support
the creator’s work.

Finished Prints through 3rd-party Printing Services It has also been found
that creators may direct users to print their designs through 3rd party
printing services, such as Shapeways and Sculpteo. Creators have a virtual
‘printing shop’ hosted by them, and can receive a commission for each
successful order through their personal shops (Figure 3C). Customers often
utilize these special services due to availability for special materials using
high-end printers that are not easily printable using low-cost printers,
including soft plastic (Thing#3733220), metal (Thing#2736009), and ceramic
(Thing#150087). This gives creators more possibilities and choices in their
designs, as they can create designs that usually require special materials,
such as a jewelry ring (Thing#1230141).

Full Version of Incomplete Design Some creators post limited or incomplete
version of designs on Thingiverse for public, then sell full design in their
personal stores (Figure 3D). One example (Thing#4249613) is a set of
miniatures, where one of them are posted publicly on Thingiverse, and the full
set (which contains 3 models) can be purchased at cults3d. Another example is
a single design (Thing#3948802). One part of the design is on Thingiverse, but
the full design (which has more model files) needs to be purchased in store.
Images of these examples are shown in figure 3. Other examples include a torso
of naked body, where the full body sculpture needs to be purchased
(Thing#2514495). Users can decide whether they want to pay to get more
variation of the design or not.

####  4.2.3. Type 3. Consulting/Personal Design Task

Many creators also provide paid personal services in the field of 3D printing,
such as 3D design on-premise through Patreon, or other freelancer platforms
(e.g., UpWork, Fiverr). As known from above, 13.25% of Patreon pages on
Thingiverse proposed personal service. Of these pages, 74.28% of them offer
on-demand modeling service, providing the modeling or crafting, including
customizing existing models based on customer’s special requirements, and
54.28% of them provides consultation or tutorials, including technical
support, modeling tutorials, and consultation on personal projects of
customers. This shows an additional clue of compensation can be received not
only from the physical products or models, but also from creator’s
professional skills.

Figure 4. Example of creators trying to get paid by their professional skills,
advertising through shared 3D contents: (1) 3d printing, (2) converting
photos, and (3) gcode programming, etc. Creator bio and information is
removed.

Another platform Fiverr, which is also popular among creators who seek
compensation, focuses more specifically on freelance services. 51 things
explicitly mentioned Fiverr in the description, and 20 unique Fiverr links
(excluding links that belongs to the same creator, or links that are no longer
accessible) were associated with designs on Thingiverse. Similar to the
personal services on Patreon, creators also provide various paid personal
modeling, programming, printing, or drafting request, such as non-specified
general modeling service (Figure 4A) , specified modeling service (e.g. create
STL model from photo, Figure 4B) , cnc programming and g code (Figure 4C) ,
and technical drawing service for manufacturing, and more.

These instances with paid personal services demonstrate that there are
creators who are compensated for their expertise and individual tasks in
addition to contents that are shared in open platforms– similar to utilization
of multiple digital platforms in existing online gig economy (Sutherland and
Jarrahi, 2017).

###  4.3. Type of Contents: What Things Creators Make Money from?

While there are more people who believe in the promising future of the 3D
printing, there are also people with curiosity why people would pay for 3D
designs, instead of buying mass-produced products from Amazon. As we see in
many applications that the variety can be better accomplished via
customization, in that, which 3D printing has shown its promises, it is
important to know what type of products has been gaining its popularity
particularly to make profits. To understand the type of things, we retrieved
the information about thing ‘category’ and thing ‘tags’ of designs.

####  4.3.1. By Category: 3D printing, Hobby, Household Items, and Toys &
Games

To publish a thing on Thingiverse, creators are required to select the
category from a predefined list, and the platform provides two levels of
categories to help creators best describe their work, such as Fashion,
Gadgets, Household as the top level category, and Costume, Camera,
Kitchen&Dining as subcategories. We retrieved the first level category of set
by Thingiverse, which include 11 different categories: ‘3D Printing’ (19.17%),
‘Household’ (18.62%), ‘Hobby’ (12.51%), ‘Art’ (10.76%), ‘Fashion’ (9.68%),
‘Toys & Games’ (7.18%), ‘Tools’ (5.96%), ‘Gadgets’ (5.6%), ‘Other’ (4.65%),
’Models’ (4.4%), ‘Learning’ (1.47%).

We retrieved the top 7 categories with more than 10K instances, as shown in
the Table 3.

Sort by count | Sort by ratio in each category
---|---
Order |  Category |  Count |  Order |  Category |  Percent*
1 |  3D Printing |  32,823 |  1 |  Toys & Games |  19.53%
2 |  Hobby |  26,561 |  2 |  Models |  19.01%
3 |  Household |  26,008 |  3 |  Hobby |  12.02%
4 |  Toys & Games |  24,758 |  4 |  Gadgets |  10.35%
5 |  Art |  16,600 |  5 |  3D Printing |  9.53%
6 |  Models |  14,779 |  6 |  Learning |  8.86%
7 |  Gadgets |  10,248 |  7 |  Art |  8.47%
Table 3. Popular thing category (with more than 10K designs)in each
compensation type, sorted by percentage (*Percentage indicates the ratio of
things with compensation solicitation among all things in the same category)

Considering the difference of total count of each category888 ‘3D Printing’ is
meant to parts and accessories for printers, such as extruder, parts, and
tests as sub categories, but somehow it is misunderstood by creators so
anything can be 3D printed are often categorized into this. Thus, it is
possible that the simple count does not necessarily represent its category,
and we report the ratio of compensation seeking design in each category as
well., we also retrieved the top 7 categories sorted by relative percentage in
that specific category (i.e. percentage of compensation seeking designs in
each category). As shown in Table 3, ‘Toys & Games’ become the most popular,
where people may post and sell models and miniatures of games and movie
characters, such as the collection of DnD (Dungeons & Dragons) miniatures
(thing#3054701).

####  4.3.2. By Thing Tags: ender_3, fpv, customized, dnd, stencil, miniature,
and camera

While optional, creators can also add tags to their design to help audiences
quickly search, and combinations of user-defined tags often better accurately
describe the identity of the design. Thus, we retrieved tags of compensation-
seeking things in the top 7 categories sorted by count in Table 3, and
extracted the top 10 tags from each category.

Category |  Top 10 Tags
---|---
3D Printing |  ender_3, creality, filament, spool_holder, prusa_i3, filament_spool_holder, extruder, anet_a8, prusa, 3d_printer
Hobby |  fpv, drone, quadcopter, mount, arduino, case, diy, holder, customized, airsoft
Household |  customized, holder, vase, decoration, kitchen, container, christmas, box, cookie_cutter, household
Toys & Games |  dnd, tabletop, miniature, dungeons_and_dragons, wargaming, rpg, warhammer, boardgame, 28mm, pathfinder
Art |  stencil, customized, art, sculpture, logo, sign, 2d_art, openscad, statue, decoration
Models |  miniature, tabletop, model, warhammer, animal, warhammer_40k, wargaming, 28mm, prop, toy
Gadgets |  camera, iphone, stand, case, holder, mount, gopro, phone, phone_stand, smartphone
Table 4. Top 10 thing tags in the top 7 compensation-seeking categories (with
more than 10K designs, sorted by total count of designs)

As shown in table 4, popular tags for 3D printing are related to 3D printer
parts, printing equipment, or materials. The popular tags in both ‘Toys &
Games’ and ‘Models’ show that a number of compensation-seeking designs are
highly related to video or tabletop game/movie/anime characters and miniature.
This might indicate a potential popularity of fandom culture in compensation-
seeking designs among creators. For art category, tags are related to both 2D
and 3D designs, which also shows potential opportunities of customized on-
demand design request. For Hobby and Gadgets categories, the popular tags are
often related to DIY projects, parts, and accessories, that could also
potentially lead to selling kits, parts, and assembled products from web
stores, as we found above. These categories are also popular in things with
affiliate links, as things may require additional components or devices (e.g.,
Arduino, electronics, and small components or materials), which are usually
available for purchase online; and thus the creators can put affiliate links
in description both for helping other makers to quickly locate the parts
needed and get a compensation from successful orders– which might be
motivation of designers in creating 3D models; create and share 3D designs
that audiences download and buy required things via provided channels.

At the same time, it implicitly tells us that certain categories such as
‘Fashion’ (jewelry, accessories, etc.), ‘Learning’ (biology, math, etc.),
‘Tools’ (chess, construction toys, etc.) are either not very popular among
creators who are interested in sharing contents for profit, or possibly,
creators who design and share those things do not seek compensation through
designs shared for public. However, these two hypotheses deserve another in-
depth analysis.

###  4.4. Motivations, Expectations, and Gaps

We further conducted a survey with Thingiverse designers to ask their
motivation in sharing designs, their expectation of compensations, and the
current situation. We sent out 700 survey invitations on Thingiverse through
private messages, and received 43 valid survey responses. All responses are
anonymous and optional.

####  4.4.1. “Share and Share Alike, Everyone Wins.”

We started the survey by asking creators their motivation of sharing designs
for free. We provided 4 pre-set options for this question, including (1) I
want to share the talent I have with the community, (2) I take this as
accessible storage of my work, (3) I want to share other 3D designs to get
more attention through this work, and (4) I want to advertise my other
creative work portfolio (PodCast, Illustrations, YouTube, etc.). In addition,
participant can also enter a custom response in case none of the above options
applies. Of 11 responses (excluding who skipped to answer), 8 responses
(72.7%) are for altruistic reasons, including (1) and two customized responses
“share and share alike, everyone wins” and “I want to make the world better
with my designs”. Other options (2)-(4) got one response each. The result
shows that although we are targeting the user group that indicated at least
one method for receiving compensation, the majority of creators who responded
still share their designs for free, primarily to contribute to opensource
community.

Creators may post their designs for fun or mostly for altruistic reasons, such
as “giving back to 3D printing community” (R2), “helping others” (R4), and
“keeping the community going” (R36). Some creators turned on the ’tip
designer’ function because other users requested it to show their
appreciation, or because creators may want to refund from initial investment.
For example, one mentioned that ”I gave the possibility to leave a tip on
Thingiverse for my designs. I was hoping at least to refund some material such
filaments or 3D printer parts. I did not want to gain anything from sharing
the designs. I believe that the 3D printing community is great because of the
free availability and sharing of Knowledge and Ideas.”(R8) One participant
also mentioned that ”If I don’t need the money for the time I spend on that
creation, then I won’t require it. I want everyone to have the ability to
create regardless of their ability to pay for it, but I understand that other
creators need to be compensated for their time so they can continue creating.”
(R25)

####  4.4.2. “I Would Like to Make Someone Cares.”

While altruism could be yet the primary motivation, it can be found that
compensation could also bring additional motivation for creators to post more
designs. For example, one participant mentioned, “Sometimes even a very tiny
small tip would encourage me to make/publish 3D models.” (R43) Giving tip is
also a way of showing appreciation, as one quoted “Because it’s difficult
time, just 5 bucks would be awesome to show that people care what you do.”
(R18) Insufficient compensation may let creators feel that the time they spent
on designs are not well acknowledged. The participant added “If you make
something and people do not care, it just takes down the mood to upload new
thing, like the motivation will just disappear.” (R18) Thus, compensation
would be another motivation that keeps creators sharing more designs,
including those are free for the most of audiences on open market.

####  4.4.3. “I Want Compensation from what I’ve Spent Time On.”

Creators’ expectations of compensation are diverse, depending on the type of
models or the actual need of compensation. We asked the compensation amount
that creators expect to receive from their designs that are shared online, and
the range of responses is quite vary, from as low as $10 in total to $1,000
per month. This may also depend on how much time they spend on creating
designs. For example, one participant explicitly mentioned that he/she wants
to “get a job and income from my designs.” (R12) Other creators might take
this as freelancing job, doing is as a side hustle which can bring extra
income as also seen in many existing online gig economy such as Uber and
TaskRabbit (Sutherland and Jarrahi, 2017), as participants quoted “This is
fun, but I can stop whenever I want and move on to other things. Once it’s my
main income I’m trapped. Keeping it a low key side hustle takes a lot of
pressure off and let’s me create better because the motivation is love of the
craft and not making rent.” (R26) Some also mentioned that they only expect
compensation for “the ones I’ve spent the most time on” (R30) or complicated
designs only, while keeping some other designs freely accessible. “If I don’t
need the money for the time I spend on that creation, then I won’t require
it.” (R25),

####  4.4.4. “I Had High Hopes but Everyone Wants Us to Work for Free.”

Although creators have various expectations, there is one common mind shared
by creators, which illustrated the gap between the expectation and reality, as
one participant mentioned “Thingiverse is now only used to show designs, I
have never received tips from using this platform. I had high hopes but
everyone wants us to work for free.” (R41) On average, the total amount of
compensation that participants indicated that they have received is $9.32 per
creator, and 20 of 34 (58.8%) have not received any. We also asked
participants whether the current compensation they received could motivate
them to post creative works full time by choosing between 1 (Strongly
Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree), and on average the score is 2.23, which shows
that the current amount they received is still below their average
expectation. In addition, none of the participants think the current
compensation is a stable source of income. This gap may potentially
discouraged creators to post more or quality designs, as one participant
mentioned “I’ve stopped making models altogether, It’s just not worth my time.
People expect everything to be free these days.” (R37) It may also cause
creators to move to paid sites to seek enough compensation, as another
participant mentioned “I am strongly considering moving to a paid site where I
can receive a few dollars per download. Thingiverse tips are less than $100
for a complex design with over 15,000 downloads.” (R34)

Besides the amount of compensation in total, another reason which may stop
creators from spending more time on creating and sharing design is the
instability of the compensation. 28 out of 42 participants agree or strongly
agreed that the compensation they received is too irregular to be a steady
income that they can rely on. This may due to the nature of certain
compensation method, such as one-time tip through PayPal or a one-time payment
to unlock all designs (which could potentially be re-distributed online). From
another point of view, this shows potentiality of subscription-based monthly
donation, as the monthly compensation is easier to predict and thus the
creators can plan the time they spend on creating new things accordingly. This
could also motivate creators to post new designs in a planned manner, in order
to keep high retention rate.

The results echo our observations in the existing discussion amongst
Thingiverse users through forums, as they do not think voluntary tipping is
enough to sustain it as day job: “I sometimes receive tips, but a regular $10
a month would be utopian.” (Thingiverse user DrLex), “If I’m wrong, and anyone
here makes more than 10$ a month in tips, I’d be surprised” (Thingiverse user
Drewrt).

##  5\. Discussion: Opportunity, Concerns, and Implications

###  5.1. New Socio-economic Opportunities Emerged by 3D Printing and Online
Platform

As shown in this work, 3D printing has been presenting many new societal
impacts with the rapid growth of opensource platforms online. With the open
platform, the 3D printing community rapidly responded to the critical needs in
personal protective equipment for clinical professionals during the recent
COVID-19 outbreak (Exchange, 2020). Various group of people, such as America
Makes and Make4COVID, participated in various pipeline of supply chain, as
designer, design verifier, local manufacturers, quality assurance, and many
more (Make4Covid, 2020). On Thingiverse, ‘covid-19’ tag also quickly became
very popular, with its 3,556 frequency ranked at the 90th most popular tags
among all designs (as of May 2020). As we have seen through this work, 3D
printing open market has also been used to advertise creative works and get
attention, which enabled creators to use this opportunity to launch a new
open-source based entrepreneurship via successful kickstarter funding.
Although we need further studies to identify creators’ identities999We
retrieved user accounts and looked into their public bio page to extract their
self-reported identity. However, due to limited selection category originally
set (e.g., educator, students, maker) on the bio page, these are limited to
know their occupation or current social position and more, we also observed
some empirical evidences about new societal opportunities for various people,
including entrepreneur, retiree, female, and more. Furthermore, known from the
goals set by 139 creators who owned Patreon accounts (139 of 264 Patreon
creators set goals on their Patreon page), some creators also want to quit or
decrease day job hours (5 out of 139), open a dedicated front store to sell
more products at easy access (6 out of 139), or even hire people (7 out of
139), which we can expect even expanded job opportunities that 3D printing
community can bring to our society, more to the underrepresented groups who
needed more job flexibility or limited mobility, and more. 3D printing has
brought more and more options for home workers, where we can see the future
with expanded opportunity from DIY and craft to freelancing design and
printing tasks.

###  5.2. Tension between Opensource Culture and Copyrights to Credit Labor

As introduced earlier, people have started sharing their own designs with
altruistic motivation, and it helped the community grow and mature. The growth
of communities with more people owning 3D printers at home also broadened the
audiences who can participate in this new labor market. Now the technology and
culture is grown enough to craft new opportunities (jobs), for example, custom
design in open repositories now can be completely 3D printed at nearly-
commercial quality, intriguing customers buy these over mass-produced items.

However, potential concerns has emerged in various aspects, particularly with
IP rights of shared contents. Protecting copyrights of creative contents
online somewhat compensates the societal benefits, in particular, regarding
reuse thereof for derivative creations(Kiskis and Petrauskas, 2005a). Activism
to make historic assets and intellectual property has been getting popular
which could become beneficial for wider community, as example can be observed
with 3D models of 3D scanned historic sculptures at Museums101010Example
available by Thingiverse user cosmowenman, with long story for law suit cases
(Wenman, 2019) The most controversial case caught its attention when people
made profit by selling complete prints on Ebay, made of models that were
originally shared for free by others (3dprint.com, 2016). The designer shared
for “Non-commercial” but a seller at the closed market such as Ebay downloaded
a bunch of models and sold for price, with the wrong interpretation of Terms
of Use, saying “Once you share for opensource, you lose the right”. Since the
most of those items were down and so unavailable from Ebay, some creators
chose to take different actions, where some has begun to make earnings by
selling ‘commercial license’, officially allowing others to sell final prints
if they pay fees to the original designer (e.g., Thingiverse user Robagon),
while the other deleted his all free designs from open repository, leading
audiences to visit his webstores hosted in Shapeways (Thingiverse user
mz4250), where people can purchase printing service, but not the design file
itself for free replication or remix.

###  5.3. Potential Issues with Remix, Customize, and Sensitive Things

Licensing may sometimes be unclear on certain websites for makers and
designers to notice, particularly in regards to fork and renovating new
features (remix) based on opensource libraries and designs. It has been
noticed that platform does not guarantee any equitable compensation to the
right holder, while, unfortunately, it may provide tools for abuse(Kiskis and
Petrauskas, 2005b). Currently, remix and customize are also one popular native
function on Thinigverse, but what if remixes and customized design get
compensation while the original is not? In reality, among all things that
solicit compensation for some format, 7,012 are customized, where we might
need more in-depth analysis if the majority of them were done by another
Thingiverse users or the designer-selves. We have seen that people actually
obtained tips from remixes even without complex re-design “I found which part
I was tipped by, and it was something I remixed, just to flatten in out,
because it was at a very difficult angle to print at. This had its beginnings
with Ryan’s coupler, so thanks Ryan” (Thingiverse user Jeffeb3), of which the
original designer is unable to directly benefit from it as s/he did not enable
tip designer or asked for donation at all.

###  5.4. Towards Fair and Ethical Technology to Support Creative Endeavors

There have been increasing discussions among creators, which platform they can
trust to get paid. “I never tip through thingiverse because makerbot clearly
doesn’t deserve 30% cut they take. Also secondly, I have evidence that they
just steal some tips (some people told me they sent me a tip through
thingiverse, the paypal accepted the transaction but I didn’t get anything out
of it).” (Reddit user HairyBeardman)

Recently, Thingiverse has allied with 3D hubs(Hubs, 2020), which helps
customers without 3D printers or expertise/time to 3D print. Users can place a
print order directly to 3D hubs, out of free 3D models on Thingiverse. Since
then, creators questioned “Who’s making money off my design?” (3DHub user
Alexander_Gaarn) that ignited a long debate among stakeholders. While some
people believe that ‘‘To me, the entire point of designing things is to prove
that 3d printing can be useful and not just flashy. I just wanted to make sure
that no one was trying to undermine the altruistic endeavor.” (3Dhub user
Alexander_gaarn), others may arguing back “If you are mad at people here
because someone took your work that you ‘gave away freely’ and hired one of us
to print it for them, your anger is severely misplaced. If someone bought a
printer so they could print your design, would the manufacturer of the printer
also be ‘making money off your design’?” (3Dhub user MindFull). Nonetheless,
the Thingiverse and 3Dhub officials claim that they “enable 3D Hubs by default
only for designers who’s licenses allow for commercial use and we make it easy
to disable” (The full conversation available at (Forum, 2016)). The
controversy could be alleviated by transparent information, while we need to
invest more efforts into developing ethical and fair system and metadata that
can inform rights that creators hold.

##  6\. Limitation

While we were trying to provide a comprehensive analysis of compensation
seeking behaviors on Thingiverse with 3D contents shared for free, there are
still several limitations. First, although we also used the text
classification model to discover more potential compensation seeking designs
in addition to URL analysis, this does not guarantee that we discovered ‘all’
possible cases on Thingiverse, especially for creators who does not directly
seek compensation in the description field (e.g., one creator only left his
personal website in description where the link to donation account is on
his/her personal website). Second, in regard to the ’tip designer’, we
collected all things made by creators who enabled them as compensation seeking
designs. However, some may not have a strong intention to seek compensation
but just turned on the function as there were people who wanted to leave a tip
as we discovered the case from the survey: “I only have one design available
[…] I only enabled the ‘Tip Designer’ option after users requested it to show
their appreciation.” Third, not all creators classified their designs
correctly on Thingiverse, which could potentially influence the analysis that
are based on category information. Some examples include models that are
either overlap (such as ‘Models’ and ‘Toys & Games’) or can be easily
misunderstood by creators who chose the categories, such as the ’3D Printing’
category. From the subcategories, it can be guessed that this is mostly for
designs that are related to 3D printers (e.g., printer parts, accessories, and
testing models), but there were some users misunderstood this as 3D
’printable’ models in general. Thus a potential future work is to come up with
an efficient and accurate way of verifying the categorization of things.

There also exist limitations in our survey design and analysis. As there were
no compensation promised for participation, responses collected could be
potentially biased to the users who share designs for altruistic reasons,
expecting no returns.

Also, some findings are drawn from the empirical evidences. The analysis of
compensation behavior could be more well-support with more detailed
information and data, such as statistics of compensations received by creators
and how the creators’ overall incomes are influenced by the compensation (e.g.
does compensation actually increase creator’s household income? Is
compensation a stable and sufficient way to sustain home economy?).

##  7\. Conclusion

This work discusses the potential opportunities in online 3D printing
communities for designers to get additional compensation. We analyze the type
of compensation methods and behaviors, the type of content that attracts
compensation, additional benefits and rewards for compensation, and how such
trend increases over time. We find that there exists various opportunities in
3D printing communities, such as providing additional content, professional
consultation, printing service, that could help designers get additional
compensation. We also discuss the motivation and expectation of designers’
compensation in these communities, specifically on how the revenues they
received influence their will to continue producing creative works. Although
there is a diverse gap between ideal compensation and the current status, it
still shows a wide variety of socio-economic opportunities for designers. We
conclude by discussing emergent issues, concerns, and implications for
potential opportunities and jobs for community members in the future.

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