net revenue

Net revenue is the only figure that exists in any real sense: it is the one you can spend. Everything above it (the total at the top of the platform page, the number an agency quotes, the price on a single locked message) describes money that is not yours yet. The gap between gross and net is not an anomaly. It just has to explain itself line by line, and on most statements it does, provided you know which line you are reading.

Which line on the statement is net revenue?

Not the big one at the top. A platform statement usually carries four numbers that people use interchangeably and should not:

• Gross earnings: what fans paid, before the platform’s own cut.
• Net earnings: the same period after the platform’s share comes off. This is the line that matters.
• Current balance: net earnings that have accumulated, including sums not yet released.
• Available balance: the part of that balance you are allowed to withdraw today. What governs that is the payout threshold and schedule.

If you have an agency, none of those four is your net revenue yet: the agency commission comes off net earnings, and only what remains is yours. The order of the whole stack is set out in revenue split.

Why is the bank transfer lower than the statement?

Because a statement describes a period and a transfer describes a moment, and several things happen in between.

Gap you notice	Usual cause
A sale is missing	it landed after the period closed
An amount vanished	a refund or a chargeback, sometimes weeks after the purchase
The money is there but has not moved	it is earned and not released yet
Nothing arrived at all	the balance has not cleared the minimum withdrawal threshold
The figure is close but not equal	currency conversion, or a transfer fee taken at the end

None of those is unusual on its own. They become a problem only when nothing in the paperwork lets you find them again, which is why the date of a sale and the date of its payout should be tracked as two separate columns and never merged.

Does net revenue mean money you keep?

No. Social security contributions, income tax and whatever else your country asks of a self-employed person come afterwards, out of sums already sitting in your account. Which is why the balance showing in the account is never the amount that is yours.

How should you track it?

One full month at a time, and one platform at a time. Three precautions make the figure trustworthy:

1. Do not mix months. Book a sale on its sale date and follow transfers separately, or a slow payout cycle will look like a bad month.
2. Run every metric on net, not gross. An average order value built from displayed prices describes money nobody receives.
3. Compare yourself to yourself. Two creators’ net revenue is not comparable: not the catalogue, not the prices, not the contract.

Whatever you track it in (a spreadsheet or a creator dashboard), net revenue is only checkable if every deduction has a line of its own.