The story of Emberline
2016
Nine years ago, illustrator Wren Kobayashi was stuck. Her weekly comic reached 340,000 readers, and the ad revenue attached to it barely covered her ink and postage. So she called her old studio-mate Ansel Priday, and the two of them started building the thing they wished existed: a way for the people who already loved the work to fund the next chapter of it directly. Emberline has spent every year since making that exchange simpler, steadier, and more worth building a career on.
Today
Emberline is where independent creators turn an audience into a working business. Starting is free. Creators can open a membership, sell one-off releases, or run both side by side, and they keep a direct line to the people who pay for the work — names, messages, and email addresses that belong to them, not to us. No ad auction, no ranking algorithm, no third party deciding which fans get to hear from them this week.
Our numbers
Built by a creator, for creators. Every decision here gets measured against one question — does it get creators paid?
11.8 million fans paying for memberships each month
Members pay for access to work that never shows up anywhere else — early cuts, process notes, and the room where it gets made.
64.5 million free memberships started
Free members may not be ready to pay yet, but they still want a seat in the community a creator is building.
284,000 creators on Emberline
Illustrators, session musicians, documentary teams, and modders — each running a business on terms they set themselves.
$6.3 billion paid out to creators
Since 2016, earnings have moved from members straight to the people making the work, minus one flat platform rate.
Our mission
We're proud that creators come to Emberline for creative freedom and ownership. We take that seriously, and we have a good time doing it together.
See our job openings
At Emberline, we spend the day building toward a future where creators are in control and a real community can thrive around them. A future where someone can make the thing that excites them most without feeding an unpredictable feed, and where fans and creators reach each other with nothing standing in between.
If you want to go deeper on that idea, we worked with documentarians Marta Olsen and Idris Fennell on a short film, narrated by Wren, about the problems creators run into — and how we plan to solve them.
