How earnings work on ModsDrop: the 70% share, how a day’s revenue is split, and when and how you are paid

24 Oct 2026 · 4 min read · ModsDrop

Pictured: Volkswagen Golf 4 1.9 TDI Stage 3 – Tuned FWD Diesel Sedan, from the ModsDrop library.

ModsDrop pays the people who upload mods 70% of what the advertising earns on their files. That sentence sounds simple and raises six questions the moment you think about it. This is the long answer: what is counted, how a day’s money is split, when it reaches your balance, how it is paid out, and what we do about faked downloads.

What earns money

Downloads need no account and cost nothing, so the money comes from advertising on the file pages: the page a visitor lands on and the “Your file is ready” page that follows it. Nothing else on the site carries adverts. Visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland see no advert until they say yes to the cookie question, which means a European download often earns nothing at all; that is the law, and we would rather lose the cent than the visitor’s trust.

How a day’s revenue is split

The advertising network reports what the site earned each day. We divide that day’s amount between the files that were downloaded that day, in proportion to their finished downloads, weighted by the country each download came from. The weighting exists because advertisers pay very different prices by country: a download from the United States or Germany is worth several times one from a country where ad prices are low, and a flat split would quietly move money from the authors whose audience pays the bills to the authors whose audience does not.

A download counts when it finishes, not when the button is pressed. Cancelled downloads, download managers hammering the same file, and repeat downloads from the same visitor within a short time are not counted. Your account shows the result per file and per day.

Where the 70% goes

Each uploader receives 70% of what their own files earned. The remaining 30% pays for the storage box the files live on, the bandwidth, the virus scans and the hours of running the site. There is no premium tier that skips the adverts, so there is no second revenue stream to account for yet; if one is ever built, the author share will be worked out from both sources, as the page about ads and a paid option explains.

When it reaches your balance

On the 3rd of each month, your share of the month before is booked to your balance, once the advertising network has corrected its figures. Networks adjust the previous month’s numbers for invalid traffic during the first days of a new month, which is why the booking waits for the 3rd rather than happening on the 1st. Until then your account shows the running figure as an estimate, clearly marked as one.

Payouts

From $10 you can request a payout on the Payments page. It is sent by hand, usually within a few days, to the PayPal, Payoneer or USDT details you saved in your account. USDT network fees come off the amount; PayPal and Payoneer fees are whatever those services charge on their side. There is no automatic payout, deliberately: a person looks at each request, which is the cheapest fraud filter there is at our size.

Faked traffic

Inflating downloads or advert views with bots, scripts, bought traffic, download managers or several accounts forfeits the earnings involved and closes the account. Earnings already credited can be taken back if they turn out to come from such traffic, before or after a payout. We do not publish the exact signals we look at, for the obvious reason, but the country weighting and the finished-download rule already remove most of the incentive: a thousand clicks from a proxy farm in a cheap-ad country earn almost nothing and stand out immediately.

Your own share is yours

One detail that surprises people: an uploader looking at their own file sees no adverts at all. You cannot earn from yourself, and you cannot accidentally break the rules by testing your own page.

What you can do to earn more

Describe the file properly. Visitors who know what they are downloading finish the download; visitors who guess, cancel.
Keep the game version current in the description. A file that says “tested on 0.40.3” is downloaded, a file that says “0.34” is skipped.
Upload a lite version alongside a 2 GB file when you can. Finished downloads are what count, and a 300 MB file finishes on connections where a 2 GB one does not.
Link to your ModsDrop page from wherever you publish. The share is per finished download; more of them is the whole game.

The full wording lives in the Terms, section 16, and the Earn from your mods page has the short version. Sign-ups are paused at the moment; existing accounts earn as described.