Free-Template Site SlidesCarnival Sold to Canva for €20K/Month: What a One-Person Distribution Site Can Reach

What happened

SlidesCarnival was a free presentation-template distribution site run single-handedly by Spanish designer Jimena Catalina Gayo. She published free templates for Google Slides and PowerPoint, grew the site to €20,000 a month (about ¥3.3 million, roughly $240,000 a year) in advertising revenue, and then, in March 2023, sold it to Canva, the largest name in design platforms (the deal was announced June 28 of the same year).

It began in June 2014, when she made a Google Slides template to help her brother with a college assignment. Gayo, whose day job was digital product design, spotted a gap in the market at that moment: available templates split into “free but low-quality” and “high-quality but paid,” with nothing filling the high-quality-free space. “Can I give away templates for free and still make money?” became the business hypothesis, as-is. The WordPress site itself took under a day to build, and initial promotion consisted of nothing more than her network of friends, her blog, and about €50 of LinkedIn ads. From there, exposure on Product Hunt and organic Google search pushed the site forward over nine years. By its later years the site was reaching 2 million monthly visits and 12 million monthly pageviews, and ranking first for major keywords like “free PowerPoint templates.”

Nine-Year Timeline

The math that turns “giving things away” into a business

A free-template distribution site pulls in enormous traffic from search demand like “free presentation templates” and “plantillas de Google Slides.” Someone searching the night before a presentation has a clear goal and stays on the page a long time, which pairs well with advertising revenue. The €20K/month figure shows that a distribution site alone can be a fully sufficient business on its own.

But per-unit revenue is thin. €20,000 divided by 12 million pageviews comes to roughly €1.7 per 1,000 pageviews — a fairly low rate for an ad unit, meaning this revenue was only made possible by sheer volume. Put differently, unless you take the #1 spot for major keywords, this model simply doesn’t add up as a business. Revenue came entirely from Google AdSense, accumulating with every click and impression in the classic model.

The economics on the production side hold up, though. A template is a stock asset, build it once and it gets downloaded indefinitely, and even at the pace of a single designer, the inventory adds up to a meaningful catalogue within a few years. A portfolio that doubles as a revenue engine is one of the most repeatable side-business models available to designers.

The breakdown of a one-person operation — “distribution” was never the whole job

Even calling this a side project undersells it: in practice, it was one person wearing every department of a small company. Beyond making templates, Gayo lists WordPress maintenance, blog writing, user support, social media, coding, SEO analysis, and translating from Spanish to English among her responsibilities. The single biggest challenge she names is keeping up a steady pace of new templates. Maintaining search rankings and competitiveness required a constant supply of new work, so the template library, supposedly a stock asset, was in practice also a flow task demanding constant replenishment. Across these nine years she also took two maternity leaves. Running all of this alongside freelance work and childcare is the setup for the “burnout” discussed later.

The acquisition came “from their side”

The path to the sale is interesting in itself. Gayo was not shopping the business around. It started with a single email from Robert Kawalsky, a Canva product lead. Kawalsky himself was a co-founder and former CEO of Zeetings, a presentation platform that had itself been acquired by Canva, meaning someone who had been on the “acquired” side was the one standing at the door for this acquisition. Gayo felt the terms offered were fair and accepted with essentially no price negotiation. It also happened to land at a point when she was starting to feel worn down by nine years of upkeep.

Yet the biggest hurdle she names is neither price nor negotiation. It’s due diligence. Turning a personal side project (in her own words, “just a website”) into something that could pass a major company’s acquisition review. For a one-person operation, even a profitable one, the books, rights, and operational reality live only in the founder’s head, so the final gate to a sale is not the numbers but the paperwork. She candidly describes the whole sale process as “stressful.”

What Canva actually bought

For Canva, the value of the acquisition went beyond the template assets themselves to the daily funnel of “people who want to make a presentation” flowing in from search. SlidesCarnival’s visitors are exactly the audience Canva would otherwise pay advertising dollars to acquire. What happened after the acquisition confirms this, ads disappeared from the site, and getting a template now requires a Canva account. The €3.3M-a-month ad revenue was given up the moment the deal closed, leaving only the free customer-acquisition channel of 2 million monthly visitors flowing in on their own. What Canva bought was a funnel, not an ad business.

Just as Carrd was born from the audience of the free-giveaway site html5up, a free giveaway can become either the foundation for your own paid product or a sellable asset for a large acquirer. A giveaway is an asset disguised as a customer-acquisition machine.

The shadow side — burnout and single-track revenue

The other side of this case is exhaustion. Even a site generating ¥3.3M a month becomes a burden the moment nine years of updates and maintenance rest on one person’s shoulders. The motive for selling was not a growth ceiling but fatigue from upkeep, and a stock asset carries the hidden, ever-rising cost of maintenance. Her choices after the sale tell the story: the new project, Little Big Artists, carries no ads, doesn’t even track analytics, and is explicitly framed as “a hobby.” She has said plainly she has no intention of pouring in that much time again. Time with her one- and five-year-olds comes first now. The very person who built a ¥3.3M-a-month machine chose not to run the same play again, no fact speaks louder about how heavy the maintenance cost of this model really is.

The single-track revenue structure was also a risk in its own right. Revenue rested entirely on Google AdSense, meaning the entire business depended on two variables, search ranking and AdSense rates, that were outside her own control. Lose the #1 spot and most of the business’s value disappears. On top of that, this acquisition began with Canva reaching out first. For anyone else pursuing the same model, assuming “if I grow it and wait, a buyer will come” is reading the situation from the side of survivorship bias.

Conditions for replication

The transferable core is the act of building up a stock of free giveaways in a genre with clear search demand, creating a stock-type traffic asset. The lightness of the launch (€50 in initial spend, one day to build) also supports how repeatable this model is. In the Japanese-language market, the same structural gap still remains open for template distribution, résumés, proposal decks, presentation slides. Search volume in Japanese runs an order of magnitude below English or Spanish, so €20K-class ad revenue is a stretch, but as with Photopea’s one-person operation built on a free tool plus ads, the design of compensating for thin unit revenue with volume, or with adjacent revenue, holds regardless of language market.

What doesn’t replicate is the existence of a buyer. Platforms of Canva’s scale that want an entire template funnel are countable on one hand, and you cannot design toward a sale as a given. Build a self-sustaining business on ad revenue first, and think about a sale if and when it comes. The order this case actually followed is itself the realistic blueprint for the model.

Related reading

• Carrd — $2M ARR born from a free-giveaway audience
• Photopea — a one-person operation built on a free tool plus ads