SlidesCarnival: How a One-Person Free-Template Site Making €20K/Month Got Acquired by Canva
SlidesCarnival, a free presentation-template site run single-handedly by Spanish designer Jimena Catalina Gayo, generated €20,000 (about ¥3.3M) a month in ad revenue and was acquired by Canva, the biggest name in design platforms. Like html5up before Carrd, it shows how a "free-giveaway audience" can end up being bought by a major company.
This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.
(Yen figures for foreign-currency amounts are approximate conversions)
What happened
SlidesCarnival was a free presentation-template site run entirely by one person: Spanish designer Jimena Catalina Gayo. She published Google Slides and PowerPoint templates for free, grew the site to €20,000 (about ¥3.3M) a month in advertising revenue, and then sold it to Canva, the largest player in design platforms.
The math that turns “giving things away” into a business
A free-template 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, which makes the traffic a great match for advertising. The €20K/month figure proves that a distribution site can be a real business all on its own.
The economics on the production side work too. A template is a stock asset: build it once and it gets downloaded forever, and even at a single designer’s pace the inventory grows to hundreds of pieces within a few years. A portfolio that doubles as a revenue engine is one of the most repeatable side-business models available to designers.
What exactly did Canva buy?
For Canva, the value of the acquisition lay not just in the template assets themselves but in the pipeline of “people who want to make a presentation” flowing in from search every single day. SlidesCarnival’s visitors are precisely the audience Canva would otherwise pay advertising dollars to acquire. The site has continued distributing templates after the acquisition, functioning as an on-ramp into Canva.
Just as Carrd was born from the audience of the free-giveaway site html5up, free distribution can serve either as the foundation for your own paid product or as a sellable asset for a large acquirer. A giveaway is an asset disguised as a customer-acquisition machine. In the Japanese-language market, the same structural opening still exists for template distribution — resumes, proposal decks, slides.
Related reading
Sources
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