I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful.
There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content.
Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of posts by the artist". The stream is JavaScript driven so if you want to go 100 posts back you have to page through multiple pages of posts. If you want to do it again tomorrow, or if the site crashes which it does, you have to start over at post 1 and page through again.
It's telling that so many artists use google drive, dropbox, mediafire, or mega to distribute their works. This seems like money Pateron is leaving on the table if they'd provide for a similar service at similar prices. They do provide a way to upload media but the UX is awful compared to Mega which has arguably the superior UX of those 5 options.
Worse, because these artists are using these separate services there is no way to limit who accesses them. In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.
Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all.
I can certainly imagine a service that's significantly better Patreon for this use case.
Let me also add discoverabilty is horrible. Maybe this is mostly on the artists but the #1 way I find one is off of patreon. Compare to say youtube where the #1 way I find anyone is on youtube itself.
Their UX for viewing creations is absolutely atrocious. If you're going to write a site like a JavaScript SPA, at least do it well.
Scrolling down the stream of a large creator brings down my i7 Macbook Pro to its knees. That should not be happening at all.
Finally, Patreon's 'no refund whatsoever' policy is acceptable for donation jars, but with the growth of creators offering $100-$250+ tiers, it is only going to hurt Patreon and its brand, and possibly in contravention of consumer protection laws in many countries (including Australia). When there is an explicit promise to provide XYZ in exchange for $$$, you need to fulfil that promise.
Yes, sellers hate PayPal disputes and chargebacks, but there's a reason why buyers overwhelmingly prefer PayPal and most businesses see a substantial uplift when integrating it: customers feel more confident!
The reality is that small artists and creators are often unreliable, and if patrons feel like they're scammed or unreliable (e.g. pledge $50 for a t-shirt, do not get t-shirt, patreon support tells them there's nothing they can do), that's only going turn away patrons for life.
The word you're looking for regarding PayPal is trust. Buyers trust PayPal, with good reasons. And in a sad way, PayPal didn't have to offer much for that, merely ensure that you got what you paid for or your money back.
It says a lot about the universe of web sites, sellers and payment processors that offering that put them well above every one else.
The problem is that the payment processor has no capacity to really investigate fraud, so their main choice is between defaulting to enabling seller fraud or buyer fraud. This means it makes sense to use different payment processors with different defaults for different payment types, because some payment types have disproportionately more buyer fraud than seller fraud.
The problem for Patreon is that they're trying to provide something useful -- a service for transactions which are more likely to be dominated by buyer fraud -- but are stuck building it on top of credit card infrastructure that the law requires to default to defending against seller fraud. Then they get stuck in the middle, because buyers can still commit fraud by purchasing thousands of dollars worth of material and then disputing the charge with their credit card company after they already have it.
What's needed is a version of credit cards that themselves do what Patreon is trying to do (no chargebacks) with relatively low monthly charge limits (limiting the buyer's exposure to card theft risk), so that this use case can be met with a system that isn't a garbage fire.
> In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.
They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content from people that login supports and mirrors it for free. Almost every artist with more than 100 subscribers is illegally shared there. It's really quite sleazy when you consider most of the artists let you see their entire catalog for a $1 or even $5 tier. Cheating someone out of thousands of hours of labor for $1 is particularly low.
I know it's the internet and you can't really stop piracy, but I'd like to see Patreon being proactive against a service that hurts both itself and its creators like that.
Piracy has proven to be the best competition for shitty legacy content delivery methods. I wonder if we'd have Netflix without ThePirateBay. Fact is, people want to pay for content (not because it's "not cheating" or whatever, but because they genuinely want to support artists and want them to keep creating) but are unwilling to jump through hoops for that. It's on Patreon & co to improve their game.
Netflix's UI is total shit. It is as if they are purposefully trying to keep it that way to hide the fact that most of the movies they have are garbage and the only way to get people to watch those is to give them some odd "compatibility" with your taste rating.
I totally agree that they're anti-user. But they have a dilemma.
Imagine a nicely formatted table of Netflix movies and shows available in your country. New, potential users can quickly find out if it's worth signing up. Existing users can quickly realize that maybe the service is not worth it.
I also have a theory that if you're stuck looking for something to watch and you've already spent enough time on their platform, you might just settle on something.
They're trying to stay as the "first stop" of when you want to watch something, and the only way they can keep that position is purposefully being murky with their offerings because, yes, it's a 90% shitty collection.
Search is a binary proposition. Netflix either has the content you're searching for, or it does not. Because Netflix is optimizing for total time spent on platform, this is a bad proposition, from their perspective.
That's why the Netflix home screen has become a circus of autoplaying videos, "recommended for you" queues, and "watch it again." The goal, from a UX perspective, is to stimulate you into watching something you didn't come there wanting to watch.
You say its anti-search, but its like three button presses on my Roku to get to the search menu which seems pretty fast and accurate. Its one click to get to the search box in the Windows app. I've never had a hard time trying to search for a specific title.
Sure, but I'm more commenting on the ease of use. I mean we can debate it until heat death of the universe, but the fact is, my less computer-proficient family members ask me to download torrents for them, whereas they have no problem buying/watching films on Amazon/Netflix/etc.
Then pay to support a creator on patreon and consume their content elsewhere. (I don’t think this is ideal, but your summation made it sound like a false dichotomy.)
For what I support and consume, it's actually less. Personally, I'm happy just using Patreon as a way to pay the creators and consume their content elsewhere.
Some of the people I support make videos, and while they release them early on Patreon itself, they always eventually make it to YouTube. No matter what investment Patreon makes, it will never be as good as YouTube for watching videos. I could watch these videos early on Patreon, but I don't. Not because Patreon's video watching is bad (although it is), but because YouTube is the best platform for watching these kinds of videos. The same thing applies to podcasts (but with different apps, of course).
A PDF I bought on sellfy actually did this. It stuck my email address in the footer of every page.
That email was tied to a transaction in paypal, making it highly traceable back to myself. In 30 seconds, one could easily remove that from the PDF in Acrobat, but that doesn't mean there aren't other hidden watermarks in the file.
Patreon is a rather subpar product that succeeded by using venture capital to buy growth and is now struggling to find sustainability for something that should've been profitable from day 1.
Also a sizeable portion of creators from Twitch to Patreon produce adult content and much of that has now shifted to other niche sites.
I've heard it said that porn tends to have a large amount of chargebacks.
There would also, presumably, be a fear of censorship targeting your entire company for over a subset of content. Back in 2018 Tumblr was blocked from Apple's app store [1] and responded by banning all adult content on the service [2] - and I'm sure there's a similar risk from school/workplace/ISP NSFW blocking services which are of course famous for over-reach.
Obviously, tumblr could have shifted everything NSFW to nsfwtumblr.com but for various reasons, a lot of sites seem to take a deniable 'turn-a-blind-eye' approach rather than visibly embracing NSFW content.
Their response wasn't really correlated with the ban. They were moving in that direction for months, despite the fact that the problem with their platform wasn't the ecosystem of properly marked porn posted by creators, but the avalanche of untagged porn (some illegal) posted by bots which they were unable or unwilling to do anything about (the illegal stuff is why Apple banned their app). When they started the ban, their filter was awful and basically just pushed all the creators off the site (even those who weren't posting porn). As far as I know the porn bots are still there, because the false positive and false negative rate of their filter is atrocious.
How do the Reddit and Imgur apps get away with distributing porn and serving ads against it on the App Store? Maybe it was just a different time in the Tumblr era?
HBO and Cinemax have had apps on the App Store for about a decade, serving up adult content the entire time, sometimes with prominent editorial placements. The answer is, as always, "app review is a crapshoot".
One thing I thought was interesting: Apple sells access to HBO & Cinemax through their TV app, but that access does not appear to include the adult content (or at least it does not display without an active subscription).
> Obviously, tumblr could have shifted everything NSFW to nsfwtumblr.com
Or just kept using their web page?? I'm pretty sure that I can still access NSFW content in Safari.
I never understood what's the point of website-specific apps - like HN app or Reddit app or even Facebook & Twitter app - except of course some middle manager's quest for promotion.
It's not like every other adult site sells fraud as a feature. It's just really difficult and expensive to prevent. A single chargeback can cost the merchant up to $100 in fees.
That would be the product, right? Honestly, no idea. But IMHO an adult site that's secod purpose is not to spread malware and defraud people, while simultaniously making sure creators have a stable income should be a viable business.
Patreon is relatively safe in that regard: They don't have much focus on discovery, no ad-placement to worry about, ... People interact with it primarily through deep links to invididual creators pages, so the "neighborhood" is less relevant. They've always been far from being a "porn site".
The answer to all 3 responses is 'perception' less so 'what happens on the site' although they are related.
Amazon is not known for porn. I didn't even know you could get porn there. Certainly, it's not 'online porn' which I would imagine would be the primary issue.
Tumblr became a place known for adult content so it was a problem. If Amazon started to do a lot of digital porn, like PornHub, it would be a problem.
If there is no 'search' on Patreon ... maybe they could keep it hidden. But it's a big risk.
I mean, if Patreon provided a good service and the porn was hidden away under the default filter and not visible from my subsite or the homepage, I don't see at all why I wouldn't launch a product on it if I decided the business model was a good fit.
Until only a couple of months ago, the iOS app required you to click through each creator to see their posts only. There was no central news feed like the website and the most obvious way to consume such content.
They -finally- fixed this about two months ago.
Deep linking also often failed for me, i.e. I got a push notificaiton, I click the notification, and I end up on the first creator in my list's news feed rather than what I clicked. That also seems finally fixed now in the same update.
So I'm glad they fixed it but I have no idea what they were doing for the last few years...
I realise they can't/don't want new revenue on iOS due to not being able to use their own billing system for electronic goods and losing a chunk of the revenue but I'm sure they have many people who use the website but want push notifications to work and to read the news there.. it was bonkers.
The world is bad UX which I tend to think is a conspiracy.
For example, the Postmates driver app functions like it was programmed (automated) in a parallel dimension by toddlers in a thousand year future using an analog of Visual Basic. Then ported to iOS and ran via 480 API requests that transverse space, time and logic.
It’s so extra in its absurdism that I’d rather believe in sinister intent than systemic stupidity.
The delivery address is the smallest possible font hidden behind screens. The endless dinging etc makes no sense. I feel like people designing apps have never actually used them. Or maybe it’s all designed to make one so frustrated as to question the nature of reality.
Yep, this is why you should call BS when tech companies claim to make product decisions based on data or customer feedback. Their north star is revenue and as long as that's trending up (because of the secular trend of creators needing better monetization), who cares about UX /s.
> Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all.
Everyone but the people at the top are getting tired of all its problems and the uncertainty, but where else do you go? So far, no one has an integrated replacement. You can build a Patreon in pieces connected by APIs, but Patreon is (unfortunately) the only place you can get everything in one place for the price.
WordPress is a common alternative for membership sites, but it comes with expenses that scale up in proportion to how little you want or are able to do yourself. All the plugins for WordPress that do membership and file access control are in the $100-300/year range. Then there's the cost of hosting: cheap if you don't mind running everything yourself, more than the plugins if you get managed hosting. It's worth it, but you need the money to start, and you lose the ease of everyone already having a Patreon account.
Though for content producer without Patron-exclusive content and which are not using Patreon to distribute their content, instead using Youtube or a blog, it works well. At least that's my experience with the content creators I follow.
Of course they don't. Most people are willing to spend their valuable time watching said content, however only superfans pay the monthly subscriber fee to be "the first ones" or get at content that is never going to be distributed anywhere but the patreon channel and on piratebay.
Many creators use Patreon as a way to paywall their content behind minimum levels of Patreon support. By supporting on Patreon, you gain access to their content.
> In March, Patreon wrote in a blog post, “Not only are patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.” Additionally, the average income for creators was 60% higher in March than in previous months, according to the company.
> Around that same time, however, Patreon said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than usual due to financial hardships. Still, Patreon said churn rates were stable.
These two paragraphs are one right after the other. How do you reconcile the two? How is it not at least a question posed to their spokesperson of which is the case?
The key to reconciling is seeing that "due to financial hardships" is a dependent clause. When patrons leave, they are asked to give a reason why. The % of those leaving who give "financial hardships" as a reason, is increasing. However, as also noted, the total churn rate (people leaving for any reason) is stable.
They're not saying that more people are leaving than usual. They are saying that of the people leaving, more are offering financial hardship as a reason for leaving, than usual.
A corollary would be that the % of people leaving for reasons other than financial hardship has decreased.
Mmmm yeah I would believe that. I guess it could've been better written with something like "even so, some users are leaving and the ones doing so due to financial hardships..."
Business analysts pulled these metrics from a data warehouse and the semantics don't line up.
I've worked on growth and data science teams, and there ought to be a book "How to lie with data science" as a successor to "How to lie with statistics".
There's been situations where I've seen the same metric queried in two different ways with contradictory results. The slight of hand here is that the query is query, and unless the metric is defined as the query, the metric is not the query.
I remember Nassim Taleb proposing that books are fractals and can't be summarized / compressed.
"In March alone, we onboarded 50,000 new creators to the platform of which the average income was 60% higher than previous months."
It seems like the "60% higher than previous months" figure applies to the new creators rather than all creators. I could easily imagine that income for new creators is very low on average and a 60% bump wouldn't mean much.
I'm totally guessing but I think there's simply a missing "most" in the first sentence:
> Not only are most patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.”
Because as the second paragraph reminds us, there's always some churn. I think what they mean is, the churn rate went up a bit, but it's not increasing (though how they can tell from only one month is intersting).
And btw, it wouldn't surprise me if churn goes up, a lot of $1 tier supporrtes withdraw support to save money, but a bunch of higher level supporters increase their donation by a higher amount. E.g. if you're well off enough to support a creator at $10, you're less likely to need to leave given the current situation, and if you do incresae your pledge, then you won't increase it by $1 - you'll probably increase by $5-$10 at a minimum. So the average income could still go up even as churns are going up.
Guesses: Patreon loses money (ie, they're a startup). This may be due to solely due to international, the use of the round D, or not.
Either way, they -- much like the startup I run -- are immediately planning how to go 24-36 months without any additional investor cash. Because your investors will still expect you to meet growth targets to get that next round regardless of covid.
Speaking for myself only, we've taken to heart the cut once, cut fast mantra that every company that came through 2008 says is the right thing to do. And we've figured out how the company will go for more than two years without additional cash, or be able to tolerate 20q2 being a sales disaster. Those both require immediately cutting burn.
Although that makes sense as to why they may cut, none of that addresses the two statements the grandparent quoted, though.
They wrote in a blog post in March that patrons are not leaving the platform, and then at the same time they apparently reported that they were in fact leaving.
In March most of the world went from "everything's fine here, situation normal" to shooting out the radio and diving head first into a trash compactor. That might have affected a few things.
I kind of assumed people were aware of events since 26 March. For instance, on 26 March, 3.3m weekly unemployment reports was by far the largest ever reported.
I also suspect some of that type of reporting may lag, and if a ceo or finance team orders it to be shown daily, may be surprised at what a week or two of reporting lag does in the time of the aforementioned events.
The people leaving due to financial hardships weren't making much money so they pulled the average income down. After they were gone, average income of the remaining creators was 60% higher.
Maybe the point is that they are not reconcilable and the writer wants you to think what Patreon wrote in the blog post was a lie, hence the however in between "Around that same time" and the patrons exiting the platform.
Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot. Like, a lot. A million a month or more.
And I can't help but suspect that this realization necessitates changing, if not the business model, the business strategy. Patreon in 2017 is fine with Chapo Trap House and Amanda Palmer as the top moneymakers; Patreon in 2020 needs the next Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. (Better yet, the current Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.) That doesn't mean they have to actively drive out the podcasters and comics nerds and furries, but it probably means they have to put all their resources into going after whales.
A middleware that can be described as Wordpress with access control and Stripe integration, but worse in terms of performance and UX; somehow takes on $165 million in funding [1] and describes their business model as "not sustainable" [2].
Patreon is a low touch SaaS platform that charges up to 12% PLUS payment processing fees. They do not provide any meaningful level of discoverability: you must build your audience yourself.
I wonder how the business would be doing if it disregarded that "raise money and spend money at all costs" model, that Softbank exaggerated? What if it had a WhatsApp-size of team: ~20 employees using sensible and well-architected tech stacks (not chasing the latest shiny thing just cuz its hip or cool)? I'm sure they'd be outrageously profitable.
There seem to be a lot of businesses out there, that should be cash positive. Yet, the VC funded ones (also the ones you read about), aren't. No idea why, maybe easy access to VC money, and VCs themselves, cause them toneglect cash flow?
I also saw this effect with Chinese manufaturersofsolar modules, whatever amount of cash they need, they get from Chinese banks. In their day to day operations, cash flow doesn't really play an important role, as long as they are marginally profitable at the end of the year.
So, I've never worked in a startup, but I've done my time in a large conglomerate. While I was there, I noticed a pattern that I believe translates fairly well:
Business teams make decisions that are based at least as much on the resources that are available to them as on what makes business sense. A really well-funded software team will buy itself a bunch of expensive computers, and proceed to write a to-do list app that assumes it's running on high-end kit. A really well-funded marketing team will throw huge blowout after-hours parties at trade shows even though the target audience is people who go to bed at 8pm. All well-funded teams hire too many people too quickly, and then waste productivity on failing to do a good job of keeping everyone coordinated. The corollary to this is that the best-funded teams have a tendency to underperform. (Or at least that's the impression I get.)
My sense is that it's similar with individual companies: The best way to create a train wreck is to find a really promising up-and-coming startup, and help it become a well-capitalized up-and-coming startup.
Employee count seems to be the major problem. The current Patreon site doesn't seem to justify more than 50, and I still feel I'm being generous; I really want to say 20. A couple of web people, contract out any design work you need, some sales staff, a few support people, definitely some business people and support people to deal with chargebacks and the credit card company, and I'm having trouble finding how they have 5 times that many.
I feel I need to expand that because that's going to read to a lot of people as "Patreon shouldn't need more than 20 or 50 people." But it actually makes sense to me that Patreon could have 250 people. There's plenty of ways for VC-fueled growth to indeed take over this market and become the household name as VC-style growth intends to do. The problem is that what I see from them doesn't seem to justify that. The complaints that people are posting in other comments have been like that for years. Discoverability of artists is awful. Obvious places to list patron-only media are missing, let alone any sort of hosting. Community features are very perfunctory. Their outreach seems to be stalled out; the top of the patron chart seems to gas out weirdly, where I think there ought to many dozens of people making $10K/month by now by the way the economics of this should work. Patreon today hardly seems any different than it was three or four years ago. As a startup with a couple hundred people, I'd expect to see it moving fast and breaking things and rolling out new features every couple of months, if not weeks, not being so stagnant.
I mean, I've worked for a "startup" [1] that had ~200 employees. It had several products, each of which pushed significant updates around once every two months, sales staff, support staff, physical manufacturing staff... it moved fast and sometimes broke things. In any six month period you could take any of the products it had and there were clear changes and improvements, probably a new model, probably starting up a new product since then. Totally different business, my experience is not entirely applicable of course, but Patreon from the outside feels like a business that is already running a bare bones staff as it treads water while the business winds down, not an exciting startup getting things done. Where's the features? Where's the improvements? I don't just mean techical, either, I mean business improvements too (better deals for the users over time, better business partnerships for the aforementioned content hosting, etc.) Why is it still possible to effectively set up a feature-parity competitor to Patreon in a few months with just a few people? Shouldn't they have both technical and business features that make that harder by now? Where's the output of all those people's work? I dunno. I don't expect to be able to see all of it anyhow... but I don't see much at all.
If that ~200 person startup had suddenly been switched to working on Patreon, in a year we'd have a good forum (even if we had to write it from scratch), we'd have some sort of custom content hosting, we'd have listened to our customers and built what they wanted more... & I'm judging it against what we could have done 15 years ago at the time. Today a decent prototype of some of what I'm talking about is 10 minutes with CloudFormation or equivalent, and then you can tune from there (since you may not be able to afford to directly ship that).
[1]: I can understand if you don't want to call that a startup any more.
From my total outside perspective to both, development and patreon, it is that there is more to platform business than just reach and number of users. I mean without users, it is pointless. But without value for the users, it is kind pointless as well. Or not pointless, but falling short of the potential.
EDIT: 200 people, depending on the business, is still in start-up teritory if the company is not decades old.
I know someone working at a VC funded startup for a few years, they have way more employees than they probably need and seem to be paying 20-30% above the going rates to attract talent. That combination makes it hard to turn a profit. Yet they keep getting more cash infusions even though they are losing money.
I'm going to push back a little on this. I've run a Patreon and have a pretty good idea of what they provide for creators, and I've also looked into how I could replicate their services on my own -- and it turns out it's not really that trivial.
- I want something that handles tiered membership levels with paid access control.
- I also want something that keeps track of "goals" for donation drives (e.g., "if I bring in $500 a month, I'll do this thing for everyone").
- If I have rewards at different levels (which I did), it's nice to have something that keeps track of when I need to send those out and who I sent them out to.
- It's nice to have what amounts to a basic CRM, keeping records of who paid me what at what points. If I say "maintain the membership at the $9/month level for at least six months and I'll send you this widget at the end of the year," I want my membership platform to be able to tell me who was at that level for six months even if they're not at that level at the end of the year.
- It's nice to have a built-in mailing list if I need it.
- While Patreon is very up front about not being a discoverability platform, aggregation of creators still matters: it is way easier to support a half-dozen or more creators monthly when you get one monthly charge instead of many monthly charges, and in fact people do occasionally discover new creators by discovering who creators they follow are supporting. If I were running this on my own, I wouldn't get that benefit and I probably couldn't have a "just pay me a little because you're nice" tier: it's no problem to pay $1 or $2 a month to somebody if it's part of that bundle, but it's not worth the hassle if it's standalone. (This was why everyone on Patreon screamed bloody murder when they proposed unbundling charges a few years back.)
- Last but not least, not every creator is going to be comfortable putting together a Patreon-esque platform on their own. The more friendly the solution is, the more likely it is to cost money, and Patreon's pricing structure ends up being more competitive than you might think. WordPress membership management plugins that don't suck are often commercial, some with fees of $100+ per year; Memberful is free for limited use, but $25 per month otherwise; Substack charges 10% of your revenue and, like Patreon, doesn't cover processing fees that way.
Obviously none of these give Patreon a "lock-in" and it might make sense for creators to jump ship anyway; I'm certainly keeping my eye on alternatives. But I'm kind of a control freak. I genuinely don't think "anyone can build their own Patreon over a weekend" is true, and I don't think the amount of money they charge over and above processing fees is super unreasonable.
I've never been in the position of taking VC funding, and I don't expect to be in my life, but if I were, I don't think I would. It seems to be a recipe for destroying your company ~5 years down the line. Perhaps the early founders get out with a bunch of money, and maybe that's the point, but I just don't think I'd want to do that to my employees and the people who came to depend on my company. If you don't have a sustainable business model from day 1, you've already lost, haven't you?
Personally, I don't think too uncharitably of Patreon's founders; I genuinely don't get the impression that they started the service because they thought it was a way to make oodles of money, but that they genuinely saw it as doing good for small creators. But I think they let themselves be talked into the idea that they could be the Next Big Thing if only they took enough VC money to follow the "ramp up, get big, and then figure out how to pay for it" model that a lot of startups during the last decade took. The vast majority of those startups failed while they were still small, and the vast majority of the rest only ended up "successful" by selling out to someone else before the bills started coming due... but that's not the story that most of us wanted to hear back then.
I've always wondered if Patreon's core business can ever be big enough to justify the VC and company size.
A generic 'patronage' business will always be expensive to develop and run compared with more targeted discovery and patronage platforms - music, video, podcast, porn. If I can see the 'patron early' videos in my normal youtube feed, or pay podcasters from my podcast app I'd use that.
It takes a huge amount of effort to support 'long tail' artists - those that I'm not a mega fan of - on a different site.
This is interesting given that, like the article suggests, patron contributions were still growing last month. Seems like they either wanted an excuse to "right-size" and this is a great opportunity, or they're expecting a significant hit to patron contributions on the back of mass unemployment, which would make the rest of the year rather painful.
> This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones. Prior to the pandemic, we had completed an in-depth performance review cycle and deployed a new company strategy – both exercises highlighted the need for different skill sets moving forward.
It was this combination of economic uncertainty, performance reviews and a shift in strategy that prompted us to make this change.
I am more inclined to believe that a lot of people are dumping their donations right now. Listen to a few podcasts that rely on it, and it will be clear.
I know that my patreon subscriptions are unfortunately the first to go of all my expenses right now. I only do them to inspire certain creators to keep going, but in some cases I don’t even listen to them or use their stuff anymore, I just liked donating so they could do what they love. But when things get tight, I have to survive first.
You’re probably right about “right-sizing.” I’m close with another company in this space, and they’re seeing their biggest growth ever right now. But they do have slight variances in business models, and maybe that’s making all the difference.
I ain't seeing it. I saw significantly more patron contributions. I guess maybe there's a danger I am just that awesome? ;P the general sense I get is people tend to rally around their creators, and I would imagine that happens across the board, and not just in special cases.
The patreon podcasts I listen to have all said they're sorry to see people go but know money will be tight for many, and that if we can stand remote recordings, they'll be making just as much content as before.
Not sure if they're all just spooked or if they've seen hits already.
Friends and I were discussing this last night on jitsi. We think that instead of throwing employees to the wolves at a time when getting a job is going to be difficult, many employees would accept equivalent pay cuts to help weather the storm.
In fact I know one company that did just this, with 100 employees. The staff chose a 10% indefinite pay cut over 10% reduction in head count.
Sacking people at this time is awful, and any company who has cash in the bank has options other than bankrupting some of their employees.
I don’t care if Patreon had planned this before Covid-19. There are alternatives. These are dark times and companies who sack their employees as a first resort are part of the problem.
In Europe most companies are doing this instead of laying off right now. It's a conventional practice that saved a lot of companies during the 2008 crisis and in many countries it's subsidized by the government.
If its subsidized by the government, how is it a paycut? Similar programs in the US exist, for example states paying a 50% unemployment payment for employees who have their hours cut by 50%. Its a win-win - companies effectively pay nothing to keep their employees at a full time salary for reduced hours, and the government avoids needing to pay out full unemployment benefits to laid off employees.
For the 60% bracket the company reduces your working hours by 60% and you get a paycut of 7.5%. The government covers the difference, effectively reducing the cost for the company by 53%.
I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.
For what it's worth I've stopped using Patreon when they included some Facebook tracking (among others) on the membership management page that when blocked will crash the entire front-end and make the entire page unusable.
I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations.
When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely on you to get money from you!) even 0.1% of them asking questions and having difficulties is a huge work generator!
It's not "oh it's easy to write a for loop". It's "my for loop now has 20 non-orthogonal options, and a user is saying we emptied their bank account and now we gotta make sure if we did". Also a content host, a CMS, and reporting software for taxes and the like.
I mean I bet you could get away with 100 people or something for this but there's _so much_ that can go wrong and would require lots of intervention.
A lot of people don't seem to realize, when you're dealing with communities -- especially communities that involve money flying around -- there's tons of work in managing it.
You've got employees trying to grow the community in different areas (genres?) and different geographies, reaching out to people, giving advice to get them on board. You've got employees giving support. You've got employees looking for irregularities and fraud among all the finances.
Sales, marketing and operation are huge parts of businesses that many engineers don't often think about.
> I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations.
If you really think that way then the company is doomed. The primary reason for technology companies to exist is the fact that the number of users is disconnected from the number of employees in the company. Companies like Patreon completely waste this huge advantage and just set money on fire. You are no longer a tech company anymore and if you are not a tech then you don't deserve unicorn valuations. This is why the company is doomed.
Yeah it still sounds like a pretty easy problem (I work at a super operationally heavy company and at time my workload has been 90% ops 10% eng). If the 300 count includes all the support agents then I maybe I can see it but the common Silicon Valley practice would be for none of those people to actually be employees of the company.
On the other hand my company has zero marketing, which obviously won't be the case for Patreon - I have no idea what headcount levels are involved there - at Google marketing had a ton of people like running promotions and campaigns but again the entire bottom layer was TVC's...
This is hacker news. Under each article you see people being surprised why companies have employees. Common knowledge is that all you need is to write some code and you can start earning billions!
These customers are usually top billing and are just indicators of going upmarket. They’re also probably hitting problems loads of your users are hitting and simply dropping out of the funnel from.
“Fire your users” is a thing, but at one point you gotta actually have things work
This statement can be made about almost any company in the US right now. There is some serious systemic risk in the surreal number of people working whose jobs do not matter at all.
Even for productive software engineers, think back on how many projects in your career really shipped, how many of those then made any money, and then how many of those companies are still thriving. For me nearly all of the work in my career has amounted to surprisingly little and I have always been on the front lines of creating products in my roles.
So why are there so many people at every company that don't really create value? What does it mean when an economy depends on those people being employeed, well paid and consuming goods?
I've once read a HN comment that said that Aboriginees are economically useless and should work in a major city so that they can be useful. This completely ignores systematic risk posed by nuclear weapons or viruses like covid-19.
Those Aboriginees have much better survival skills than the average NYC resident and they are far away so they are more likely to survive global disasters.
My comment was about the fragility created by running organizations too lean from # of employees perspective.
I have no issue with Aborigines' life choices and don't consider them economically useless at all, so I'm not sure what that has to do with the subject.
* Hire lots of people because that's what successful companies do
* Product development slows way down, because you hired too fast (Mythical Man Month stuff kicks in, where adding more people to a team can slow development down, if not done carefully and thoughtfully)
* Notice that development is slow, so you hire even more people to try and speed it up
At least that's been my experience at 3 different companies.
* Product isn't that complicated at heart, so new hires busy themselves with complicating it, to justify their paychecks
* Your easy to manage monolith is now seventy-three microservices, in case you need to serve Google levels of traffic without any further engineering. You're hopelessly understaffed to keep the monstrosity stable, so now you've got to grow your engineering corps to Google scale.
Hiring too much is a problem, but also bear in mind that having customers sort of gums up the works--you can't go changing stuff on a whim without communication, more careful assessment of impact, migration plans on customers' schedule--it's easier to be nimble when there's nothing to conserve.
Some of the services Patreon offers bring them dangerously close to being regulated as a lender, or even a bank. Wouldn't surprise me if some number of their staff are retained to meet any such compliance needs.
Nothing is fully automated. At their scale even if a small fraction of their users need manual intervention that's a lot of work. I'm sure they didn't freeze their feature set 10 years ago - they have a feature backlog for sure. On top of that they appear to have an ios, android, and web app. At their scale they need an infrastructure team just to keep the plumbing working. Their administrative back end is at least as complex as their user facing front end, and probably is also constantly generating feature requests. We are easily up to 30 engineers and more support people. That means accounting, HR, managers, payroll. The beast grows.
I was at a consumer facing startup where about 70% of employees were in-house customer support representatives, so even though a product may appear simple, it can have a lot of non-programmer employees.
This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don’t see it.
Also annoying to basically admit that layoffs were basically avoidable given the “strong cash position” but made anyway to give the company a little more runway. Doesn’t look too great.
>This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don’t see it.
It looks like the company's biggest creator brings roughly $5k a month for Patreon and only one other creator has their financials public and brings in even 40% of that [1]. There is certainly money to be made in that business, but I just don't see how they scale revenue in any large way without pissing off either patrons or creators.
That's not really representative. If you sort by publically available earnings, you can see 100 Patreons pulling in $10k/month, another 100 making $5k/month, then another making $3/month. the rest are private.
Assuming this is a representative distribution of the top 1000 (and I bet it's actually higher!):
- ~$285k/month for Patron just from the official cut
On top of this, Patreon probably has revenue sharing with the card processors for a small percentage of the fees (let's say even 0.1%), which adds a couple k.
Now people in the high-paying pro plans that get you the 5% rate (the lower end is 12% platform fees!) will pay $300/month.
that alone doubles their revenue, adding $300k/month _for just these first thousand patrons_.
So you're already at $600k/month in MRR. Hell of a lot more than a lot of "serious venture scale" B2B CRMs that are trying to be the next Salesforce or whatever but utterly failing at providing the value add needed to make big billings.
You might not need 300 people for it. And yeah it would be a lot better to make a lot of money. But they're being pretty successful at getting money here. And this is just assuming that they only have 1000 patrons (which is just false)
Honestly, $600k/month for 300 knowledge workers is horrible revenue if growth and margin aren't on the right track. This is more like a "20-30 pretty decent consultants in a second-tier American city" number.
Yeah I don't disagree that it's not nearly enough for 300 workers. I just think that they totally have a legitimate business model to make Real Money. And my whole calculus was based on just the first thousand patrons, but I think there's a very long tail here.
Wait, how does $50M not cover 300 employees? Is fully loaded cost of employees (I imagine most of those 300 are _not_ super high level engineers, but things like CS and admin) in SF really above $160k/employee?
Patreon makes more sense as a medium-sized business than an epic-scale corporation. Unfortunately reliable recurring revenue is a tough pill for "To The Moon!" investors to swallow.
Patron seems like a classic long tail situation. The fall off to 100th place is only 1/7th the number of subscribers and 1000th place ~1/37th the number of subscribers as first place.
Patreon’s fees range from 5-12% so they could easily be making more make more money from the 10,000 to 100,000 creators than they do the top 10,000. Further, people can hide earnings which makes estimates of their finances difficult.
Something like 350 of the top 1000 creators have their financials public. There are several in that list that likely bring in less than $100 per month for Patreon. That tail has to be pretty long and flat to justify 230 employees and any hope of the type of growth that many investors demand.
$100M in annual revenue is generally considered the rough bar to go public. Various estimates put them somewhere between $30-50M in revenue for 2019. Another 2-3xing doesn't seem out of the question.
I also think there's a fundamental conflict in their business model. Their nominal goal is to deliver maximum financial support to independent artists, etc. But especially as they go for IPO, their interest is using platform leverage to extract maximum cash from those same independent artists.
Personally, I've been using them to support creators for more than 5 years now, so I really believe in the model. But neither the software nor the UX has ever been great, and I'm amazed they've needed $165 million to get this far. If the people I'm supporting moved elsewhere, I'd quickly follow them and not look back. So I suspect they're going to have a very hard time giving their investors any major return.
it’s exacerbated by the VC cycle. You could imagine a bootstrapped Patreon that wasn’t aiming for IPO, that could employ a handful of people no problem. You could even have the maintainers be listed as an “artist” on the platform
That's a fiscally wise decision. Better for the company and employees to let people go now to avoid having to do mass layoffs later if shit really hits the fan.
Especially while unemployment is paying $2400/month on top of your normal payment. Many workers are better off just being temporarily laid off and getting a pay raise.
FWIW I’m pretty sure OnlyFans is run by one guy out of London. Maybe has a handful of contracted employees for engineering and support. Basically the same business. Not sure what the payment volume comparison is but must be hundreds of millions a year, at least.
There is more than one person working at OnlyFans [1]. Many of these are customers of OnlyFans, but there are others like a Social Media Manager, Recruitment, Marketing etc.
They’ve made ~100M over the last 4 years according to Wikipedia (quoted as saying they’ve paid out $400M since they started in 2016 and they keep 20% of payments).
Still an insanely good number for a 1(ish) person operation.
Where are you getting this from? I tried looking it up, but it seems like Timothy Stokely had an entertainment company that was responsible for a bunch of cam sites before eventually making Onlyfans.
Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.
Patreon is not an advertising supported platform, so it can't be from advertisers. Onlyfans has no problem accepting credit cards; and Patreon is certainly at the scale where they negotiate with payment facilitators.
I'm curious why they made the decision... moral superiority?
If it's a brand perspective, then I think the biggest regret of Patreon in the coming years is going to be not spawning off their own Onlyfans, a reskinned and rebanded version of Patreon.
I wouldn't be surprised if Onlyfans is growing faster than Patreon right now...
If you've ever tried to monetize NSFW content in a context that involves credit cards, you know it is an absolute nightmare. If Onlyfans is seriously NSFW, it may have no problems accepting credit cards but its days are numbered and it runs the risk of the credit card processors unilaterally refusing to service them anymore (especially Visa, IIRC)
Patreon is at the scale where they would be exceedingly aware of this. One of the side-effects of the earlier 'not tying payments super tight to individual creators, but just charging patrons for ALL their committments' is that it let them aggregate charges in such a way that patrons were doing business with THEM, not 'NSFWCamGirl69', while still supporting CamGirl as the patron intended. The credit card company didn't really have a way to dig in and go 'prove you're not giving any of this money to porn creators'.
This changed, but Patreon remains a platform where it screens creators pretty well from the moral expectations of credit card processors (and governments? kinda? It's a very tough problem if they expect to do business at all in certain countries)
The question is more 'will Onlyfans be cut off from service by credit card companies': 'growing faster' is not useful if it's doomed. They have to also stay in business and maintain relationships with processors that have a record of showing intent to blacklist certain types of creation.
Payment processors view this as a risk/reward scenario. NSFW content historically has very high chargeback rates. When your overall processing amount is low, the risk is low. As the amount goes up and your business gets more successful, the risk increases as your new customers are more likely to be fickle.
This is a few years out of date but when I investigated what it would take to legally accept credit cards for NSFW content, the processors all wanted a very large bond to hold as protection against chargebacks. I imagine once your daily transaction volume grossly exceeds reasonable bond levels, the processors get pretty flighty.
IIRC there's basically one payment processor, whose name I can't recall, that ~100% of NSFW sites use. And their fees are very high, given the risk of processing those payments.
CCBill is the primary one and they charge nearly 4% per transaction and routinely hold transactions for up to 6 months sometimes. They also have high registration fees but they are one of the best for high risk industries.
They have a 3.9% ("green") tier without a high-risk fee, but I don't think the adult companies qualify that one.
I could be wrong, but I didn't find a clear breakdown of who qualifies for each plan on their website. I'm guessing the 3.9% plan and their non-profit plan are there so they can present as a normal payment processor.
Patreon has always had its hands dirty in enforcing their definition of "morality" -- while I almost completely agreed with their decisions, banning "anime" was the last straw for me.
Each choice they made to ban an "influencer" in the name of morality was a massive hit to their business because by definition, not only was said influencer banned, but also the massive audience that he/she influenced.
Unfortunately, you can only successfully stick to an allow-all policy (with all of the dangerous content and liability/bad PR this entails), or you can haphazardly try to enforce your often-subjective definition of morality with all of its inconsistencies and edge cases, to your own detriment, like Patreon did (I'm a moral relativist).
It's a Faustian bargain because neither is a good business decision.
> They're not banning anime. They're banning the fetishization of young girls, which has been against the community guidelines for quite a while:
> However, we have zero tolerance when it comes to the glorification of sexual violence which includes bestiality, rape, and child exploitation (i.e., sexualized depiction of minors). This is true for illustrated, animated, or any other type of creations. Patreon reserves the right to review and remove accounts that may violate this guideline.
> even though anime characters more closely resemble aliens than actual human beings
The typical characteristics of child-like appearances is proportionally large head compared to the rest of the body, round head, and large eyes.
It also happens that having a large head with large eyes is a common method to make it easier to express emotion for objects which we know is fake. For example, the two main robots in the movie wall-e utilize this a lot, and yes, one can interpret that as if both robots are children as they do have more human child like proportions than human adult proportions.
The only real way to know the age of non-photo non-realistic image of a character is in context or if the author spells it out. If we were to guess the age of Donald duck we would base it on that he has a job, has nephews, and wear a time appropriate hat for adults, but also that his head is slightly less round compared to Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
The issue is with how they define minors. Considering they're stylised cartoons it can be pretty subjective, and for some, simply having a flat chest = child, regardless of anything else. In other cases, curvy body + large breasts can also be considered child if they are deemed 'too cute', etc.
It leads to inconsistency, which leads to people creating content that is well within the guidelines deciding to not publish to Patreon as they can't guarantee whoever is enforcing the rules that day won't arbitrarily decide otherwise.
Do you not realize the false equivalence they are making here to justify actually banning it? Banning first person shooter video games can also be done under the guise of having zero tolerance for glorifying mass shootings. And then any heavy handed enforcement actions can be justified by saying that only violent games are banned. Look at which patrons have actually been affected by their policy and how they are choosing to enforce it. Wake up!
(Lastly, hentai is obviously a very different thing than anime. It is clear that Patreon is targeting anime, as well as hentai.)
I'm guessing Patreon is reacting to the changes in the legal landscape. The same ones that made Craiglist close its Personals section (or however it was called): the increased liability for the platform for whatever behaviors the public at large might find objectionable. Or find an excuse to take an issue with, really.
From what I know, the anime genre creators were a fairly popular niche (with the associated income stream), so they probably weren't taking these changes lightly.
I'd say write your congressmen (I'm not from US myself), but at this point it seems futile.
These are private companies, other competitors have stepped up that are willing to take on a certain level of risk -- no need to get the government involved. People didn't stop making video games because of "moral" activists like Jack Thompson. Anime is a global industry for Japan, much like K-Pop is for Korea; however, I'm willing to bet that far more than just anime creators (to say nothing of their respective fan bases) have been alienated by Patreon's policies. One of my favorite creators, Louis Rossmann, is pretty vocal about being against Patreon's moral policing. I don't even watch anime, but if you don't see anything wrong with Patreon's business strategy, you can at least observe how the market is reacting to it (i.e. badly enough that they need to cut some of their top senior engineers, even though their business model practically prints money in a scalable way -- a rarity in the SoftBank tech bubble -- and the industry they are in is one of the LEAST affected by the coronavirus pandemic).
They also banned Carl Benjamin, leading to a mass exodus. They justified this by citing his use of a racial slur in a YouTube video, although the word was not used in the context of a racial slur.
In the USA there is some kind of Voldemort status given to this word where you cannot even use it out of context - it reminds me of that Jehovah sketch in Monty Python where that parody has now manifested itself into a reality that seemingly changes the course of companies.
For context, here is a censored version of the transcript that caused Carl Benjamin to get banned:
"I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n-----s, just so you know. You act like white n-----s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”
“Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your f--gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n----r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me."
Seems quite ban-worthy to me, but of course each individual can judge for themselves. Do note that the whole section has a sorta racist slant best exemplified in the contrast between "white people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another" and supposed "black people" behavior.
Patreon and other platforms that engage in this kind of moral policing are always going to have an issue in that they must continually get more strict. As a platform, you can't easily defend to your profit source picking an arbitrary line between one offensive behavior (racism) and another (eugenics). At first that seems fine - nobody is going to defend racism or eugenics.
But remember that Patreon has a diverse user base and some of those users will be very offended by things that don't offend you or I such as drinking, same sex relationships or transgender rights. If Patreon (as a profit seeking entity) sees financial risk, it's always going to engage in the most aggressive enforcement of any potentially profit affecting content. This is happening with Youtube now with the crackdown on firearms content, legitimate coronavirus talk and swaths of political content on both sides of the aisle.
At some point we need a way to have platforms that allow any legal content, even when that content is really reprehensible. I don't know if that solution is legal or just an incentive problem, but the mainstream-ification of all internet content at some point needs to be halted before free speech is genuinely quite harmed.
Any platform that wants to can host all legal content. Nobody's preventing them, as an outside force - people are complaining, but the complaints have no force, other than people don't want to be there. Platforms with explicitly free-speech agendas (see: 4chan, voat, gab.ai, hatreon) have reputations as absolute cesspools of hatred and bigotry, and people who don't want to deal with that choose on their own not to go there.
I'm not saying platforms should be forced to host all legal content. Well moderated communities (HN as an example) have a lot of value.
The issue is that right now those platforms can't really exist. Even if the platforms themselves had an incentive structure to do so, credit card processors would cut them off or heavily punish them in fees and rates.
Let's say you wanted to legally sell NSFW content. Perfectly legal, nothing morally objectionable. Well, you can't host it on several server providers immediately because their TOS/AUP restrict it. Some providers may allow it with significant restrictions.
Once you find a place to host, you still need to accept money. Paypal, Amazon, Google Pay, et al are right out. You can't use Stripe last I checked. You may be able to use Authorize.net or another middleman but you'll have to post a bond and pay a much higher rate. They may still cut you off.
And that's all for perfectly legal non-morally questionable content! That's for porn which 80%+ of the population indulges in.
You can't have it both ways. If some site can choose not to host some content, then so can some server provider, some DNS provider, some colocation operator, some payment processor, and so on. It's the same deal.
And the above platforms DO exist, people CAN use them, and by God there's no shortage of porn on the internet.
Ah yes, Sargon of Akkad, of "I wouldn't even rape you" fame.
If anything, I'm pretty glad the absolutely despicable thing is no longer funded through them and kinda makes me want to contribute more money to Patreon somehow.
It was only a "mass exodus" in the minds of Carl Benjamin fans. In reality he was a notable individual but ultimately a drop in the bucket relative to all the other activity on Patreon.
Regardless of if it was a drop in the bucket to their revenue, their probable acts of tortious interference could cause material arbitration costs to them for deplatformed creators that chose to open arbitration cases against them: https://www.cernovich.com/patreon-mandatory-arbitration/
It seems they made the decision that they just didn't want that style of content on the platform – Benjamin, Harris, Peterson, etc, and the controversy, or risk of controversy that went with it.
I've been a follower of/contributor to some people in that sphere (though not Benjamin, to be clear), but I can understand Patreon making that choice and preferring to be a platform for creatives like musicians, filmmakers, writers, artists, etc.
Controversy seems to be a euphemism for "wrong" political views though. I'd be more sympathetic if they had a blanket "only creative professionals" policy.
It's not a political issue, that type of language is not acceptable anywhere in public society; even 30 years ago you couldn't speak like that and expect to retain any position of prominence. Try that here and you'd be banned very quickly. Patreon making the decision to explicitly rebuke that kind of language seems totally within the realm of defensive corporate PR.
>Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes.
Do you have any numbers to back this up with ? I think you are likely right but if there is any data on this then I would love to see it.
I remember seeing an article where the Patreon CEO said it wasn't sustainable a year or so ago, was this after they started banning nudes ?
Also I recall that Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and others left the platform due to censorship, which I believe happened around the same time as the CEO statement.
I would also love to see these numbers. The highest earning group on Patreon is a leftist podcast, and they're only doing it with singular $5/month patrons.
seeing news like this really brings me down, no matter what i hate when employees take the hit and i sure hope they can find another job sooner rather than later.
I think there should be a music service that works exactly like Spotify / Apple Music / Google Music but with these differences:
1. No free tier
2. Your views determine which artists get your money.
AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most overall views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's Scatman's World then I would have expected his estate to get all my money minus maybe 5% admin fees.
The harder question is does everyone get paid the same per view. If i only listen to one song, does that artist get the $5 from my monthly subscription? If I view a 1000 things in a month, do they all get $0.005? It gets hard to put a value on a listen. Is it maybe $0.10? Well over an hour that is $2 and I can get audio cheaper elsewhere. I think you have to have tiers where each month you get X credits (partial rollover?) and then that is what the artist gets paid. Allow people to upgrade to higher levels on the fly
The sibling reply points to discover and unknowns getting any views at all. I think that is solvable with a different model. People who are unknown essentially "advertise" with the platform at the cost of 2 "views". People who listen to the unknown's song essentially earn two more views. And they might play that song later and the artist gets paid back essentially.
You take x seconds listened that month, and distribute to artists a, b and c.
As a nice easter egg, I mean distributivity in the mathematical sense. y.x = y.(seconds(a) + seconds(b) + seconds(c)) = y.seconds(a) + y.seconds(b) + y.seconds(c). And y = subscription amount per month / total seconds.
The alternative is of course to take x amount of songs listened to, but this does not distribute over minutes.
I guess you can have a hybrid approach too. If the song is >10 minutes it counts as two songs, or maybe you have a continuous scale. All of the above is better for me than what Spotify does. Even better, let the paying customer decide.
But I agree that finding new artists is tricky. You can pay people to listen to your music in the hope that they later go back to listen to that music when you aren't paying them anymore.
i think the downside to this would simply be that up & coming artists would be paid near 0. i'm not sure how spread out the money is on spotify and the rest, but i'm guessing if it's listen based payments (similar to youtube view based payments), then there will be an extremely disproportional amount of people getting pennies and other labels getting millions upon millions. although, maybe that's how it is today, regardless?
I actually had to explain this to people that listen to my music. I get ~$0 per month from Spotify and when I told this to one of my friends (who listens to my music) they were like: "But I pay $10 a month!".
Then I had to explain that all the subscribers on the whole platform get pooled together.
I thought similar. Four developers/full-stack, but then a customer support function that'd roughly 0.X scale with users, then marketing - could double-hat that, then certainly a legal/compliance team after some scale, also finance which probably doesn't need to scale linearly but should be a couple of people at least and no double-hatting on these at their size. So, thinking a bit, perhaps more than four.
I'm slightly surprised by Patreon's pricing, given they're not a discovery platform - it's really just subscription payments and some simple CRM stuff...
It's pretty easy to make a simple facility for accepting subscription payments.
You can do this with any website, plus a tool like Trolley [1] - of which I'm the creator, btw - with no technical knowledge.
The fee structure (2% for Trolley, plus your Stripe fee of ~2%) comes out less than Patreon, and you're not inside a walled garden.
Use the webhooks to link to it a CRM of your choice - probably on a free plan - and you're golden (yeah ok, maybe this bit isn't entirely non technical)
I should probably write a blog post about this, tbh :)
Given the purging of creators for arbitrary and political reasons, I can't say I feel sympathy for this company's collapse. Ideally it'd go out of business entirely. Creators should be cutting out the middleman anyway.
I have had “donate” buttons on my work and I have had Patreon and I have gotten several orders of magnitude more money out of Patreon than any other method. Patreon has more than earned their 5% cut of what my fans are willing to give me for drawing weird comics that make no attempt to fit into what corporations are interested in marketing.
For me it somehow feels like my donations are being received in a more meaningful way via Patreon than anywhere else, even if the creator has no rewards set up. Like, a "Donate" button on a creator's website just feels like sending my money into a black hole. But sending it in Patreon makes me feel like a real supporter.
It's completely irrational but there it is. And I suspect a lot of people feel the same way too for some reason.
I guess on Patreon you are buying a bigger number on the creator's page. The other reason is that it gives you a consistent "workflow" so it is easy to subscribe and unsubscribe. Meanwhile if you wanted to help a youtuber who was sometimes streaming on twitch your only option would be to subscribe on twitch even though you mostly watch the youtube videos.
I'm with you on the political thing, but the middleman is great for reducing friction. I personally do not like to think about X number of expenses, which means X receipts in the email, X credit card numbers to update, etc. Patreon was one expense. What I would give to have one organization handles every charity I might donate to (and then have them hide my mailing address from them).
At very least it would be nice to have a piece of local software that acts as a "middleman" by integrating with (let's say) Stripe or Bitcoin, and I set up subscriptions that way.
Yes, I will simply not donate if my only option is Patreon. I want a dumb pipe between myself and the person or organization who receives the money. I do not want the pipe making any decisions about who gets to use it.
The idea that I am going to have to navigate the ever-changing political sensibilities of different organizations is starting to bother me, and I am seeing in it more and more places.
Small-time niche creators largely can't cut out the middleman, because consumers are (quite understandably) reluctant to give payment information to some random person with no real reputation.
Discoverability is a huge deal. Looking for new, interesting projects? You know where to go.
It's the reason Etsy is very popular. Could sellers open their own Shopify stores in order to have more control over their storefronts? Of course, but they lose out on the search feature that Etsy provides, as well as the trust that buyers associate with these larger platforms.
Single place, consistent UI, my credit card details are already there. I can change my card / address for everything in one go. It removes a lot of friction.
I've got my Patreon set up to pay some folks I like monthly, and I can't even tell you who they are off the top of my head, but I decided that I wanted to budget $x towards supporting cool people and it's been charging me in the background ever since. Meanwhile, I can barely remember to pay my voice teacher every week and I go there in person (well, not anymore) and sing for an hour.
In addition to what lmm mentioned, giving to patreon usually comes with some sort of perk or special content, and it's also a subscription by default which I imagine isn't the case with a donate button.
They had some trouble with micro-payments, resulting in a big drop. It's solved now. (Basically: don't do micro payments, pay e.g. 1 year in advance, directly to each receiver.)
Gumroad is working on something that can potentially replace Patreon, but as it is Gumroad's different features lack the integration that makes Patreon what it is.
- They may have interviewed for those roles internally but not found a fit
Or,
- Those job lists are "continual" in other words fake so they can increase their applicant pool and possibly use it in the future (or they haven't taken them down)
Choosing not to supply Client Subnet is entirely valid. Most services don't. But archive.is doesn't block those other services only Cloudflare. How "strange".
It's outside of my expertise. I just know that both sides have opinions and there's backers for both. Would be nice if there was an alternative to archive.is - outline?
It's a good thing that millions of people have lost their jobs at what were otherwise well functioning businesses because of a global pandemic that also, by the way, is going to end up killing hundreds of thousands of people?
There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content.
Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of posts by the artist". The stream is JavaScript driven so if you want to go 100 posts back you have to page through multiple pages of posts. If you want to do it again tomorrow, or if the site crashes which it does, you have to start over at post 1 and page through again.
It's telling that so many artists use google drive, dropbox, mediafire, or mega to distribute their works. This seems like money Pateron is leaving on the table if they'd provide for a similar service at similar prices. They do provide a way to upload media but the UX is awful compared to Mega which has arguably the superior UX of those 5 options.
Worse, because these artists are using these separate services there is no way to limit who accesses them. In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.
Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all.
I can certainly imagine a service that's significantly better Patreon for this use case.
Let me also add discoverabilty is horrible. Maybe this is mostly on the artists but the #1 way I find one is off of patreon. Compare to say youtube where the #1 way I find anyone is on youtube itself.