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.
