Hacker News Reader

Youtube has about three orders of magnitude greater revenue than Patreon. Do you think Patreon could grow 1000 times by scaling to the size of Youtube?

I love the direct-support model as a consumer/viewer, but I have significant doubts that it competes with ad dollars nearly as well as people would like it to.

View on HN

In terms of creator income it absolutely competes. In terms of raw spending, adtech is king by a mile. I doubt patreon would ever grow to compete with youtubes ad sales volume, but creators get a very tiny cut of the yt ad revenue. Typically single digit dollars per 10k views. Or far more views, depending on the audience (cpm varies wildly among different target groups). As someone who ran a slightly successful yt channel (20k subs), I was making a pittance from ads ($100/mo). That was back before things like patreon existed, but I'm sure I could have gotten more from donations.

Doesn't much of youtube's revenue come from music these days? Whether a patreon-style model competes or not depends on the kind of content. Individual channels making videos on youtube act like patreon is a much larger income stream for them than ad revenue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com