Patreon lays off 13% of workforce
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Nothing makes sense, everything’s broken.
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.
Also a sizeable portion of creators from Twitch to Patreon produce adult content and much of that has now shifted to other niche sites.
1) A new payment platform is started, small enough to be fly under the radar
2) It attracts more and more adult content producers who've been turned away by the bigger players
3) It grows big enough to attract attention
4) The Nazgûl lawyers ride from Mastercard / VISA to shut the adult business down
5) Lather, rince, repeat
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.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/3/18123752/tumblr-adult-con...
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.
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).
Would you launch your new line of e-books on a site that is 95% porn and well known for porn?
No.
If you're a porn site, then you're pretty much going to be just that, it's its own content vertical, fairly distinguished from everything else.
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.
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.
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.
If there are zero hacked accounts ever, sure.
But charging someone $500 for actions a hacker took with their account would be.... very unusual.
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.
One consideration, maybe your TV app is the problem. Personally, this is why I don't use TV apps.
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).
It has been fixed. The artist can configure an option whether the patron needs to pay up front or after. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291283-How-...
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.
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.
> 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?
Facts: They raised a $60m D in July 2019.
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.
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.
Which is it?
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.
This sounds like a riddle / koan.
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.
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.
Thanks
Or something like that perhaps.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/patreon-raises-60m-series-...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patre...
Them taking venture capital is right up there with GumRoad taking VC money for levels of completely inexplicable for both the VC and the company.
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.
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.
EDIT: 200 people, depending on the business, is still in start-up teritory if the company is not decades old.
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.
- 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.
Because the whales remember when they were minnows, and the small timers is where the big timers come from.
Patreon has wanted to dispose of the pain-in-the-backside long tail for ages - this was an explicit business plan by mid-2017.
Because they took VC money and turned a sustainable small-time business into something that MUST GROW, whether it makes sense or not.
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.
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.
Not sure if they're all just spooked or if they've seen hits already.
> 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 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.
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.
Edit: see this for an example of the program in California: https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm
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%.
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.
* 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.
- Value of a 1% improvement at $100/week revenue: $104 of developer time.
- Value of a 1% improvement at $1M/week revenue: $1,040,000 of developer time.
* 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.
I love the Carta philosophy on hiring - every person you need means you've failed to execute: https://carta.com/blog/how-to-hire/
Unfortunately they didn't heed their own philosophy given their layoffs with simultaneous massive fundraise.
tl;dr: payday loans
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.
“Fire your users” is a thing, but at one point you gotta actually have things work
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...
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.
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?
There is perhaps greater systematic risk in not having backups. Too much efficiency can equal a lot of fragility.
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.
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.
Far away from the globe?
Good question, I am curious about how it compares with how Gumroad operates.
What's astounding to me is they don't even do _that_! It's a many-to-one payer-payee scheme... essentially a pretty wrapper for Stripe.
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.
It looks like the company's biggest creator brings roughly $5k a month for Patreon and only one other creator has their financials public and brings in even 40% of that [1]. There is certainly money to be made in that business, but I just don't see how they scale revenue in any large way without pissing off either patrons or creators.
Patreon’s fees range from 5-12% so they could easily be making more make more money from the 10,000 to 100,000 creators than they do the top 10,000. Further, people can hide earnings which makes estimates of their finances difficult.
Also, they have three different fees. The 5% to 12% fees are on top of the CC fees and money transfer fees. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027674431
Ex: Someone with 500 subscribers at 3$ per month after CC fees on the middle 8% tier is 120$ per month to Patreon.
Assuming this is a representative distribution of the top 1000 (and I bet it's actually higher!):
- $10k/month * 300 + $5k/month * 300 + $3k/month * 400
- ~$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)
Even then that doesn’t exactly cover salary and benefits for 300 employees in SF, let alone everything else.
Health insurance is expensive. Don’t think many realize how much it costs employers.
Then obviously rent is the other big expense. And cloud computing.
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.
Still an insanely good number for a 1(ish) person operation.
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...
https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ba...
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.
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.
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.
(Lastly, hentai is obviously a very different thing than anime. It is clear that Patreon is targeting anime, as well as hentai.)
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.
IIUC Tumblr and Craigs have similar problems as a result.
Video games are somewhat different, it's not a situation of a platform with user-generated content.
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.
Can this possibly be true?
CCBill's fees I think are like 11-15% plus $1k per year, pretty insane but underscores the risk
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.
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.
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.
They're not consistent with this though, Jim Sterling is in their top 50 earners and said the same racial slur in a podcast
https://archive.org/details/Podtoid/Podtoid189.mp3 @ 4:30
Not defending Benjamin, because he's said some disgusting things but they obviously only have a problem with it when it suits them.
"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.
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.
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.
> Nobody's preventing them, as an outside force
Except practically yes, they are.
And the above platforms DO exist, people CAN use them, and by God there's no shortage of porn on the internet.
(ccbill for NSFW billing, btw)
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.
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.
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.
>Still, it’s peculiar timing for Patreon, given the company touted an increase in new memberships during the first three weeks of March.
Peculiar indeed. So what is a factor not yet mentioned?
69 days ago, I was net downvoted after pointing out specifically what trouble was coming for Patreon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316071
>>I wonder if consumers could use forced arbitration in the same way.
>They can. Patreon is about to be hit really hard for playing thought policeman.
Now we are here.
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.
I listen to artist A's song 1 time, you listen to artist B's song 9 times. We listen to no other songs for the month.
With pooling, A gets 10% of the money, B get's 10% of the money.
With their suggestion, they each get 50%
Then I had to explain that all the subscribers on the whole platform get pooled together.
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.
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.
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 :)
[1] - https://trolley.link
Gamification?
It's completely irrational but there it is. And I suspect a lot of people feel the same way too for some reason.
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.
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.
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.
What happened to those French guys patron alternative for open source projects? Libre-something was is name...
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.)
Suscribestar OnlyFans New Project 2 Liberapay
How is it possible?
- 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)
If you sign up with Patreon to get perks, you're not really a patron any more. You're a customer.
Uh huh.
If they just wanted to be a payment processing platform they would just be a payment processing platform.
Instead it’s guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more.
Pretty sure onlyfans is basically run by one guy out of London and maybe a handful of contractor support staff for essentially the same business.
whoopsie
looks like they should just be a payment processing platform and let youtubers do that work