Patreon Raises $90M Series E at $1.2B Valuation
blog.patreon.com
blog.patreon.com
[0] I assume client is the inverse of a patron? Just going by Roman usage.
As opposed to eg Zynga or cam girls.
i think it mostly depends on the demographics of your audience, rather than how many you can convert over to being a patreon supporter.
It's really the variety on Patreon, from a podcaster/youtuber to a Twitch streamer to even open source devs, which kind of shows how well it's working.
The YouTube Red / Google Play Music decoupling has me worried for the future of the product. I'm both upset Google Play Music is going away and that it might risk YouTube Red.
I know it's my age talking, but there are some people that still prefer to listen to entire albums. Make it easy for our kind to find albums, and then don't default to play a mix of singles after.
Here is a list of the tiny sliver of the total bugs that I had experienced and knew off the top of my head six months ago.
I miss google play music and Spotify style discovery.
Curious how you found Spotify to compare to YouTube music. As google play music was deprecated.
I still don’t get why google deprecated me as a customer. Google’s churn is exhausting. Starting to want the “Microsoft” & “Apple” experience of it just works.
[1]https://images.prismic.io/soundcharts%2F571ff05f-9320-4e26-9...
'better for the artist than Spotify' is… not a high bar :)
Funny how you say that when Tidal have been caught faking plays[1] of artists close to Tidal-management, giving more money to them and less to everyone else.
But what do you expect by a streaming-platform literally run by “gangster”-rappers?
[1] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tidal-fake-streams-cr...
Remember the most expensive ever Google product? Plus?
Right...
All that to say its not being decoupled, its being extra coupled. Your YouTube Red subscription comes part and parsel with YouTube Music since its the same thing.
What do you mean? YouTube Premium (“Red” is a legacy name from waaay back) won’t go away. When Google Play Music dies, YouTube Premium will instead pay for YouTube Music (the new, “equivalent” service) which will still be around.
Or am I missing something super obvious?
Most likely doesn't make you enough money to redistribute it to lots of content creators, though it serves your purposes to have 'em thinking that is what they're there for.
I'm happy enough to serve consumer-grade video content at no cost to me through YouTube, on their terms. It's limiting, but I can put a lot of video out there without paying a host to serve the bandwidth. And YouTube gets to continue to pretend they are the only game in town.
But that is the mother of all sub-threads, so it might not be worth us getting into that infinite recursion fueled by dishonest argument :)
Good, but isn't YouTube algo your primary discovery funnel?
Does YouTube provide you metrics such as organic visits e.g. searching in YT, clicking on related videos, trending etc. vs direct visits e.g. clicking your video link from Reddit, HN, other websites etc.?
Edit: I also just realized I know of a game developer on Patreon for a game that hasn’t been released yet. It seems he (and presumably his team) earn $40k/month: https://www.patreon.com/alexmasse
All I've seen is Patreon as a gratis or else early video releases.
I'm not doubting it exists, but it must be in some niche I'm not aware of. I'm interested to see how that might work.
Google might want to nip this in the bud now with a cheeky 2bn $ acquisition...
for starters the absolutely abysmal performance of their site. I think Patreon found a good idea but good lord scrolling through a patreon account with someone who has a lot of posts basically stress tests my laptop fan
Friendster is frequently cited as a potentially massive company that failed due to its poor performance: https://www.techinasia.com/awesome-startups-failed
Note that I’m specifically talking about improving bad performance. If I was talking about having good performance, largely meaning designing the app to be fast from the start and never letting it get bad, the figures would be a bit more favourable, though they would still be very heavily skewed against large teams or companies. My conclusion is simply that the more people you have, the harder it is to make fast stuff.
I’m quite serious about these numbers. Not all small teams can produce fast apps, but over time no large teams can produce fast apps unless they very deliberately design it in from the start, in which case it’s merely extremely difficult to maintain (again, over time).
You can still opt in to keep using their old interface thankfully, the difference in both performance and UX is staggering. When that option disappears from the site, so will I.
I'd be more worried about YouTube getting their shit together and making a Patreon killer than Patreon building video hosting.
As long as they are YouTube they can capitalize on being the gatekeepers and there's no reason for them to care about becoming also the ticket-takers. There's also no need for them to try and kill Patreon to replace it: Patreon is taking pressure off of them and enabling them to enjoy the really useful part of their dominance, with no consequences to them. With Patreon out there, YouTube doesn't even need to care whether it seems like it pays creators or not.
I can't imagine it'll replace Patreon though, as a lot of creators see Patreon as giving them back control from Google's inscrutable, capricious treatment.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcXhhVwCT6_WqjkEniejRJQ
Maybe not, depends on the accretion of your content.
So because Patreon is used in such a wide range of ways, It's hard to make generalizations about all of it. And by that same token it's also hard for Patreon to make changes in a way that doesn't interfere with the way someone is using it. (Not that this in any way excuses their numerous blunders.)
The problem, at risk of stating the obvious, is that investors are hoping for big returns, and that means big revenue -- and that means changing the definition of "success" on Patreon. To hit a few hundred million in revenue a year and earn their valuation, they're going to need to start competing with not just YouTube and Twitch, but major music labels and indie-friendly TV/film studios. They're going to need to recruit the new Taylor Swift, the new Lady Gaga. Hell, they may need to recruit the current Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.
The most successful campaigns they have now are bringing in tens of thousands a month, but those are wild outliers. The vast majority of their creators are making side money, not a living; bringing in just $1000 a month puts you in the top 5%. (It's hard to be sure, but I think there's a good chance it puts you in the top 1%, given that there's about 178K campaigns total and there are folks in the top 1000, according to Graphtreon, barely making over $1K a month.) And... that vast majority of folks won't be Patreon's focus in future years. It can't be. (One can argue it isn't now.)
I don't think Patreon will "turn cancerous," per se -- but the Patreon of 2022 may not look that much like the Patreon of early 2020, which some would argue didn't look as much like the Patreon of 2018 as ideal.
While I agree that they're not currently cancerous I do think they illustrate part of the broader problem with modern society: over-dependence on central infrastructure-like sources that are private and can change on a whim. It's great that people can make a living on Patreon, but this should be tempered by the inherent risk of being on a platform you don't control.
[1]: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu [3]: https://www.patreon.com/posts/18216256
Why is it that you choose to use "failed to maintain a privacy agreement" to describe the Vice editors publishing her personal information without consent, while using the much more loaded term "doxxed" when she did the same to them?
Do you understand the difference in likely consequences for each party here?
Is there any rational argument that can be made to exonerate the totally shitty behaviour of Vice and it's writers/editors in choosing to invade her privacy after having agreed not to?
(According to Wikipedia) she published Vice's editor-in-chief's home address. I assume she did that to "explain" how she felt threatened physically by ensuring that the editor in chief feels physically threatened as well?
She could have acted differently. She could have taken legal means; perhaps asking for help to her patrons. Supporters can support in many ways and not only with money.
Can somebody who knows more about the details explain why her behaviour should have been tolerated by Patreon?
Both actions are bad. But if I have to pick one to be "more" bad, I'd pick Vice's.
Those two points are probably what's at the root of the calls against Patreon here.
We don't live under eye-for-eye law. (Maybe China has some laws like that?) But people often view things in that light socially.
This is not about the rule of law and the issue is not whether Wu was right to do this; rather that presenting Wu's behavior as worse than the Vice editor's is extremely unfair. Furthermore, the consequences of doxxing for some north american influencer type vs those for someone living in an authoritarian dystopia are quite different. Finally, in one case the offense was arguably perpetrated in a state of panic while the other was done in cold blood so to speak.
If you don't want to live in an eye for an eye rule of law, attack the causes, not the victims.
I don't think a witch-hunt would have been a better option. Honestly it was an ugly affair, but Patreon shouldn't have gotten involved. Much like MasterCard or Visa didn't get involved in Vice.
[edit] the third link above describes what happened
Ever since Patreon sided with those fucking shit heels Sarah Jeong and Jason Koebler at Vice Magazine, and took away Naomi Wu's Patreon supporters - I've had Patreon firmly in the "cancerous" category.
I'm still using them where I have to, because some of the people I choose to support want to be supported that way. But I've made sure I have non-Patreon contact details wherever I can so my donations can follow the creators, and Patreon as an organisation can die in a fire for all I care.
Time to go contact all the creators I support, and remind them I'd prefer some other means to send them monthly donations instead of via Patreon - before these new investors put the squeeze on and start ripping me and the people I support off (even further)...
And on other hand I can't see how their model can justify the value. They are only there to to take a small cut from donations. Will this really be so big business? Pretty big changes are needed to something else.
OpenCollective is more organization focused and have plenty of accounting help.
That’s really not true. Subsidising creation maybe, but for most patreon that I’ve seen most of the value produced by the creator is public.
There might be some exotic sideshows (eg access to a discord server, time-limited exclusivity is also common) but I’d see it more as funding creation than paying to create, the latter implies much more direct transaction and benefits / exchange e.g. commissioned work, that is “paying to create”.
They're not? I honestly thought they were a utility like PayPal.
Bizarre that people think they can make big money off it.
On July 17, 2007, Zuckerberg said that selling Facebook was unlikely because he wanted to keep it independent, saying "We're not really looking to sell the company... We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company."
I think FB started turning bad around 2015. So if we're comparing Patreon to FB, give it another 10 years before they look like something else. Even Google had to be worth several billions before they dropped the "don't be evil" motto.
No one that can be Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga needs Patreon because they can already monetize their content through mainstream channels. There is no to little value Patreon can add on top of that. Patreon exists to enable monetization for the long tail of creatives, which means they need to increase breadth, not depth, and not lose the current growth in demand for these channels to competition.
I could certainly imagine Patreon making a pitch to bigger creators about taking control of their own destiny and keeping more of their money. Would it work? I don't know. But a single creator who averages $1M a month is twice as valuable as a thousand creators who average "only" $500 a month. If you're idealistic, you may still prioritize the thousand, but if you've taken multiple rounds of VC money at a multi-billion dollar valuation, you're gonna look real hard at what you can do to bring in that one.
In other words, no one who can average $1M a month has anything more to gain from moving to Patreon’s platform, or any other payment processing platform for that matter.
> less than 4% of Patreon's total number of creators make $1K or more a month, but they account for about 70% of Patreon's revenue.
That describes the shape of the curve, but doesn’t describe the total volume. If the overall market size is increasing, which it does, regardless of the thin long tail, their aggregate revenue will increase. It doesn’t need to do anything special, it just needs to make sure it is not going to lose its share of the ever growing pie.
And I would like to invite all Hacker News participants to call me out and make fun of me if it turns out I'm wrong. Come back in 2-4 years and respond to this comment calling me an idiot if I'm wrong.
After all, what's the point of making a prediction if people can't call you out for being wrong when it doesn't come true?
Then again, YT can turn Patreon functionality on in a blink, offer everything for free and then some, offer features to subscribers that Patreon doesn't have, and over time, slowly, erode a big chunk of their users.
Even though Snap has not completely died yet, Instagram was able to suck out their oxygen pretty bad by simply offering a wider audience to the creators. YT can't pull the same trick here, but once they found what works, it's only a matter of time.
It will be interesting at the very least.
Revenue doesn't earn a valuation, profit does. Hundreds of million in revenue is worthless on its own – unless you can dump your shares on the next Greater Fool.
I put forth that Wordpress, Peertube, Substack, and ActivityPub are all inspiration for what comes next (with Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle support for patron payments/subscriptions). The primitives already exist.
https://taler.net/en/news/index.html
Having an external audit and a response plan is, helpful for finally solving the payment processor / money transmitter issue.
Though the real solution for Patreon, and so many other issues, is some kind of automated escrow service built on top of that, with a best case outcome of seller and buyer agreeing and a contested case of review by other registered entities in the service deciding the outcome of the contract.
GNU is pathologically incapable of coming up with appealing names.
Patreon is indeed a billion dollar unicorn not because it's immediately going to funnel money to shareholders… did Amazon?
Patreon is clearly the PayPal of… being Patreon. The network effects and defining of the brand have already kicked in. I'm pretty happy about it (but then I would be as I'm one of the more successful people on it) but, like I personally told Jack Conte and Sam Yam, I am also happy about what Patreon means TO that 'long tail', because some of the qualities that benefit me also benefit the small fry.
You can't live off a steady and ever-so-slightly growing $50 a month. That's the long tail: people not being discovered, who have only their little crews of supporters. There is no plan to make them all earn thousands of dollars a month because practically, that can't happen to all of them.
BUT, if you have a predictable slowly growing $50 a month (because it's not tightly tied to new product releases of yours, there isn't the feast-or-famine cycle of being entreprenurial in the traditional sense, which I have also done) that becomes a small supplemental income that you can depend on. The value of that is incalculable… certainly worth a billion VC dollars that Patreon means THAT to people.
An extra $50 can mean life and death to someone who is really on the edge. The example I used to Jack and Sam is a single mom with just a cell phone, who can livestream telling bedtime stories to her child. And other moms tune in, and support her and her stories for $50 a month: they can spare it, and that is now food for her child. It doesn't HAVE to make her J. K. Rowling, to count. It matters at all scales.
The creators I want to support are all on Patreon, so that’s the platform where I have account, but beyond setting up the subscription I new use the site. It’s a sad experience, slower than the Reddit redesign, it’s pointless to try to do anything meaningful on Patreon.
They need to invest in their site, but the valuation seem high for what they provide.
With crypto, there is no gate keeper. No Stripe or Patreon or Paypal in the way. I love Stripe by the way, but they too could in theory block me for whatever reason. Also on the other side of the coin, you have the buyer who can cancel their subscription at any time. You could even have a smart contract for 30 day refunds - which allows the refund for any reason but at least the buyer has committed by having their funds held in that contract for the 30. Stable coins can take the speculation out of it and are ideal for small amounts of "cash" for these kinds of transactions.
I think this problem is a great example of where crypto can shine where normal finance is held back. You can have the idealistic platform - Wordpress on your own server and some PHP code or something to check for payments - no one "owning it" on your behalf. Someone can wrap that as a SaaS, but anyone can, there is no need to go with the big unicorn provider.
That leaves the question of how to market your little market stall on the internet? Well like anything else, just use the right tool for the job. You don't need the payment platform to be the way people find you.
The limitation isn’t moving money, there are tons of ways for consumers to pay creators money, it’s all the services around payment that Patreon provides to both producer and consumer. Things like recurring charges, places for premium content, charging structure tied to content release, fraud protection, support, and marketing. A decent chunk of that is outside the scope of what crypto can solve.
I think the idea that creators should cobble together Wordpress websites kind of weird. Most of these creators are artists, not engineers. They probably don’t have the inclination nor the skills to build a DIY patreon. If they’re going to move, someone needs to provide a turnkey solution for them.
Wordpress can be turnkey - someone needs to set that up? I mean wordpress.com is kind of that. Or another company could set up an instant install and make it look good and make it fast wordpress service. They probably exist.
Maybe they could do it for free and then charge a take from Stripe.
Crypto solves some problems beyond this, but I am not sure it will be adopted because walled gardens and central corporations seem to win for the obvious reasons. Crypto gives the buyer more control and the seller more freedom. The seller can have zero fear of getting their funds cut off by the platform.
Recurring payments are not possible from the PULL side, but I like that. If something is valuable the customer will keep on paying. A smart contract could allow for subscriptions from the customer side by pushing the money until the contract is stopped. This solves the "remembering to do it" part.
You turn off Patreon emails and push notifications because the episodes just show up in your podcatcher like any other podcast. Patreon isn't offering anything in the relationship beyond recurring monthly payment processing. RSS + your parasocial friendship with the podcast hosts are what builds the relationship.
I'd love it if a podcast-focused company stepped in to fill the same role. They could provide the same custom features that ATP and Dithering/Stratechery have added recently to their paid feeds. The UX of having "Free" and "Paid" feeds for the same podcast really sucks.
Podcasters could save ~10% on Patreon fees and maybe even gain some useful dedicated RSS tools and membership perks that would work inside a podcast app.
Some podcasts put that info in the episode descriptions, but I usually end up finding it via Google.
Bonus points if it could automatically switch me to an ad-free feed for paid supporters, but that would require some infrastructure. Just putting a "pay" button prominently on the app would nudge people. It really is one of those things where $1/month times 5,000 people could make a going concern.
https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enab...
Their is no exit. The whole point of Patreon is an efficient way to suck up pennies.
It is a great service but their taking of VC funding was even dumber than when Gumroad did it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4PnSJDIJMg
But since COVID he's been posting on his channel a lot more frequently and – knowing his dayjob – the production value and time he spends on these things is really impressive
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbd-QOxzNKQifQfSuaH5I0A
Now, he's been making videos for a long time, and obviously knows his way around producing great content, but still highly recommended.
[0] https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1233827705222615040?s=20
> Or is the money just so that a few people can get richer now somehow.
Why _else_ does anything happen in this fucking industry?
Not sure how meaningful that really is though...
But, there is no catalog of media. All you can do is go through old blog posts. The UI of the blog posts is a single page app that you pick "more" at the bottom of every 10 posts. It crashes often and you have re-start back at post 1 when it does and paginate your way back to where you started. Fixing the pagination would be nice but fixing the entire UI around actually helping people distribute their media would be even better.
In fact many people don't even put their media on Patreon given how bad the UI is and are forced to find 3rd party solutions
Also, Patreon is horrible at discovery. For the most part you have to find out about people to become a patron of offsite. Some of that is the people on Patreon not knowing what they are doing but arguably Patreon needs a better way to browse people and concretely know what they'll get access to. Not just "you'll get access to special videos" but rather tell me exactly which videos, how many, how long are they, what is each individual video about, etc....
Even for artists Patreon could generate a series of thumbnails, small enough that just the thumbnails are not enough but large enough that you can tell what art you'll get access to.
Given how bad the UX is it's slightly infuriating they're the most popular of such sites. I guess that just means there is plenty of room for someone to steal their market.
Further, Patreon has lots of people scamming for $$$, reselling other people's art. There are Patreon accounts for blogs of pirate videos like someone runs a blogspot blog of torrents and has a Pateron to support their activity. Or someone uploads videos they don't own to a video site and has a Patreon to support their "cataloging".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23691168
As far as I can tell, Patreon's most compelling attribute is a clever name. If some other company nailed the discovery and "new connection" experience, they'd own the niche. There's a small network effect but I doubt it's terribly compelling since creators can easily exist on multiple networks.
Well I've just checked, and the problem is still there and not fixed. I guess their fix queue is long.
What are they spending so much money on?
Given all this, what is the purpose of raising more money at this time. They already have good name recognition, and should be turning a profit by now.
Sometimes, too much funding can end up being a curse, where the business loses focus on their core competency and tries to branch out too much.
EDIT:
Thanks to the commenters below, It looks like they take somewhere between 5 - 12% of donations. That is on top of the 2.9% processing fee. So it looks like they they could easily bring in between $50-100 million/year with the $1 Billion/year in donations that they are pretty close to bringing in(depending on the mix of plans people sign up for). This further reinforces the point that they have a pretty good monetization strategy.
For the first time in two decades it often makes a lot more sense to be publicly traded for funding purposes than private. The public market hasn't been this ravenous for money losing tech'ish stocks since 1999-2000. If you're Patreon, it has to be a serious consideration to take advantage of the unhinged mania in the air. (Obviously with the understanding that Patreon may have other reasons for remaining private; although that can't last forever though, and when you're on a series E it's getting that time).
Generating large returns has been easy for a while now. You have to retain the self-discipline to remind yourself that getting 40% in a day is ridiculous (as with Zoom today), that in normal times that is two or three years of good returns. It's about consciously restricting your own reach for greed. Average investors that get lucky in bubbles also tend to get crushed by them as well.
As an example, back in March I posted my thoughts on buying during the crash and I was buying Square in the $30s at that time. I'm out now. If Square goes on up to $200 or $300 per share, I simply don't care. My returns were easy, ridiculous and good enough, I sleep extremely well having exited with the gains I generated. They're mine now, I captured that return, locked it in, and that's the single most important thing. It's a far better thing to secure already massive gains than to reach for more, being greedy, and risk all of it if the mania turns south (which it will at some point, nobody knows when though and trying to pinpoint that is most often a fool's errand). Always have the discipline to walk away if you hit a homerun. The crazy returns (ie anything far beyond reasonable, very outsized) generated at this time are mostly not skill, they're luck; spotting a position to enter can be skill from years of mental training, however getting 500% on eg Fiverr in five months is mostly dumb luck (to be clear, it's the particularly outsized return that is the dumb luck part of that); cash that luck in, as it will inevitably turn against you.
There are some very straight-forward moves an average investor can make to shield theirself as well, requiring no particular skill. For example if you generate a large return quickly in this market, remove the initial principle, maybe a reasonable chunk of profit as well, and let the rest ride if you have a strong desire to continue to participate. Mentally accept that portion as money that may very well go to zero, to emotionally steel yourself for a bad outcome if the market crashes at some point; that's your speculative money in this gambler's market, having safeguarded the other portion. If you care to, you can even constantly peel your principle back out of these stocks as they climb, rather than aiming for a particular high point to sell in bulk (and trading fees are widely now zero, which can add-up in that context depending on the position size). Losing a big chunk of your principle investment generally stings a lot more than losing a big chunk of some easy outsized gains, always keep that in mind. It is most often easy come / easy go in markets like this one, and the only way to avoid the easy go part of that is to exit the gains at some point.
You might see a lot of people saying the market can't go down because interest rates are so low / zero. Interest rates have been between very low and zero for a decade now, and they'll probably be low for a long time into the future. The market can return to its former multiples from eg 2014-2015 (when rates were also de facto zero), while rates are at zero. Don't let yourself fall for that premise, as though this market's extreme upward trajectory is guaranteed. A crash just back to the multiples we had in 2014-2015 would hammer this market, taking it down by 30-40% (and the more bubbly stocks would particularly get smashed).
That's not to say there are no buys remaining in this market that will yet produce huge returns, rather, I personally wouldn't provide advice on specific stocks on the premise of seeking large returns here (ie which stocks will be the next SQ or SHOP; what's going up 500% in the next six months). Square under $40 was an easy buy, it had a large margin of safety in its valuation; at $166, six months later, I consider it dangerous and wouldn't advise anyone to buy it as a new position (that's what 300%+ in six months will do).
When the parent asked how an average investor should take advantage of the situation, I took that to mean: how should an average investor that is already in this market manage the context (rather than it meaning to enter the market for the first time here and now). I'm looking at this market from a particular angle: I'd say an average investor, already in the market, should take advantage of the situation by looking to exit some or all of their gains (take advantage of the market to exit value; which is what eg Tesla is doing when diluting now, or SV companies are doing rushing to the IPO exits); that's merely my opinion though.
I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.
Say you bought Square (SQ) between $40 and $80 during/after the March plunge (or even if you caught it in June and are already up 50-60%). Not an abnormal scenario, as many people will be sitting on large gains from the past five or six months.
So one of two scenarios related to what I've said (simplified a bit for brevity):
1) You're sitting on a large gain now, maybe 100%-300% in a mere five to six months. Take your principle off the table only, optionally with a bit of profit as well, and let the rest ride if you want to continue to participate in this market mania to see how far it can go. Or sell it all, if you're fully comfortable with your gains, and bag the full profit here. Either scenario is quite reasonable depending on the person doing the investing. It will heavily depend on your personality type, it's important to understand yourself, your impulses, your weaknesses & strengths, how you react to things. Some people might want to leave more of the profit in the market, some might feel better pulling it all. What I'd suggest at this point for an average investor, given this scenario, is removing the principle at a minimum.
That's not day trading. I'm not suggesting jumping in and out of SQ, trading it constantly trying to profit on small swings. The scenario is that you established a specific position, eg at $40, $80 or $100, and now you're looking at how to either exit or otherwise reduce risk in a reasonable manner. In my view, most of what is left to take advantage of here, is the selling opportunity being presented.
2) You noticed your position was up a lot in a short amount of time, eg it went from $40 to $60, or $60 to $100. Rather than debating when exactly to sell all or a big chunk of it, you sell gradually as it climbs, until either you're entirely out of it or you've extracted your principle (then decide on strategy for the profit remaining). It's of course nothing more than averaging across sales, some people feel more comfortable doing that than selling all at once, especially if they think a stock might keep moving higher yet and they want to try to capture some of that remaining upside.
Then lie outrageously about how profitable they are and sell them to some other sucker with a get rich quick dream and no work ethic to back it up. Rinse, repeat.
The same crappy minimum-effort rent-seeking SEO-spamming techniques that every "get rich quick building affiliate websites" snake oil salesmen use...
i don’t see how that works in public markets...though to give them credit they should probably try to go public sooner rather than later to take advantage of the froth...
also 8% on top of payment processing fees seems like a lot, though I guess creators just account for that in deciding what fees to charge...
In my opinion it was deeply unethical to start Patreon as a startup instead of a non-profit. How can you justify it? For-profit means the goal all along was to skim some portion off the top rather than to make a livelihood enabling content creators to make ends meet on their own.
A nonprofit isn't all it's cracked up to be. It must means that it doesn't have shareholders who own the company. It can still pay employees, sometimes very well. It gets tax benefits in exchange for limiting the kind of business it does to something for the public good, but Patreon doesn't really fit those existing categories very well. It looks more like a payment processor, the kind of service you hire like a web page developer or carpenter.
I suppose there's room for somebody to try to squeeze them out by charging even less, perhaps by dogfooding their own service. But if they're charging only ten cents on the dollar, there's not an enormous amount of room for competition, and you'd need to start by raising a ton of money from people purely for charity.
For example, did you know that when Microsoft bought NPM, they starved NPM employees for oxygen, forcing people to quit over time, as they were unable to work on anything?
That's anecdotal, and I am simply trying to say that MS isn't charity. Maybe it's worth it to support Patreon and help them to avoid (delay, perhaps) their future predatory behavior?
I am just brainstorming here. I don't know what the right answer is.
It would be nice if they also made the subscription in Stripe so it's portable, but Automattic has been around long enough to trust with handling it. On the customer/supporter side, I think knowing they aren't at the whim of the blog owner for cancellation is a perk.
Non-profits seem rather complicated / constrained, at least in the US (but probably elsewhere as well) e.g. you could ask the same about Mozilla.
Also, why is it unethical? Middlemen are a universal fixture of US society. And patreon does provide value in convenience and reliability over the previous standard of… idk, beg for donations via PayPal or something?
Youtube is a better discovery funnel/tunnel.
Even PayPal offers better payment fees (especially for micropayments).
The only thing I see Patreon offering is a fairly coherent system for managing and communicating with one's "patrons". That's not worth nothing, especially to people without existing website infrastructure already. But it's not worth a lot to people who have that in place.
PayPal offers nothing, afaik, to manage your community or tiered rewards and certainly has no ability to show how much a given creator is receiving. It was clearly never designed for recurring payments and when I've used it for those it seems like it was only grudgingly implemented.
None of these other systems have a good experience for the person, like myself, who donates to a large number different people. On Patreon I can easily view and manage all my contributions in one place. Becoming a patron for a new creator is seamless.
Despite my love for the platform though, them doing investment rounds seems bizarre to me. They've got a good thing going, and I'm not sure that dramatically increasing profitability requirements is a good thing.
I mentioned YT as a discovery mechanism, I wasn't implying anything about it as a revenue mechanism. I probably haven't thought it carefully enough, given that I don't really need the discovery mechanism to support my own work.
PayPal's micropayment service is MUCH better than Patreon's. (or anyone else's as far as I can tell). I make most of my income via PayPal, and the majority of the payments are US$1. PayPal's micropayment fee structure saves me 22c per $1 transaction. That's a huge impact for me (possibly as much as US$2k per month). The only way I could feasibly move away from PayPal is to somehow force/convince most of the people who support my software development work to pay more than US$12 (the point at which regular fee structures start to be better). That would mean convincing roughly 4500 people ("patrons" :) to switch payment platforms too.
I think the only downside of this is that they will reduce the music creation.
The current pomplamoose setup is probably not going to change. You can find old vlogs where they explain the setup they were intending, and Jack posted a video somewhat recently where he explains the thing, but basically they arrange and record a month worth of songs in a day.
On a serious note, I would LOVE for Patreon to offer a video platform (add a peertube node or something? no idea how it works), maybe I can even stop using YouTube.
Jack Conte of Pomplamoose is one of the co-founders of Patreon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patreon#History
Not to mention… patreon isn’t limited to youtubers? Webcomics or serials authors can be on patreon, what would they do on YouTube? Likewise podcasts, the average podcast listener has no reason or incentive to go sub to a YouTube channel.
Patreon is facing the possibility of going through the arbitration process with 72 people, who are seeking it on the basis that by banning a creator, Patreon is interfering with a business relationship between viewer and creator.
The theory that Patreon will go bankrupt is based on the assumption that these 72 instances of arbitration will go through and the costs of arbitration will be enough to bankrupt the company.
For (a), they've already banned a lot of adult content (thus the rise of OnlyFans, until they follow suit), and they'll probably ban more if they get enough attention from either media, angry card processors, or both.
For (b), they've already narrowly avoided fucking this up once back in 2017 (https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure). They increased fees in 2019 (https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024952552-P...) but at least grandfathered in past users, preventing their existing userbase from being too much of a flight risk.
All links are NSFW, but not graphic unless you open the embedded tweets.
0: https://www.dailydot.com/irl/patreon-yaoi-deepthroat/
1: https://www.dailydot.com/irl/patreon-anime-porn-ban/
2: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbqwwj/patreon-suspension...
If you're at all familiar with the issues of building a public-facing business on adult content, you know that there are entire industries (hint: VISA credit card processing) that will categorically refuse to let you be in that business at all, or to deal with you if you're facilitating it. Patreon must maintain working relationships with VISA.
There are countries in which it is a criminal act to expose the belly. Patreon attempts to operate internationally, which means the content creators they enable become part of a negotiation where countries like that are at risk of demanding Patreon get rid of ALL 'criminal' creators or be refused permission to operate in the country.
Adult content is a hell of a can of worms. To facilitate it at ALL at this scale is impressive. And the issues we run into are not coming from inside the Patreon-like company: if anything, their scale helps them negotiate terms. It's the credit card companies, the restrictive countries, which are setting the terms, and what Patreon facilitates is already an impressive feat within the context of what you can get away with anywhere else.
Seriously, if you're casting aspersions at Patreon over handling of adult-content creators, first try to make a dildo company and then negotiate being able to accept direct payments through VISA :)
(disclaimer: I have not actually made a dildo company and then tried to negotiate being able to accept direct payments through VISA)
How would OnlyFans follow suit on that? Isn't their entire thing adult content?
It's 30 mins but you can flick through or 2x it if you are genuinely interested why some people are anti-Patreon
Goodbye to Patreon - Dave Rubin and Jordan B Peterson - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8_OrrvaVVw
Its how I read it, just a simple, large tech organisation (Facebook) controlling people.
And a lot of people use to say Patreon was finally a healthy way to do Youtube without having to worry about de-monetisation.
Then Patreon also started restricting content more and more (cancer)
They are already cancer. So not sure where this "very soon" comes from.
This extra money to Patreon is just another example of morality and trying to work towards a common good can't beat evil incumbents (Without becoming the evil incumbent perhaps)
Neutral platforms just don't seem possible, maybe Bitcoin might change that, but it's place seems like a solid alternative to mainstream, never mainstream.
Working on it: https://hub20.io/architecture/#a-balanced-approach
I hope they fail so a neutral provider can take their place. I know of https://www.subscribestar.com/ - are there others?
They are a platform, not a monopoly.
I hope they succeed, and I personally hope that companies that have morals that I think are worse than theirs fail.
They help people discover content, too.
I think a "moral-neutral provider" is a terrible idea, because it provides a platform to people with deplorable morals.
EDIT: Judging a company by their actions is a valid thing to do. It's remarkable to me that this is controversial.
Morality is an opinion. And in my view, your electric company shutting off your power because they don't like who you are would be positively dystopian.
Let's say Patreon took a strong moral stance that you absolutely disagreed with. Would you still think it commendable?
What would you do? No, honestly. What would you do?
Do you think Amazon should freely and proudly work with Nazis, "because of neutrality"?
"So, like, most of the world I imagine?" No, I think there's a pretty low bar of morality that most of the world does in fact agree upon. I'm not asking for much more than that. Others might, and I might hope they lose out in the long run.
To answer your questions:
"Deciding to punch or not to punch old ladies is an important decision. I think it's commendable that Patreon is making a moral decision." Yes, it's implied that I commend Patreon because they are making the moral decision I agree with, not just that they have made a moral decision.
"How to stop old ladies from getting punched" is a political discussion. "In general, people shouldn't punch old ladies" is a moral position. "We will not work with people who advocate punching old ladies" is a moral decision I would agree with. "We will exclusively work with people who advocate punching all old ladies" is a moral decision I would disagree with.
Judging a company by their actions is a valid thing to do. It's remarkable to me that this is up for debate.
And I would judge that power company as being morally wrong, unless I agreed with them that the person they shut off was repugnant. Should PG&E provide power to the California Nazi Party? Maybe not.
If you want to make fun of me, perhaps you would enjoy this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e1aGEb2R90
Yes, some people make boycott decisions that I think are bad. Some boycotts are good, though.
Quite frankly: no, unless you subscribe to the sort of philosophy that that believes there is such thing as morality. It's an attractive philosophy, but nobody I've met has ever actually behaved that way.
If I punched your face and gave you a bloody nose, you would almost certainly not act like I simply have an alternative opinion about where my knuckles belong.
Edit: I think we might have a difference in how we're using language. An opinion, as I'm using the term, is a belief that we don't strongly believe that other people ought to believe as well.
"Morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."
You have never met someone who believes you can make a distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior?
Please state clearly what you do mean, or the exact objections you have with what I'm saying.
I don't "simply have an alternative opinion." I view your actions as wrong.
I'm sorry, but you're framing this as a debate where I have a bizarre opinion, and I don't understand your claims or objections.
There are valid reasons to boycott companies. Do you disagree with that?
Patreon endorses its customers. Therefore they should police their platform as they see fit.
Amazon is completely different. If Amazon hires a Nazi as a warehouse worker then it is not endorsing whatever opinion the warehouse worker has. The warehouse worker is only there to provide his labor and receive a paycheck. Amazon can decide to not let Nazis be in charge of press releases and it also has no obligation to publicly talk about the political affiliation of its factory workers.
Don't you see the huge difference? Some people sign up for Patreon because Nazis are on their platform. In the Amazon case you're not buying Amazon products because Nazis are handling them.
I'm sorry but that's what I've been saying, and you've been disagreeing with me.
> Amazon is completely different.
No, it's not.
Amazon Prime. They should police the content on there.
Amazon Marketplace. They should police the products that are sold on there. Blood diamonds should not be for sale on Amazon.
> If Amazon hires a Nazi as a warehouse worker
There are many things Amazon does. I've highlighted some where yes, Amazon should police themselves, and not support Nazis. You've highlighted one (laborers with Nazi views) where Amazon should maybe turn a blind eye.
What about the Direct of Communications? The VP of Human Resources? Is it okay if Amazon hires a self-avowed white supremacist, card-carrying member of the Nazi party, for a senior leadership position? I'd say they should avoid it. I might even boycott them if they kept someone like that in a senior leadership position.
> Amazon can decide to not let Nazis be in charge of press releases
Again, you're agreeing with me. Why do you pretend like you're not. You are 100% agreeing with me, and occasionally pointing out edge cases that I agree with.
> Don't you see the huge difference?
I agree there is a difference, and there are situations in which (as you agree), Amazon should police Nazi's out. That is my position, and you agree with it, and you've spent a great many words telling me I'm wrong.
Nazi behavior is immoral. Companies that support Nazis are wrong. Hiring a menial laborer who happens to be a Nazi, who doesn't bring it up at work, is probably fine. I hope they're exposed to people from other backgrounds, and stop being a fricking Nazi.
Can you name some?
The most recent one I saw was Patreon demanding an artist delete all adult images of a specific character on all websites because they found an old image where this weird monster thing didn't have breasts as a design choice.
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/patreon-gay-hypnosis-artists/ here's an article I guess?
Which means they couldn't legally consent?
So it's entirely about non-consensual sex?
So it's entirely about rape?
I don't think you've chosen a very good Poster Child for the argument that Patreon was in the wrong.
When someone is talking about morals in the way you did then they are usually talking about their own morals.
>"I hope they succeed, and I personally hope that companies that have morals that I think are worse than theirs fail."
This is a good example of you talking about your own morals. There is no objective criteria for "worse morals". The only way you can make a statement about morals being worse is from your own viewpoint.
The worst thing about your comment is that you are implying that your own morals are the only good ones.
>EDIT: Judging a company by their actions is a valid thing to do. It's remarkable to me that this is controversial.
The problem is not Patreon in this case. You are the problem.
Sure it does. And pretty much everyone does it. There are things that are legal but wrong. Policing wrong content makes sense.
> There is no arbiter of morals
Each person decides what is moral.
> so whatever policing there will be is going to be highly subjective.
Yes, that's true. It's a marketplace of ideas, and each of us should shop accordingly.
> If Patreon makes "Nazis" famous then Patreon's reputation will reflect that.
Yes, and that's as it should be. Someone who allows Nazi propaganda is wrong. Someone who polices Nazi propaganda, and removes it, is right. How are you not agreeing with me?
> Of course the owners of Patreon don't want their platform to be associated with Nazis whether that is because it is bad for business, the owners don't like nazis, the payment provider has decided to cut off Nazis or any other reason. What it certainly doesn't have to do with is "morals".
I think you don't know what the definition of morality is:
"Morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."
It is absolutely about morals. In your example, Patreon would be saying that Nazis are wrong, and have bad behavior.
What do you think morals are?
> When someone is talking about morals in the way you did then they are usually talking about their own morals.
Yes, each person has their own ideas about what is right and wrong or good and bad behavior.
> This is a good example of you talking about your own morals. There is no objective criteria for "worse morals". The only way you can make a statement about morals being worse is from your own viewpoint.
Yes, absolutely. And I support people who share morals similar to my own, and I try to not support people with morals widely different from my own.
If Hacker News was flooded with content from MAPs (Minor-Attracted Person) trying to normalize pedophelia, then I would stop coming to Hacker News, and seek out another community kept that content off of it.
> The worst thing about your comment is that you are implying that your own morals are the only good ones.
Each person thinks their morals are the best ones. That's... literally... how morals work.
But no, you misstated my position - I do think other people have morals that are similar enough to my own, and so also good. (I don't think my own morals are the only good ones.)
I look for compatibility. Some people are in favor of forced sterilization for criminals. I think that's wrong. Some people think it's okay for a woman to wear white to someone else's wedding. I mean, yeah, that's wrong too, but it doesn't matter to me anywhere near as much as the first one.
You shouldn't buy blood diamonds. You shouldn't shop someplace that sells them. Even as an option to their customers. That's my morals.
Yes, I think my morals are the best ones. I suspect you think yours are the best, too.
You may think Freedom of Speech is the most important principle, and all other rights or concerns are less important. You may be okay with libel, slander, harassment, inciting violence, violating copyright, sharing a "recipe for playdough" that actually produces cyanide gas, animal abuse, snuff films, advocating for race wars, etc.
I think someone who could police that content, and chooses not to, is wrong.
> The problem is not Patreon in this case. You are the problem.
I think either a) you're misunderstanding me, which may be my fault, or 2) you haven't considered the content that gets policed all of the time, and if you did, you'd agree with policing it.
You're trying to pin on me that I was saying there should be a single authority, judging all people. I didn't say that, and I reject that view. Nazis were totalitarians that killed people.
I'm saying a company should chose who it does business with, depending on what that person is doing.
If someone wants to find another person to work with, they're welcome to try. If I agree that what they were doing is bad, then I hope they fail.
Should lawyers try to tell good people from bad people, to decide whether to take a case?
Lawyers: great question. I believe when the government is prosecuting someone, they deserve a defense, so in that case, I hope some lawyer will defend them. If it's a civil case, like if Exxon is trying to sue some grandma to drill in her back yard, yes, I would hope lawyers are deciding not to take that case, and I might (if it ever came up) boycott a law firm that worked cases like that.
Question back for you:
You walk into a job interview, and the receptionist greets you with, "Heil Hitler! How can I help you?" Not sure you heard what you thought you heard, you answer that you're here for a job interview. The receptionist tells you to have a seat. A moment later, someone comes out and says, "Heil Hitler! I'm the hiring manager, are you ready for your interview?"
Do you take the interview, or do you walk out?
We do and should judge people based on their actions, and we should shun people who make extremely bad decisions. Like following Hitler. Like normalizing pedophelia. Like advocating for a race war. Like selling arms to terrorists. Like selling blood diamonds.
I think it would be wrong for a Catholic to boycott a Lutheran business. I happen to think it's wrong for a cake maker to not make a cake for a gay wedding. I might even boycott that baker. I don't go to Chic-fil-a or Hobby Lobby.
Which parts of this reply seem weird to you?
I think we should support companies that each of us think act responsibly, and avoid or boycott companies that each of us think is acting irresponsibly.
How is that remotely controversial?
It has been tried in the Soviet Union: if you deny a certain ideology, you'd be kicked out from university, from your job, from any public life.
I don't see how copying suppression techniques from the world's most brutal regimes is making the world better.
Question for you:
You walk into a job interview, and the receptionist greets you with, "Heil Hitler! How can I help you?" Not sure you heard what you thought you heard, you answer that you're here for a job interview. The receptionist tells you to have a seat. A moment later, someone comes out and says, "Heil Hitler! I'm the hiring manager, are you ready for your interview?"
Do you take the interview, or do you walk out?
I happen to boycott Hobby Lobby and Chic-fil-a. Is that really horrifying to you?
People on Hacker News propose boycotting Google because they fired Damore, or because they were researching providing Search to China, or because they did or didn't work on AI weapons systems, or...
Do you similarly berate those posters? If not, what's different about what I'm saying?
"Totalitarianism: a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state."
I am proposing that private individuals and corporations don't do business with moral monsters, like say for instance, Nazis.
If a jewelry store sells blood diamonds, I propose to boycott them.
If a shoe is manufactured by slave child labor in China, I propose to not buy it.
It sure sounds like Nestle is doing some awful stuff around the world, maybe we shouldn't buy from them, either.
Do you really disagree with those positions?
Because this is just Free Association, where people have the right to associate or do business with whomever they like. And it could happen under a completely Libertarian government. Or even under an anarcho-capitalist or anarcho-communist society. Basically, the exact opposite of Totalitarian government.
Sounds like maybe you boycott businesses that work with totalitarian governments?