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Comment by bkraz | Hacker News Reader

Graph showing revenue for my YouTube channel vs Patreon over the years. In other words, my Patrons mean more to me than the YT algo. https://twitter.com/BenKrasnow/status/1300643248508080129?s=...

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You didn't include perhaps the most interesting part. You currently have 662k subscribers on Youtube while 1,221 subscribers on Patreon. Those numbers obviously aren't constant throughout the entire time frame of that graph, but it would generally indicate that less than 0.2% of people becoming patrons was enough to surpass the revenue from Youtube. I still have my doubts of how this scales for both consumers and Patreon as a company, but there is no question that this model is great for established content creators.

Those numbers look similar to Zynga’s whale user ratios.

The numbers might be similar, but I don't love the comparison due to the ethical differences between the two. There is a lot more shady psychology and manipulation going on with Zynga than there is when a creator of free content starts accepting donations through Patreon. This is especially true when the membership bonuses are setup like Ben's in which they are mostly just being thanked in slightly more elaborate ways as the donation level increases.

https://www.patreon.com/AppliedScience

Importantly, there's a limit to how much money you can spend on a single 'client' [0]. I don't think Zynga had meaningful limits on whale spend per game?

[0] I assume client is the inverse of a patron? Just going by Roman usage.

Is there? Apart from the preset tiers, you can usually specify a custom amount to donate monthly, so you could easily spend a few thousand per month on a single creator.

Sorry, I meant there's not much of an incentive to keep pumping in extra money for most types of content.

As opposed to eg Zynga or cam girls.

Yeah, I think while Patreon's high end are fans buying merchandise and donating, Zynga's are addicts.

YouTube has a huge number of bots on it as well. Patreon is less easily gamed.

Is it? I see Patreon as OnlyFans for nerds - and I don't think OnlyFans is that dissimilar to Zynga...

That depends on the user behavior and expectations. For example, I get exactly nothing back directly for any of the patreons I back. No gifts, no bonuses, no personal interaction, nothing. Some send things to backers but I ignore it as it doesn't interest me. OnlyFans and Zynga there is I feel an expectation and goal of a personal reward for your payment.

But the nice thing of Patreon is that users can do small donations (like $0,50 / month) and it would already out-earn Youtube's ad revenue by a lot.

> less than 0.2% of people becoming patrons was enough to surpass the revenue from Youtube

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 could be a scaling issue. The parent has put out 26 videos in two years. There's a good chance that doubling the amount of videos released would roughly double the ad revenue, but might not double patreon revenue. Gamersnexus, for example, likely gets twice as much revenue from ads than patreon, but they also release daily videos.

Rewarding people for quality over quantity seems like a step in the right direction

Youtubes algo killed animation. Notice how all the big animated youtube videos are about 10 years old now. Its impossible to make money on it. The only channels that can survive are the ones that can pump out a video per week or more.

Kurzgesagt make high quality animated videos and seem to be doing quite well. 13 million subscribers on the English channel alone. All of that despite only releasing about one video a month.

I doubt they make much YouTube revenue, they also have 14,856 patrons on Patreon. Probably the only reason that it's worthwhile for them to continue to make such high quality animated videos.

CGP Grey is another animator. Looking at his Patreon, he's current at over $40k/month. Considering he's mentioned having a staff now, I'm sure that gets split between his entire project, but it still seems like it's significantly funded by supporters over ad revenue.

To be fair though, the animation part of the content is only a minor part of it. The educational and entertainment value of what's actually said is much more important.

Yep it did. That's why a lot of animators are moving to https://anim8.io

Do you mean YT algo does not recommend animated videos enough? From my experience I don't watch as many, except may be crash course history, and therefore don't get much reco either.

I think it's rather that the YT algo promotes channels that put out a steady stream of content more than channels that put out content once in a while. Animation takes a lot of work and thus time. This makes them much less likely to put out a lot of content.

Its also the fact that the payments are fairly equal. One animation that takes months to do gets as many views as someone playing a videogame for an hour.

I think it works similarly well even for newer Twitch streamers from anecdotal evidence.

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.

Interesting you got YT Red on there too. I heavily rely on YouTube Red to avoid ads on mobile, I hope they never get rid of it. I'm guessing the revenue is so low for it on your chart because most people don't have YT Red, not because it's not pulling its weight as compared to ads. I would probably just stop using YouTube on mobile if they ever removed YT Red, I don't know how people can stand the ads. There are so many ads.

On Android there is an app called NewPipe to avoid mobile adds. I'm having to pinch pennies, though.

This thread is in the context of compensating creators, not just skipping ads. Using Newpipe does nothing for creators.

That's definitely breaking the TOS

They did say they're hard up. Sheriff of Nottingham over here, scrounging the last gold coins out of the cast.

I don't think it's cheap to serve video content. That takes a lot of bandwidth, engineering, and compute resources.

It's not cheap to serve video content. That takes a lot of bandwidth, engineering, and compute resources.

And they give it to you for free!

It scales, though. It makes sense that a thing like Google YouTube exists: if you can scale enough, it becomes worthwhile at least to yourself to provide it. Your main benefit is control and exclusivity: you can expect very large results from very small controlling actions.

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.

YouTube without YouTube Red is not worth the trouble.

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.

They're still investing heavily into YouTube Premium (no longer Red) now so I don't see them getting rid of it anytime soon.

It's also still too early in the google ADHD cycle to kill it. Probably just reaching mid life at this point.

Nah, YouTube Premium makes sense. It's basically TY without ads. Why would that be too hard to maintain?

You hit the nail on its head. Google usually discontinues products which have high maintenance cost so even if it turns out that YT Premium makes less money than people watching ads (and I highly doubt the average person watches more than $10 worth of ads in a month), they'll still keep it.

Not really, for example Reader had really low maintenance costs. In fact at some point it was maintained by some of its former developers in their 20% time with no official head count.

I think it is a side effect of what keeps google from turning into IBM. Ossification is a perennial problem for large corporations especially traditional growth companies. They make their few big things then iterate on them. The "ADHD" shown by google, while it is annoying to users to have a perfectly serviceable piece of software discontinued unceremoniously, probably keeps the internal structure from becoming rigid and failing to adapt. I think they are probably slightly too far over on the side of kill stuff and move on but I'm not a multibillion dollar company.

Having zero headcount is the death knell for a project about to be cancelled. It only had low maintenance costs because the team was disbanded, presumably because it wasn't worth paying to maintain.

The story behind reader is more complicated than that.

It’s Google. The level of investment isn’t correlated to the propensity for cancellation.

Remember the most expensive ever Google product? Plus?

Right...

Or do you mean glass?

What? I'm pretty sure Cloud, Geo, and Search have more total investment than Plus.

Pretty sure self-driving will be the biggest loss, theyll make money from it and have relevance but itll be way less than they put into it so early

Do you know how much money Google has ever invested in Waymo ever?

I tried to search for a number, but couldn't come up with much. Obviously, this number would be very important in judging whether self-driving will be a loss for them.

> Google had spent $1.1 billion on the project [1]

The wikipedia also mentions Waymo raising ~2B and ~3b rounds that IIRC Google participated in as well. I'm surprised its so low honestly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo

Thanks. I should have thought to check on Wikipedia!

If you are willing to wait and just judge by eventually realised revenue, Waymo might still turn out to be a loss. But if you judge by current valuations (which reflect informed investors best guess of future revenue streams), then even after a recent major decrease we still have 30 billions USD.

That looks pretty decent for an investment of 1.1B + ~3B total.

Honestly I wasn't aware that Google Play Music was still around until I got an email telling me it would discontinued. I've been using YouTube Music since I signed up for YouTube Premium a few years ago, and I've been pretty happy with it.

Agreed. Been debating switching to Spotify. But not having ads on YouTube has been amazing.

YT Music is included in YouTube premium, you don't need to switch to spotify.

It seems to be the other way around for me. I could not buy Youtube Premium, unless I first signed up for Youtube Music.

YouTube music sucks. Now that google play music is canceled. I either continue paying for yt red and stick with the worse music platform. I switch to prime music. Or I ditch yt and google music all together and use Spotify.

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.

I still don’t get why google deprecated me as a customer. Google’s churn is exhausting.

I tend to attribute the product "churn" due to how promotions/raises are handled where releasing new products is heavily favored over maintaining existing ones.

> YouTube music sucks. Now that google play music is canceled. I either continue paying for yt red and stick with the worse music platform. I switch to prime music. Or I ditch yt and google music all together and use Spotify.

I was worried about this too, but have you tried it lately after doing an import of your Play Music data? I've been a subscriber to Play Music nearly since its inception and none of the functionality I cared about seems to be missing from YT Music in its current form. Indeed there are a couple of YT Music features I am using occasionally (the lyrics for example).

I think the impetus here is really just to unify all of their streaming content services under the YT brand, which if anything instills some confidence in me that they won't simply kill it off (Play Music was feeling like abandonware for a long time, being under the YT umbrella with an app under active development seems like an improvement).

That said, there are plenty of other ways to get the actual music files. I treat this service as a way to discover playlists and new artists only, and if there's something I want to retain access to I acquire my own copy to ensure I will not lose access to it in the future.

I did make the switch to Spotify (although I don't really watch much youtube, so youtube red wasn't a blocker for me). I haven't been super thrilled with Spotify's ability not to repeat the same songs okay the course of a few days when I listen to it throughout the day while working, but I'm slowly having success getting it to give me more variety. This might just be due to me having a smaller set of music that I'm interested in listening to (classic rock, progressive rock, and some blues) compared to their average user who might be willing to listen to anything popular from the past several decades of music, including new stuff as it comes out.

I tried YouTube music. But it’s so repetitive and playlists are just the same songs I’ve listened to recently.

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.

The auto generated lists are repetitive, but you can find any music playlist anyone's ever made on YouTube and those aren't. So instead of looking for a song and hitting play, which will start an autogenerated list based on your youtube likes, look for a playlist that has that song and play that instead. Also the more likes you have the less repetitive it will eventually get, but it's still a bit repetitive for me and I've been using YT Music for over two years now or however long since it's come out.

Please choose Apple Music or Tidal - they pay musicians substantially more than Spotify pay [1]

[1]https://images.prismic.io/soundcharts%2F571ff05f-9320-4e26-9...

Surprised how much Amazon music pays artists.

Spotify has no option to pay more because the labels eat all their profits. Apple being able to eat that cost because of their other ventures is anti-competitive. Blame the record labels, not Spotify.

Neither of those are significant for paying musicians, even if they're better than Spotify. This is why things like Patreon and Bandcamp have become so significant: the streaming providers are essentially not able to pay content creators at all, so none of them constitute a business plan for anything but themselves.

'better for the artist than Spotify' is… not a high bar :)

I buy a lot of music from Bandcamp, but its definitely not a suitable service for the vast majority of people.

> Please choose Apple Music or Tidal - they pay musicians substantially more than Spotify

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...

I've used both Spotify and Pandora for a while, and generally found Pandora superior.

Play music’s iOS app was riddled with bugs. The YouTube music replacement has all of the same features as play music with none of the bugs. The only regression is that to upload my own music I have to upload it to YouTube rather than a (supposedly somewhat) private personal library.

I much prefer Google Play's UI & did not experience the "riddled with bugs" you speak of. Just because it has the same content does not mean it's the same App or offers the same UX, it going away does not make me happy. I've been with Google Play from the start and am more likely to switch now, if it weren't for ad-free YouTube I would have quit because of this.

The UI sucked and the app sucked. I’m glad google did something because the previous state of atrophy was unacceptable. It would have been nice if they simply maintained their services, but replacing them with equivalent ones is acceptable.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184669

Used the Android version, but I agree Play had/has a much better interface.

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.

Google Play Music is being replaced with YouTube music, so it's not like Google is abandoning the product. It's more of a brand realignment.

Isn’t it Youtube Premium now? For some weird reason Google sadly won’t let you buy ad free YouTube, unless you also have Youtube Music. I’m sure there’s a point to decision, but I don’t thing it has a basis in consumer demand.

I quite like the model - either you pay for Youtube or you don't. If you do, you get a bunch of stuff, some of which you might not use; but the total is still cheap, so who cares. I'd hate it if all-you-can-eat restaurants would make you decide up front if you want access to the desert buffet, too.

Funny, every time I get an ad for YouTube Premium pop up at the bottom of my iOS client, the feature they tout is "videos keep playing in the background" which sounds like an anti-feature. I use "killing the YouTube App" as the most-convenient method of stopping YouTube videos because it's less work than dealing with the on-screen controls.

> I'm both upset Google Play Music is going away and that it might risk YouTube Red.

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?

Google Play Music is being transitioned to YouTube Music, I already got migrated, and I'm now using and is fine/comparable to Play Music, just reskinned. The only annoying thing is its tied directly to my YT account, so all my playlists show up in YT too, but any music I play/like in YT also effects what it considers my preferences and its led to some odd stuff popping up in the personalized mixes. It is kind of neat that I can listen to anything that's been posted as a video.

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.

If avoiding ads is your only concern, then Youtube Vanced [1] does the same as well. Have used it for the last couple of months and can happily recommend it. It's practically just a modified Youtube client, so every feature just works out of the box _(unsure how this compares with Newpipe though)_.

[1] https://vanced.app/

I was so confused why it's called Vanced, then I realized what's missing at the start of the word. It's genius.

For the people that do not want to give Google any money ever, you have many alternatives. I personally use Firefox(the 68 version) + Ublock Origin on Android, but you can simply use Brave out of the box. You can log to your account and have your full preferences and history. Also I use an addon to allow background playback on Firefox, but in Brave it's also out of the box. I would never support Google in any way, so no ethical concerns on my part. I support some channels through Subscribestar. Patreon does not support free speech, so it's a no go for me too.

I prefer not to support SubscribeStar in any way, as that normalizes right-wing extremists who break the Patreon TOS. I guess it depends on how much distance you want between yourself and your brand and right-wing extremists, and what things you're willing to accept under the guise of 'free speech'.

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 :)

I prefer that the tool I use to be the middleman between me and the creator I support to not decide for ME who is acceptable or not for ME to support. But I understand your point, this discussion would have no end here in Hackernews. Let's agree to disagree :-)

Happy to :) thank you for acknowledging that No Good Would Come of getting into the weeds on that one :)

YouTube is just monetizing a different part of your funnel. They both work together — you might not get many viewers interested in sending you money via Patreon either if your videos weren't getting an audience on YouTube via said algo...

>In other words, my Patrons mean more to me than the YT algo.

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.?

Youtube does provide those metrics

That's probably similar to a lot of people. It seems like a lot of the people I've watched for years on YouTube have started significantly cutting down on the length of their videos, usually sub 10 minutes, and making the full video available on patreon. It's like YouTube is just a way to get a foot in the door because it's the biggest platform, and they ditch it as soon as they can.

Yes. To clarify, I post all of my content on YT for free, and Patrons help pay for it if they choose. This model seems to make everyone happy.

That's awesome, not only for you but I especially applaud those who pay for your content. As a game developer it makes me wonder if there's a viable & addressable market there, to work on a single game "long-term" without feeling the crunch from Steam/reviews/etc.

Dwarf Fortress has been crowd funded since before Patreon existed and now has a Patreon page. I'm not sure you'd call it a total success though as the creators lived frugal lives for a long time in order to survive off the donations.

best example I can think of! https://www.patreon.com/bay12games

There seem to be some developers who make mod content for games who do well on Patreon.

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

I just want to know how paralives got interest in the first place - did they get big on Kickstarter or Patreon first ?

This is the model this boat builder (https://sampsonboat.co.uk/) is using and it's definitely a win-win for creator and audience, IMO.

I love that you continue to treat your channel as a hobby. The fact that you only post things you find interesting keeps the quality extremely high. There aren’t enough hobbyists around these days. I’m so glad I discovered your channel!

Who is gating full videos?

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.

Will Patreon become the real YT killer? They already have the best content creators on their platform, what’s to stop them building out a similar video hosting setup with search and discovery?

Google might want to nip this in the bud now with a cheeky 2bn $ acquisition...

> what’s to stop them building out a similar video hosting setup with search and discovery?

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

Right but that can fixed with a few million dollar and few months. I don’t think many (any?) companies fail because of web app performance

Reddit is getting there.

Definitely.

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.

The day they discontinue old.reddit.com is the day I stop visiting the site. The new version is like a case study in everything I hate about "new" web UX.

> (any?)

Friendster is frequently cited as a potentially massive company that failed due to its poor performance: https://www.techinasia.com/awesome-startups-failed

Throwing money, people and time at a slow web app just about never improves bad performance. 999 times out of 1,000 (and I’m not exaggerating that figure), it remains where it is or gets slower. Of the remaining one in a thousand, the substantial majority are due to them realising just how bad things are and clawing back some of the performance that they have steadily thrown away, but even then they’re not improving it to where I will arbitrarily decree it “should” be.

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 fix the slow web app by rewriting it.

In theory, yes. In theory you can often fix a slow web app without rewriting it, too. But in practice if you have a large team, your rewrite is statistically extremely unlikely to succeed in improving performance meaningfully or even at all.

Youtube operates on a freemium model where most people pay nothing other than a few cents received here and there viewing ads. If Patreon starts becoming the new Youtube their bandwidth bills will skyrocket and they will have to reduce creator compensation. If they become a paywalled YouTube (after the hypothetical death of YouTube) it will harm discovery.

Bandwidth is expensive. You need to be big enough player to have your own CDN spread across the world, with favorable peering agreements or bills will just kill you.

I don't know about that. A relatively small player can get several mbps per dollar all over the US and Europe. That means you only need about 1 dollar per month per peak concurrent user.

Also, you can use peer-to-peer transfers (like peertube)to decrease costs.

YouTube's real killer feature is its video discovery. Having millions users endlessly streaming content without many connection hitches while showing a dozen recommended videos each time does wonders for authors.

I'd be more worried about YouTube getting their shit together and making a Patreon killer than Patreon building video hosting.

doesn't youtube feature a patreon-like feature already, where you can sponsor the creators?

If they do, I have never seen it, and I watch a lot of YouTube.

It's called "channel memberships" - if you look at [1] you'll see a 'join' button to the left of the 'subscribe' button (or at least, I do in the UK)

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

YouTube's killer feature is ability to INFLUENCE video discovery. There is no need for them ever, ever to care about being able to pay creators in a competitive way, when they can be paid (or simply needed) just to get the content out there and seen by an audience.

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.

Terrible idea. They're not a content hosting platform, they're a content creator payment system. Why become a bandwidth provider and directly fight Google in a domain that Google has already scaled into?

I sub to heaps of science infotainment channels and the YT algo hasn't ever recommended your channel. I think that anecdotally shows how broken the YT algo is. You just got one more YT sub and a potential new Patreon sub, too. Cheers!

Very interesting.. You have a successful channel, sorry to see that COVID has set you back so.

Do you have paying subscribers through YouTube? I'm curious to know, when presented an equal choice of Patreon vs subscribing via YouTube, what % of paying subscribers choose each option.

The question is, do you do different things for YouTube vs. Patreon. Potentially, YouTube is more akin to a short lived annuity vs. a Patreon job.

Maybe not, depends on the accretion of your content.

Could you speak about why Patrons are more likely to pay on Pateron than elsewhere?

[Not op] There are a few reasons, but two big ones are being directly supporting the creator (YT requires you use memberships which are flat-rate and not user-adjustable) and getting perks for pledging (like Discord access, access to pre-release work, etc).

Probably the convenience of paying multiple creators with one credit card transaction, and one login. I guess you could call this a network effect. YT had/has various direct payment options, but they are confusing and never made as much sense as Patreon's model, which allows per-month or per-creation pledges. Strange since YT's existing infra would seem a big advantage in doing exactly what Pareon has.

I think it varies a lot. Some Patreon creators use it as a sort of "tip jar", where the rewards for various tiers are relatively minimal compared to the main product that is given away for free. This is very common for web comics, and I'm guessing also common for Youtubers. In these cases, the main "reward" is helping to ensure that the creator can continue producing the content they're releasing for free. Other creators use Patreon as the medium by which to deliver their content, and only patrons hace access to it. So this is more like a traditional subscription model than a tip jar. And of course there are various gradations in between, and probably other models as well.

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.)

Glynn Stewart (sci-fi author) uses it [0] to release his novels 2 weeks before they land on Amazon, which is when they get removed from Patreon as he is part of KU. So both to give people an alternative to Amazon despite technically being Amazon exclusive and to allow people to get them early.

[0]: https://www.patreon.com/glynnstewart

The nice thing about Patreon is it explicitly is structured for tiered subscription support and removes the need for creators to do any payment system managing.

It's not a discovery platform. Essentially (and I know Jack Conte would like to evolve this but it already works without such an evolution) there's no reason to even be on a Patreon page unless you were already fixing to pay the creator. That makes it pretty self-selecting.

Just a side-note: just discovered your channel, pretty interesting content.

Love your YT videos! I’m always impressed and learn something new.

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