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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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