Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

Tangent on Paetron:

> you get your money as a subscription instead of a one-time thing. The second part is REALLY important.

I agree that this is often good. Especially for some types of creators. However I think a lot of people have abandoned the store model when it would suit them well. For example I run a lot of RPG campaigns and like to grab maps often from people on Paetron. However often I only need a couple of maps for a specific campaign or one specific map that I like from the backlog. I think you can usually subscribe for one month and grab what you need, but Paetron doesn't make this obvious and it is certainly awkward. I have no interest in subscribing to an artist whose next map is likely not relevant to my campaign. If these people had stores I would be buying maps frequently, but they don't so I pass them by.

If you are making content where most of your audience is going to appreciate every post (for example producing entertainment or information) then the subscription makes a lot of sense and is hugely valuable. However I see this model being used even where a substantial portion of the potential audience likely has interest only in a small section of the work and I suspect that choosing only this model is closing off potential additional income.

I can see why Paetron doesn't offer setting prices for individual posts or similar, the subscription model is lucrative when it works. However there is definitely a missing piece in some situations.

A good way to do this is to make a Patreon where you drop content each month, and for old content make it available on Gumroad for the price of a month of Patreon.

Fanbox has a pretty interesting model for this, when you subscribe to a creator you only get access to posts up to a month prior (as well as all future posts), and to get access to specific previous posts the creator can make available bundles which you can buy for a one time fee. It reduces piracy and encourages prolonged subscriptions rather than subscribe->download all->unsubscribe.

I've had similar issues with people who make 3d models for gaming and I find it super frustrating. I just want a model of a Dwarf cleric and maybe other models in the future, but I don't want to subscribe to you.

I think Patreon works because people don't expect something in return by default, they just want to support someone or someone's work they're a fan of. It becomes one of those background / thoughtless payments, something left on until the person paying needs to save money or doesn't like the creator anymore.

It's where the business market is at as well, allowing e.g. Microsoft or Adobe to no longer have to force themselves to release new versions with stupid features to make more money than they ever have.

There's an impedance mismatch here, common in both artistic and technical activities though not universal:

The artist/ technician does an activity - for which they need to be duly compensated or else they're going to have to do this for a few hours once in a while as a hobby, since they work in the Mill for sixty hours per week. This activity has some product you can capture, maybe it's a painting, a poem, a noise, an algorithm, a mathematical proof...

The audience would like to benefit from copies of that product. And we live in the 21st century so we can digitally copy many of the above things essentially for free. The audience would gladly pay even though copying itself is free, but... how much?

Unfortunately there is no relationship between how much time you spent making the Product and either how many people want copies of it, or how much they're willing to pay for them.

So you can't build something that matches these two things together. Patreon matches the reality for creators. Trudy and Doug write a comic every week †. They would like money, Patreon subscribers like me give them a few grand, and they continue to write comics. Would I like a comic about Grier, or indeed, about Oglaf himself? Too bad, here is a comic about... pirates? This model suits a lot of creators very well, and after all the idea is to support creators.

In contrast some of the print-on-demand or PDF-download RPG sites are closer to the audience's model. If I'm willing to pay $5 for a roleplaying game that's kinda like "Starship Troopers" I could buy 3:16. I don't care what else Gregor has done, or what he's working on now, but 3:16 might be interesting, it's less than $5 I can pick that up.

If you, as an artist/ technician, have bursts of interest and can't handle commitment, then that's great, Patreon isn't for you, when you make something put it on a per-product site and I hope you have some other source of income when inspiration doesn't strike.

My sister makes actual things, she's an embroiderer (and a lecturer, but we're talking about how to get paid for the art side of things). So, that's simpler, if you want a thing, she can make it, and that'll cost you money. So long as you don't waste her time specifying a thing and then not wanting it once you find out it's expensive, this is cool. Photographs of embroidery exist, but clearly a JPEG of a sixty foot wall hanging is not, in fact, a wall hanging, there's no mistaking the two.

† Oglaf: https://oglaf.com/

For anyone that is not aware oglaf.com is very NSFW. You may want to edit your post to make that obvious.

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