Ask HN: A better way to fund content creators | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A better way to fund content creators

2 pointsiamflimflam14 comments

I've been thinking about how content creators get funding. There's various things like Patreon, YouTube memberships etc... and lots of one off donation type things such as Ko-fi or directly using Paypal.

The problem is, this all quickly adds up to a lot of money and most people will just end up in the situation of thinking - there's no way I can support everyone I should, so I won't support anyone.

I wonder if there's room for a better way of doing things. Maybe a way to make micropayments actually work?

What if you could pay whatever your budget is each year (maybe even a couple of dollars) and then allocate proportions of that to the people you want to support?

Maybe this could be adjusted over the year and topped up - not sure how all the maths would work. But it would let you just say - I've got $10 for the year to spend - as I find people I want to support I'll add them to my list.

> The problem is, this all quickly adds up to a lot of money

That's also a lot on my mind. The issue here is transaction fees and taxes. People keep calling it "donations", but essentially they are income for the artists and should be taxed as such. Commercial platforms and payment providers get a way-too-big cut from donations, imho, so I think the only way to make this somehow commercially viable is if artists unite under some low-profit organisation which keeps a low part of the donations just to keep lights on and redistributes the rest to their members. Bank transfers in the EU are cheap, but recipients often don't want to publish their bank account numbers, so there's an extra "privacy" tax.

Definitely - things like open banking should make transferring money incredibly cheap.

If this could be done, it should be done as a proper non-startup business so that there's not drive to have an exit. The goal would be to just create a sustainable business that can pay employees a decent salary and work for the creators.

Probably completely unrealistic.

Whenever I take a taxi cab, I ask drivers about their attitude towards ride hailing apps. They seem to like them, but complain about the large cut they keep. When I suggest that drivers should form a collective and hire a few developers to build them their own solution that would operate on a break-even basis, they always insist that that's impossible to organise.

Sort of like what Brave tries to do with their Rewards system? https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

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