The creator economy can't rely on Patreon | Hacker News Reader

The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

joanwestenberg.com

135 pointsTimothee162 comments

This doesn't sound as dire to me as the author makes it out to be.

I think it sounds totally reasonable that you need 20,000 or even 100,000 engaged followers to be able to make it full time off creating content. I don't see how, even with advertising or sponsors, a smaller number of followers could ever pay a livable salary (out of 20,000 people, how many of those mattresses are you really going to sell?).

It used to be that a TV show needed viewership numbers of millions of viewers to be profitable, this is still a massive democratization of content.

No, tv shows where profitable with much, much lower numbers than millions.

Not many TV shows are profitable with less than 20,000 viewers, which is what we are talking about here.

Lois & Clark was canceled (not just not renewed - canceled in the middle of their contract) when their ratings fell below 10 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_%26_Clark:_The_New_Advent...

That doesn't mean it wasn't profitable, just that the network thought another show in that slot might be more profitable.

Talking about audience thresholds for profitability of TV shows is a bit pointless though, because there's so much variation in how much they cost to make. Effects-heavy action shows are ~30 million dollars an episode at the moment. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is ~1.5 million. Gameshows and reality TV are even cheaper.

> That doesn't mean it wasn't profitable, just that the network thought another show in that slot might be more profitable.

Another show in that slot being more profitable does mean that the show already in there isn't. The time slot is a resource that the show consumes; if it can't afford to pay for that resource, then it's unprofitable.

That doesn't mean that it couldn't pay for the slot. Just that something could turn out more money. Many of us value things beyond pure profit at all cost.

That would only be correct if the cost of the time slot was set according to the maximum amount that any show could pay to be in it (determined via cross-universe market research?). But it isn't, so it's incorrect.

That is literally what happened (though the price was determined by expert estimate rather than surveys), and the show folded.

Indeed. People need to look at the numerator and the denominator. How many millions of content creators are there out there? How much disposable income do fans really have?

The advantage of Patreon-like systems is they let the creators "whale hunt", by taking much larger amounts of money from a small number of more engaged fans.

> Eventually, her viewers were asking for more recipes, more elaborate productions, and fancier kitchen gadgets to review. Suddenly, she needed some serious cash to keep it all going. She started taking on sponsors, then product placements, then brand deals. I watched her churn-out videos, just ads for knives, mixers, or meal kits. And I could see the light going out of her eyes a little.

Nobody "made" her do this: she was working for herself. And, as her own boss, she drove herself to work harder to the point of burnout.

It's almost directly analogous to opening a restaurant. You buy kitchen equipment and ingredients and hope to turn a profit from satisfying the desires of the public. Quite often it doesn't work out; most restaurants close within a year or two of opening.

The couple who make the best pizza in my city opened a (pizza) restaurant but they eventually decided that running a restaurant wasn't part of what they enjoyed, so they're back in a van outside of a pub. The pizza never really changed, a wood fired pizza oven fits inside a vehicle or a restaurant kitchen the same, and beyond that it's about the skill and judgement of the person making the pizza.

If you want to do what you love, and it makes enough money to live on, turning that into something you don't love but which makes more money is a grave mistake. We are mortal, this is all temporary.

> Nobody "made" her do this

It's not a career, it's more like being in a band. Everyone who is visible doing it, looks like a success. We don't see the 1000 failures.

My advice with all creative pursuits is: don't. Put it to one side and create the next one. If it keeps nagging at you despite your attempts to leave it behind, then you can give it some attention. Only go all-in when you're left with no other choice.

I saw Tim Schafer at Double-Fine express similar thoughts about their Amnesia Fortnight game jams. Even if an idea seems great; don't force yourself to pursue it, take a step back and see if it pursues you.

Sounds like great advice, reminds me about how (all?) writers cannot help themselves but write.

> How many millions of content creators are there out there?

So many that the scales of things have changed beyond recognition. The democratisation of tools and access to audiences has made things explode.

I read recently that there is more music recorded in a week these days than was recorded in the entire 1970s. With that amount of content being created, the vast, vast majority of creators aren't going to find a way to make themselves stand out and get paid.

>The advantage of Patreon-like systems is they let the creators "whale hunt", by taking much larger amounts of money from a small number of more engaged fans

I don't know, most people it seems block ads nowadays, and if you ask them how they compensate creators, they bend over backwards talking about how much they love Patreon.

So either people are either greedy and lying, or Patreon is actually pretty viable.

> It used to be that a TV show needed viewership numbers of millions of viewers to be profitable, this is still a massive democratization of content.

That is somewhat US pov. Small countries with small populations did and still do domestic content all the time and hitting even 100s of thousands viewers is absolutely massive if your population is in single millions. Sure it’s not game of thrones budget, but if you look something like hit danish tv it’s clearly as professional and high quality.

Most of the small countries are not Denmark and they indeed do have shit, low-budget TV shows on all the time.

True, but even the low-budget programs need crew, production companies, studio or locations, surprising amount of gear etc. Average influencer can run their setup so much more light weight.

Subscription services like Patreon are the only way I give people money unless they sell a product I want. I'm not going to watch commercials, and I'll skip sponsored videos or segments every time. If the idea is that not enough people use Patreon for you to make money, then go ahead and run advertisements, I'll just move on down the road to someone else. If the idea is that Patreon in particular is bad—that it takes too big of a cut, or doesn't have enough features—then tell me what other service to use. But the model where many fans directly support creators they like via small contributions on a recurring basis, that's the one we need to work if there's going to be a creator or artist economy in the future, so we should probably figure out how to make it work rather than tossing it out. The alternative of just more and more advertisements being shoved into everything is not the world we want to live in, so let's make the better option work.

Reality is the vast majority of people will absolutely refuse to pay content creators. Even legit newspapers with large staffs can’t get people to subscribe. Most people are ok with ads though. Your best bet is some sort of split where a small niche try’s to go subscription because there’s no chance of a widespread content creator subscription service that can replace ads.

All of your assumptions - and the article's - are rooted in this profoundly unequal society. The very worst of us are making billions on our collective suffering, and will gladly keep murdering millions to keep it that way. That's the context missing from tfa.

Universal basic income, as an example, makes debates like this irrelevant. There may be other ways to run things that also make these arguments look like the anachronism they ought to be.

I believe a world with 99% less advertising is not only possible, but necessary.

And I believe a world where creators can create, without having to sell their souls, is not only possible but necessary.

And we best make that world manifest fast, before our window closes.

How about, for example, delaying content releases until certain funding milestones have been reached? This will act as an incentive for people to pay for the content. If they want it released even earlier, they should pay more?

That doesn't get past the free-rider problem. That kind of thing can also wind up angering some people (which is kind of entitled, but that doesn't mean it isn't real)

Well there's a pretty good reason this won't work for the given example (newspapers). Why am I gonna wait for an NBC article when CNN (or worse FOX) posted the story already for free?

Some types of reporting I would be happy to fund and wait for but other stories need to be posted ASAP or they lose their value.

The same is true of art. For example, Age of Empires getting an expansion 25 years later is notable because it is uncommon. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/02/age-of-empires-2-gets...

As an author ...

People will gladly buy physical books off you, but they won't pay for articles. There seems to be a mental barrier between those two. A physical book in your hand probably feels more real, though the total amount of work isn't that different (to a series of articles).

Zero marginal cost structure of the internet has conditioned everyone to thinking digital goods should be free. Remember that anti piracy ad with "you wouldnt download a car" and literally everyone was like "of course I would download a car if I could"

"of course I would download a car if I could"

LOL at that, you're right.

When it comes to content online, we live in an era of total abundance. This is the sort of abundance that used to be considered utopian. You will literally never run out of excellent texts for free, a mere human just cannot read them fast enough. Same with videos, games etc.

But that abundance has significant downsides for the people who create all that content. Competing with free stuff is a task for Sisyphos.

And even more abundance is coming with the advent of generative AI.

The problem now isn't scarcity of content. It's signal vs noise.

As a consumer of content what we want is content specifically relevant and valuable to us, but there is too much noise most of the time. As a producer of content we want to is to be able to capture some of that value. For example if there was a source of content that have me an advantage in some domain area I work on, I would absolutely pay for it. (And in fact I do, like chatgpt plus).

For entertainment content there's probably enough free stuff that most people don't care to pay.

It didn't condition us, it reminded us that intellectual property is a social abstraction that flows against nature

A physical book is more real. If I buy a book, I have that book available to me effectively forever. If I "buy" something that only exists online, it's temporary.

But, at least for me, when I buy a book I may actually read it (maybe), and then it sits around until I manage to donate it when I move in seven years. Is it really any different from a digital purchase I forget about?

Maybe not for you, but there are tons of people who reread treasured books regularly. For that crowd, a digital purchase is not great.

I think the issue with Patreon, and a lot of similar services is that they are too focused on the "creator > consumer" relationship. I think the biggest value that a content creator is creating is acting as a beacon that people can rally behind regarding a specific niche and facilitating "consumer > consumer". Their biggest value add is as a curator. It's often difficult, especially for smaller niches to find a dedicated community around it if not for a content creator creating content and promoting it. In many cases, a content creator becomes synonymous with the niche.

I've been working on a platform called Sociables (https://www.sociables.com/) that gives content creators a place to offer their community as a part of their product offering. The difference between Patreon is it is much more focused on allowing creators to set up a place for their community to interact with each other instead of the more para-social style relationship seen on Patreon.

Most Patreons I've seen use discord to fill that specific social gap, but I've always found it a little odd that they didn't try to fill that niche themselves.

Discord are with Server Subscriptions: https://creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/104230...

Patreon knows that Patreon doesn't work - they don't fund themselves by donations on Patreon; instead they take a cut of other people's donations.

And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected.

Liberapay's model seems much more sustainable - donations only, no rewards; Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because they actually believe their system works.

>Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because they actually believe their system works.

As in they are also funded by donations, or do the creators themselves pay for entry?

They are funded by donations: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/

Do you suppose their 41 members split the 700 euros evenly each month or have some kind of Ramen group buy system?

No need to guess: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/income/ . Most money goes to the creator of Liberapay, and I would not be surprised if it would mainly cover the costs of running the service.

They say they are funded by donations:

> How is Liberapay funded? Are there fees?

> Liberapay does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by the donations to its own account. However there are payment processing fees.

https://liberapay.com/about/faq

Patreon also takes VC funding on a regular basis; if you ask Jack Conte what his plan is for when they come back around looking for profit he will just blow a bunch of sunshine up your ass about how all these investors are just totally great people who believe in supporting the arts.

When they raised rates for new creators but grandfathered in existing ones it was pretty much outed as a network effect VC scheme.

> Patreon knows that Patreon doesn't work - they don't fund themselves by donations on Patreon; instead they take a cut of other people's donations.

Huh? So does Paypal by taking a cut of payments. It does not work by people donating to Paypal. Does that mean Paypal doesnt work? The proposition does not make sense...

> And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected.

More than that, I don't think Patreons will ever be able to compete in a world where Netflix/Max/Disney exists just by making content. For example, if you consider the $10 tier of The Command Zone[1], you'd have to weight that in against something like the Disney+ catalog, which I think is even cheaper and definitely has a lot more content?

[1] https://www.patreon.com/commandzone

I’m a full-time content creator. I feel like patreon/newsletters/paid communities are more hassle than anything.

When I look at the pros and cons of every single revenue strategy, sponsorships has the highest gain and least cons (for me).

Sponsors pay at least 10x what ad revenue pays, I don’t have to ask my community for money and the audience are likely to skip the ad anyway if they didn’t want to watch it.

Patreon is great in theory, but as soon as sponsors start inquiring, you realize Patreon is a lot more work for less revenue.

What does the typical sponsorship pay, and what factors does it scale with?

It depends. I have a large following across short form platforms like TikTok and Instagram too. Usually for an integration (basically 1-2 minute ad) it ranges between 8-14k. For a short form video usually around the same.

Personally YouTube is ruined for me because of sponsorships. It just became advertisement packaged as content.

I understand from an economical perspective why people do it, but I can't shake the feeling that the content is just an excuse and the ad is the meat of the content.

You are one of today's 10,000.

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

And if you have android:

https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular

Extensions like sponsor block don't help when entire videos are centered around promoting a product. A very popular mountain bike channel I used to follow, GMBN, for example, pretty much only makes videos in order to promote sponsors. The sponsors drive the very content we're here for, it's not just 30 second spots.

SponsorBlock can also tag entire videos of the kind you cited! It won’t block them by default, but the choice of what to do when you find out will be yours.

I do notice that the GMBN and GCN videos that are just advertorials do have "AD" in the top corner when you look at the video thumbnail. I'm assuming this is an EU or UK thing, because there are a lot of other channels that do exactly the same thing but there's no such "AD" callout.

https://imgur.com/iorhrD7

These videos take away from the channel's integrity for me but at least they're clearly marked as ads

Fair point there. That channel would just have to drop for me if the "review" videos got excessive, and find a replacement or no replacement.

I'm looking to skip the embedded ad-read sponsorships, credits, the "thanks for subscribing," and "thanks for our patreons" stuff and sponsorblock does that in spades.

Install SponsorBlock! With YT Premium and that, my video experience is completely ad-free.

Install an ordinary ad blocker and your video experience will be completely ad-free without needing YT Premium.

Sorry, but an ordinary ad blocker will not block the ads embedded in the video.

Apparently "SponsorBlock" actually solves that. Haven't of it before, but the description is promising.

>>> SponsorBlock lets you skip over sponsors, intros, outros, subscription reminders, and other annoying parts of YouTube videos. SponsorBlock is a crowdsourced browser extension that lets anyone submit the start and end times of sponsored segments and other segments of YouTube videos. Once one person submits this information, everyone else with this extension will skip right over the sponsored segment.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...

> Sorry, but an ordinary ad blocker will not block the ads embedded in the video.

Yes, that's why I called it a replacement for YT Premium and not a replacement for SponsorBlock.

With YT Premium the people you watch actually get paid even if you skip the ads.

They would get paid slightly less though, since the premium revenue split is based on watchtime IIRC.

The people I watch don't get paid from youtube ads, don't like youtube ads, don't like Youtube forcing ads on videos they do not want to put ads on, don't like random companies forcing ads onto a video THEY made based on some nonsense "contentID" system that is trivial to cheat, and can't rely on youtube not shutting down their channel over "copyright" reasons that aren't even valid.

Patreon means all they have to do is exactly what they want to do, put that on the internet, and make a livable wage. This isn't exactly an isolated case either. Every youtube creator between 100k - 1 million "subscribers" is better served by just doing what they want and being supported by patrons. It is the single most direct and viable form of talent funding.

Most of these creators actively dislike youtube, which is why they push their literal replacement; nebula.

Yeah it changed mid-2020. Youtube was a nice place to go.

Cheap entertainment is getting boring.

I see the same few sponsorships constantly: Skillshare, Brilliant, Nebula, Hello Fresh, BetterHelp, Raid: Shadow Legends. I like to guess which one it's going to be when the creator starts telling a made-up story that leads into the sponsorship segment. The fact that it's the same ones, over and over again, across a wide spectrum of channels, makes me think that sponsorship is not yet a proven reliable source of income in the long term. A seemingly small number of companies are trying it out and it seems like they could easily pull out at any time. Patreon may be harder but it feels like a more dependable source of income than sponsorships.

Nebula is bit weird on that list as my understanding is that it is somehow creator owned and controlled, but rest yeah... I also wonder how long this model will operate, the advertising spend on these products must be significant and I wonder if it is sustainable in long run. Specially with these interest rates or in possible recession...

I don't exactly know how it works but creators tend to call it "my streaming platform" and that feels a little bit like a marketing angle. For the longest time I thought Adam Neely had literally funded and built Nebula.

It is a marketing angle, Wendover Productions is the actual creator of the service and has a video about how they bootstrapped the service and got it to the size it is currently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alqt6RCEWdM

Also PCBWay (mostly for "maker" videos) and VPN providers.

Paradox Interactive's relationship with the comedy sketch group Door Monster is also pretty nice to see. It seems clear that's not strictly a business relationship, but also someone at Paradox being genuine fans.

I think there's actually a bit of a sliding scale between personal patronage and corporate patronage. Local businesses sponsoring local plays, concerts or sports events is another example of sponsorship which isn't likely income-generating.

I love the oversimplified segments when they have some emperor’s message being intercepted and then someone suggests “you should have used nordvpn!”

One in that list is not like the others. Nebula sponsorships are for creators that are already a part of their network trying to move viewers to their platform.

That's not a diss on Nebula. I think, among all the others, nebula is the most likely to be sustainable. It is creator owned and operated and the pricing model model seems like it is able to make decent money for the people on it.

No affiliation to Nebula, just a happy, paying customer.

It really depends. My niche is in software and lots of brands allocate budget towards advertisements towards influencers. You might be right, long term it might dry up, but it’s been 2 years for me now and hasn’t slowed down

You forgot Factor frozen meals which I see all the time, but mainly on tools/building/woodworking channels.

Its a two sided marketplace and companies only care about the conversion they get from different channels. If demand dries up, it will be reflected in more attractive pricing - I don’t think it’s likely that the entire market pulls out.

FWIW - it seems like the campaigns are working. You seem to be familiar with the brands and someone below chimed in on how one particular brand is great. Multiply that by the viewership - that’s definitely a win.

Some quick (unverified) research tells me that YouTuber marketing pays somewhere in the range of 30-70 CPM. You can pretty easily calculate that against google AdWords with reasonable conversion assumptions to decide if it’s worth it.

My point is that in a healthy market, we'd expect a large number of sponsors and a large number of creators. What we seem to have in reality is a tiny number of sponsors and a large number of creators. Where are all the sponsors? Nearly my whole YouTube subscriptions list lives at the whim of basically three sponsors. If, indeed, they decide to cut their spend, the creators will all essentially have to accept it because there aren't a lot of other sponsors to choose from. It doesn't have to be a full withdrawal from sponsorships for it to be devastating for creators.

I think sponsorships work better for more niche products on niche podcasts / YT channels. One great example I can think of are the sponsorships on the Syntax Podcast[1]. IIRC LogRocket was a sponsor a few years ago, I gave it a try based off their ad and I've been a happy customer ever since. Other products they rep are things like Sentry and Sanity and I think those companies are definitely seeing an ROI because they keep coming back.

The problem with the sponsorships you mentioned is they are all broad scale B2C where "everyone" is a potential customer. So you end up with channels that have nothing to do with the product promoting the product and it just comes up as disingenuous. When the hosts of Syntax are telling me that I should try out Sentry, Sanity or any other product in the web dev space, I'm much more confident that it's a legit endorsement based on experience rather than just reading the script.

[1]: https://syntax.fm/

It's quite informative to look/listen to old videos and podcasts, and see who the sponsors are.

So many of them are now-dead VC-backed startups, but here and there you find a sponsor that still exists (Squarespace, for example).

The food related ones are always the most amusing because you know it's all fake bullshit and the host doesn't actually use the product, because nobody does.

Heh, I recently saw a video which started by an over the top promotional sketch, and then in the middle of the video they openly made fun of it (again) by deliberately slowing down the pace of the video while using a 150 years older competitor...

Depending on the type of content, there is always a chance the sponsorship deals affecting integrity.

Very true. I’m not a review type channel, so this isn’t something I have to worry about.

That interesting since several YouTube creators I follow on Patreon (ok, so it's a self-selecting group) say the opposite. They've done sponsors a few times, but the sponsors are so much work to collaborate with (they take too long to approve videos, they want pointless changes done, etc) that they gave up on it and rely on Patreon instead where they can just create the videos they want to on their own schedule without interference.

I’ve done sponsorships for a while now, we have contracts specifying that any changes they make is minor at most.

Business sense is really important when dealing with this.

Same with all the various things - you have to balance the effort vs the reward.

One trick is to not do too much on Patreon to start, do the bare minimum so that you don't get overwhelmed later. E.g, give early access instead of a custom special show each week/month, etc.

Okay, but I don't want to watch businesspeople, I want to watch what this person is making/doing/writing/etc! That's the whole point!

Patreon means I can just give them dollars for doing a good job, and they don't have to go get an associates degree in marketing to realize that sponsorships are lowballing them entire magnitudes.

I consider this infinitely better to a creator selling my attention, for pennies on the dollar compared to what a company would spend for equivalent advertising from a less exploitable cadre, to companies that are morally grey at BEST, often false advertising or literal scams like Established Titles in the norm.

You're right! Creators often get short changed from deals like this. All I am saying is that my background has made this career decision for me easy to transition into while making sponsors sustainable.

I know lots of creators who get completely screwed on this front. I am sure the same could happen on Patreon.

How much extra work is Patreon if you don't offer any extras to people who sponsor on there?

Most sponsored content is either completely orthogonal to the channel and its contents which is quite iffy if the creator is positioning themselves a someone with judgement their audience can trust (non-gaming channels advertising Raid: Shadow Legends, or non-tech channels advertising NordVPN), or actively make me lose respect for the creator (gaming channels advertising Raid: Shadow Legends, tech channels advertising NordVPN, or anyone with BetterHelp after all the shit they pulled).

Of course there are exceptions, like content creators posting on Nebula being sponsored by them or anything Josh Strife Hayes does.

I’m sure none but then I would feel guilt taking money from my audience. I know it might be silly, but sponsors makes everything free for everyone.

Sponsors want something in return. Reminds me of Rembrandt who got into trouble because he didn't beautify his clients enough and went for art instead...

I took a look at your YouTube channel and it was exactly what I expected it to be.

What did you expect it to be?

Exactly what it was.

White dude making coding videos with the usual modern algorithm-inspired cringe thumbnails and titles. It definitely seems to be working, though - over 500k subs is impressive.

Hahaha! Love this comment. Long form and short form content has been significant for the growth.

500k subs and a very low level of actual views...

Long form has been expirementation to see what works the last year or so. Shorts is how we grew a lot, long form still needs work but getting there!

When you say sponsor do you mean a 1 minute advertisement in a 10 minute video where you say "Today's video is sponsored by ABC Corporation, they make this useful product to do XYZ" or do you mean a video where you got a free product and paid money to do a promotional video about the product?

I've seen both and I don't mine the advertisement style but when someone makes an entire video about a product that they got for free they seem like a shill. Usually their enthusiasm level is off and the whole things seems fake and I don't like watching them.

As for Patreon being a lot more work, I am wondering how? Every month Patreon charges me $12 for the various creators I support. Some of them create videos full time but many have full time jobs. The Patreon money lets them buy old computers, toys, or games to review. I'm nostalgic about my 1980's childhood.

Patreon seems really easy when they say for 10 seconds "If you would like please contribute to my Patreon account"

getting a product for free translates to $0 in your bank account. It's not sponsored, its just been given or lent to you. You can't feed your family with free items.

In my first paragraph I said:

"got a free product and paid money to do a promotional video about the product?"

It's not just a free product but also money to promote the product.

It’s different for everyone, but for me, it’s similar to the 1 minute section like you mentioned. I integrate it within my video. Not sure if this is what you’re referring to, but if someone doesn’t disclaim that something was sent to them or paid to say it. Highly illegal.

Reason I say Patreon is a lot more work is because usually you need to build an incentive with Patreon as well (community, BTS, extra content).

The incentive doesn't have to be meaningfully extra work though, many of the creators I follow just have the patreon incentive be stuff like getting access to videos a week early, getting access to a discord to hangout in or if they're streamers, having one of their streams each month limited to supporters.

But on top of that, I have never really thought much about the incentives anyway, I join the patreons/youtube memberships of the creators I really enjoy because I enjoy them. For the vast majority of them I don't even pay attention to if they're delivering on their incentives as long as their regular content continues to be enjoyable.

Appreciate the insight. Something like this is something I have been debating and hearing this is great.

I saw a streamer on Twitch say "This is my favorite hobby. It pays for itself".

I don't think most of these people expect to live off of the income. Most people seem well aware the odds of that happening is low.

Remember that tons of content was created before YouTube was paying anyone anything. They just wanted to share it.

The best streamers don't get into it because of money. In any case, 500 average viewers seems to be the magic number for a lot of people to start really considering going full-time.

There is also a deeply worrying trend to "milk" creators, in "controversial" topics, by banning them and taking the income for the company. It allows for unholy alliances of company revenue, controversial topics, and state driven brigading.

I’d normally take a ban as an indicator that the website doesn’t want that content. What’s the evidence that they actually do?

Tom Nicholas has a really good breakdown of Patreon's longevity

https://nebula.tv/videos/tomnicholas-the-rise-and-fall-of-pa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXyN3-gQwJw.

My primary guess would be that it's easier to earn your first dollars with fans vs. with B2B sponsorships (or even with retribution from platforms like YouTube). Also, I don't really understand the term illusion in the image if someone could help. 5% conversion from content consumer to "paid fan" does not seem that low

I also struggle with understanding the image. It starts out as a flow chart depicting the conversion funnel. In the end it somehow is a state diagramm of the feeling of the creator. I get the points that are spelled out in the text, but the image is a mistery for me.

In a perfect market, the profits tend to zero. This is a basic idea in Economics, and can be seen in any area of work that gets 'democratized'. Whether that's good or bad can be debated, but the outcome isn't very surprising.

Apart from a few (0.01% or lower) content creators, most do NOT have very distinctive content. In economic terms it's a commodity market, and therefore it's not surprising that it pays similar profits.

A lot of creators have to realize that Patreon is a stepping stone to sponsors.

I run Casting Call Club, which is basically where amateur Patreon creators go to collaborate on projects and ideas. Many of the CCC members will only stay until they either A) fail, or B) get big enough to have sponsors.

What creators need is a better youtube algorithm. Is it just me, or has youtube recommendations become almost unusable by now? Some years ago when I spent "an hour watching YouTube" I'd watch a huge majority of videos recommended by the algorithm based on my current subs. Today it is 1%. Why? I'll give you an example.

I have varied interests, I sub and regularly watch a number if channels in each of my hobbies, but fixing cars is not one. However, one day I searched youtube how to change a bulb in a specific model of a car. This was a week ago. My youtube feed is still full of car repair howto videos. The people I'm subscribed to have produced new videos, but they don't show up.

Also I used to get recommended channels similar to ones I sub. No more. It looks 100% random now. I get recommended a random channel with 10 subs, but somehow I manage to miss one of the biggest channels in one of my hobbies for months.

I agree that the algorithm is weird.

To start with, it feels like 30% of the videos are videos I’ve already watched.

The rest tends to be a very naive list of things related to the last ten videos I’ve watched including many that were recommended before that I didn’t watch and never will. Often I pull down to refresh and it alternates between two lists and that’s it.

I know recommendations are a complex problem but the results seem very far off from what I’d expect.

here's my recommendation to get better suggestions.

in your single account you can multiple yt channels. the recommendations are per channel, so if you like cooking you can make a cooking channel where most of you recommendations will be just that.

I have around 4 channels each attached to a Firefox container you different topics (1main + 3 for more specific interests)

> This was a week ago. My youtube feed is still full of car repair howto videos

FWIW, if you go into your view history, you can remove videos from there, and they will no longer influence your recommendations

This, I've found that people most comfortable with algorithmic feeds regularly prune what they don't want and cultivate what they do. Even tiktok is subject to this, albeit with an exceptional high bar for skipping skills.

I only use the subscribed tab, if that runs out of videos, I stop watching

> Is it just me, or has youtube recommendations become almost unusable by now?

It's honestly the opposite for me. It's scary good at finding content related to my recent history, and it's even gotten better at directing me towards even toward very small (<1k sub) content creators. I don't subscribe to quite a few youtubers simply because I know the algorithm will point me to their relevant new uploads anyway.

But yes, if you take even a step towards some semblance of clickbait, or even hover over some random video too long, your feed will suddenly transform into a flood of crypto, cat videos, culture wars, or just general low quality content. You need to aggressively cull your history and make use of "don't recommend this channel" to stop that. Maybe even clear your entire history if it feels too lost Also, YT is aggressively promoting shorts no matter what you do, in my experience.

As a discaimer, I have Premium, so I don't know if I get a better algorithm as a result of that.

> it's even gotten better at directing me towards even toward very small (<1k sub) content creators

The cynic in me thinks this is because if you have under 1k subs you can't claim any ad revenue...

Yeah, that's shy I mentioned I have premium. I apparently have some disproportionate weight with my view and there's less incentive to try and make me watch more popular or longer videos, I imagine. That can definitely change how and what they put in my feed.

What I've done is turn off watch history. That makes the front page blank, but it means that the recommendations next to videos are only related to that video, which in my experience makes for much higher quality recommendations than ones based on watch history.

There's a lot more content too though, and the attention span of the average viewer has gone down dramatically with TikTok, which is why YouTube launched Shorts and Instagram launched Reels.

It's not just algorithm and search. ux for grouping/viewing/hiding/watching later/getting rid of notification thumbs/etc/etc/etc of all your numerous subscriptions is nonexistent and it sucks.

I worked on a creator economy Salesforce-like product for the for businesses wanted to pay creators, run campaigns, interact with creators on a unified platform etc.

I have to say that Sponsorships make much more revenue than Patreon, however sponsors have gotten a bit smarter and not simply relied on view count anymore, they look at things like quality metrics, how the creators voice stands in the community and other aggregate factors (which we would factor for them in the product as a good estimate, we were an organic match making service in a way).

That is all to say that you can get much better sponsorships if you have a Patreon because it a very strong signal to companies about your viability in the community.

Its not required by any means, but it serves a purpose around this. I am 100% certain that most of the creators you might see with sponsorships and Patreons have realized that simply having a good active Patreon lets them up their sponsorship money and thats why many keep it around even when its revenue by comparison is a rounding error

I create very valuable content that saves my readers time and money. It's not entertainment; it's thoroughly detailed information about settling in a new country. It's a bible for local bureaucracy that a lot of people have come to rely on.

I get about one donation for every ten to twenty thousand visitors. Donations are about a hundredth of my income.

If I got a donation for every reader I personally help over email, I'd get twice as many. Even the people who ask for personal assistance don't donate.

Donations simply don't work. Most people pay nothing if they can. I have made my peace with that.

Maybe we don't need that many "content creators" then.

What happens if the creator just say no?

You don't have to operate like a VC-funded company and look for infinite growth, if you want to stay small with cheap production then just stay small?

There's likely a silent majority that supported the creator because they are authentic and relatable.

Just make it clear to your supporters that's your objective and don't expect more.

Right, the people who harass you to "more more more MORE" and "better better BETTER" are NOT the people you want to enable and encourage. Usually they have a parasocial relationship with you and that just feeds into it. They also are enormously entitled and when you eventually burn out trying to keep up with their insatiable needs, they will be irrationally upset at you.

The TL;DR of this is basically there are too many people creating content.

Best thing that creators could do is tell other creators to quit. The author doesn't say this part but really that is what it comes down to.

Instead she offers a generic advice about diversifying the medium of delivery.

The irony is that the "creator economy" was meant to democratise content and make everyone able to make a living from being a "creator".

In reality the maximum number that can be sustained in this manner is less than the number of salaried listicle writers at media outlets.

Everyone? Or more people. There's definitely more people

> In reality the maximum number that can be sustained in this manner is less than the number of salaried listicle writers at media outlets.

I think the maximum is probably quite lot more than there are salaried writers. But it's certainly a lot less then "everyone".

> make everyone able to make a living from being a "creator".

Never "everyone". A brief pause to think about how the world works and how all those physical artefacts around you get there imply that it could never be more than a few percent.

Just adding to others: not everyone, anyone. The promise was that you don't need to go through nepotistic middlemen and can just directly engage with an audience solely on the merit of your work.

It's the same problem that manufacturing has had for decades now - sure, every single town in the world could have it's own beer, there's nothing preventing that, and the additional cost per beer would be minuscule - but shipping is so cheap and the savings from consolidating so high, that unless there is substantial outside pressure it's not going to happen.

Supply and demand means it's probably not everyone. What it has meant is you have a much, much more diverse set of content than before. Realistically, attention-based economies are always going to have a few standout winners. What platforms like patreon give you is a much healthier middle section, where smaller creators that still have some audience can make a bit more than they normally would (which ranges from 'a decent living' to 'beer money'), and that does mean they make more stuff. You still have the long tail of people who mostly don't get enough attention to bother monetising it.

I wonder if monetization with a low subscriber base isn't as hard as we imagine. Afterall, you just need to net like 80K in a non HCOL city to live very comfortably. (assuming no employees, or office rent, or expensive production)

It is hysterical to me people think this.

It is just because you are not accounting for all the people trying this and failing. By definition, no one is watching all the youtube videos that only get 50 views per episode of a podcast.

It isn't hard if you use a massive selection bias towards the winners and just assume you will also be a winner.

May as well just say it is easy to make a living in the restaurant business. Just open a successful restaurant!

To monetize a small subscriber base you have to pull a sizable $x per active user that almost requires you to become a little scummy at best. I've seen a lot of personal finance influencers (FIRE especially) pull sizeable amounts of money because their niches are pretty favorable, but they end up pushing weird financial products and courses for $Xk on how to make money blogging/real estate/some other business.

That's the big problem - let's say you have 50 to 100 viewers who like you, to the point of kicking in about $70 a week (what you need to get to $80k) - that's pretty high. At that point, you have 100 pretty loyal people (more loyal than the average church-goer, for example) and the temptation to milk them could be quite strong.

A low sub base liking/commenting will keep your video somewhat relevant to the algo for recommendation. So you'll have a chunk of subs that stay the same, and a percentage of new viewers. Granted that will also cap your total views in some way, but I wonder what the threshold is. Like maybe 100k or 50k of subs is sufficient to keep you buoyant.

Democratization is the act of empowering so many people that none of them can make a living at it anymore.

Pick a hobby of interest in Youtube and there'll be a top of a pyramid where people have the right mix of attractivenes/message/marketing...and then hundreds to thousands of other people scrounging for scraps. (see Full Time RV)

Sorry, but the "creator economy" is a mostly-malicious delusion. Sure, it can sound great. And for a very lucky few it probably is great. But the 99% reality is that it's just hype from techo-utopians, wanna-be's, get-rich-quick salesmen, and a bunch of mega-corporate platforms - whose profits are built on the backs of virtual-slave "creator" labor.

(Yes, maybe this is a bit too cynical. Maybe. A bit.)

I see parallels to the AppStore where the dynamics are similar but the return on spending money to attract attention works much more effectively. Basically discovery is totally screwed because the stores/platforms are oversaturated and no one has figured out a sensible way to curate content in an algorithmic manner. The only thing left is to be a first mover, already have a big audience elsewhere or to be able to pay for eyeballs and focus on retention and monetization metrics to get costs below revenue. For the average “gig work” creator the latter is basically out of reach whereas mobile games spend hundreds of millions of dollars on customer acquisition and got incredibly sad when the privacy changes Apple made reduced the effectiveness of ad tracking.

Yep.

Ignoring stuff like charity raffles, I first saw such dynamics back in the 1980's, with this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonia_dilemma#Luring_Lotter... (in Scientific American, back when it was actually respectable). A huge-sounding jackpot, seemingly available to anyone with a postcard and a bit of luck...but that ain't how human nature actually works. A zillion wanna-be's entered, and nobody received enough money to even cover the cost of their postcard.

That is true, but I'd say that its no different when you're starting any new venture by yourself with the goal of being sustainable. The entertainment business is rough, but it's even harder to sell tangible goods/services and deal with customers, investors, accounting, inventory, shipping, and everybody expecting the perfect shit from you "bEcAuSe tHiS oThEr mEgAcORp dOeS iT". It comes full circle because ultimately you need eyeballs to sell your shit, and its awfully nice when you have creators with an audience, who they can convince to stand in line with an open wallet for the shiny widget that you made.

Let me one up you on the cynicism :P

> ...no different when you're starting any new venture by yourself with the goal of...

Perhaps...but in a healthy economy, >99.9% of jobs are not "start a new venture by yourself, trying to sell to the whole world".

I don't know what your definition of healthy economy is. 90% of startups fail, but people still do it. Is that healthy?

Aside - The numbers are a lot more sane than I thought. I think its close to 50% the number of young people who want to become creators or think that being a creator is a viable choice for a career.

Long before the internet age, it has been the case that there are far, far more people wanting to do creative stuff full-time than there is market support for it. And yes, various vultures who try to make money from this fact - but don't overestimate how much they contribute to artist poverty, compared to supply glut.

Some people want to do something they believe in or can do which they have reason to believe other people get value out of and they reasonably think that they should be able to support themselves. If they add value, people should tip or whatever so they get something back for making your life better.

Monetization has been a hot button topic on HN for a long time. The HN crowd more or less hates any means to monetize content while also decrying the decline in quality writing.

And it's not just HN. Journalism is dying. Small town newspapers are going extinct. And then people complain about the poor quality of reporting when the people doing the reporting are typically paid a pittance.

I don't know the solution. I took HN's advice and "tried to get a real job" at some point and that didn't solve my problems either. I didn't get the job is the short version of stupid levels of drama.

This is obviously true. You just don't see all the people that are getting 50 views per video.

It is really just a type of more dispersed state lottery game without the state involved.

And how is that any different anywhere else in the modern economy... At least with the creator economy, content creation (including software) is more democratized and distributed.

Agreed, the power laws of online content consumption means that the top 10% of creators will accumulate most of the paying suscribers.

"Creator Economy" is a term akin to "Gold Rush", in the sense that it's pushed by VCs looking to sell shovels in the form of a Patreon or Substack.

I consider the words "creator" and "creator economy" dangerous because it suggests it's a serious and viable job. As the article and many comments explain, it isn't viable for 99.99% of those trying. Which isn't true for pretty much any other job. You can aspire to be a dog psychotherapist and actually have a decent chance of making a living from it, the odds are better than being a "creator".

The digital world is really simple: we all work for Big Tech but without the pay. All revenue flows in that direction.

Not a content creator, but I tried patreon and gave up after 2 years. It's as if asking for money in FOSS is a bad thing... I could try going commercial but I'm not really getting my hopes up. What are my options really? Try other platforms? Something tells me Kofi isn't going to be much better.

If you do open source, and there's even a chance a business might use it, at least sell something that looks business-related on the invoice generated.

I can expense $100-500 for something business-looking, even books, I can't easily expense $5 for "buy me a coffee"-type support things.

"More commonly, independent creators utilise audience monetisation to supplement other incomes." as the article says and it is the reality for content creators and platforms as Patreon. It is hard for them to monetize the audience by the platform and make it their main source of income.

Patreon is one of the buggiest, broken websites I've ever visited. I am tempted every time i use it to stop everything and build a competitor.

I've never really encountered many bugs on Patreon - but I do want to see more options in this space, so please do!

There are countless

Is there any industry where everyone (or majority) says they are making enough money?

Software Development, Restaurant business, Banking, Education?

Everyone in the industry, or everyone else?

“1000 true fans” are 1000 people who would pay you $1000 in a lump sum and feel happy about it.

Not selling 1000 cups of coffee like this article is acting it is, cup of coffee price isn’t a “true fan”.

And yeah for that you need 1000 people who your content is truly scratching an itch they can’t get anywhere else.

And yet it is. And if it weren’t some other rents seeking platform Would take its place.

What the author is ultimately complaining about is something they touched upon, which is that the creative market is saturated and in order to survive you need to have another job.

You can call it “diversification of revenue sources,” but what it actually is is getting a job as a waiter or a waitress while you audition for your Hollywood dreams.

And it happens when there are too many people wanting to sing and dance and be in movies and not enough people ready to pay them to do that.

So there’s an oversupply of creative talent, which is about to get even more squeezed as artificial intelligence pushes in on human capital.

There are, at the end of the day, only so many eyeballs, and not everyone can be the radio star.

Whenever there is a financialization of creative markets, there are artists screaming about the legitimacy of the art, and the connection with the receiver of that art, is being tainted by the commercialization.

But it doesn’t matter. The commercialization is inevitable because artist need to eat, and unless they have patrons, they have customers, and that’s just how the thing has worked throughout history.

Really at core it’s just another industry being eaten by software.

This is a trend that has been going on for a very long time, as tokenization and monetization and incremental digital transformation comes in and gradually disassembles ways of human existence into component parts and creates a business model around them. Let’s remember that painters screamed about photography being sacrilege and not even qualifying as an art form as the process involved no expression but mere capture. I met a few in my younger years who regaled me with my camera about the wrong I was committing.

It’s been the thing that’s been going on here for 30 years (and I’ve been lucky to watch the juice being squeezed). But from a digital perspective this is the way that it works in the modern economy. There’s a gold rush, then a reckoning, and from ashes emerge winners and losers, eventually leading to another stabilized period. That stability then transforms by new technology (the next breakthrough) and another rapid change of social behavior and income opportunity happens. It just goes on and on as digital technology progresses.

> The content should be meaningful, insightful, written, recorded or filmed for your audience. The people who give a shit. The people who care.

That’s the price of digital. It exacts emotional taxes to make change and people find it difficult and objectionable to watch their values erode as it gets eaten by disruption. But can anyone really get off the bus? Maybe if there’s a large scale EMP attack, the internet is shut down from a massive cybersecurity event, or solar flare, but I see almost no other way to stop the disruption otherwise as the snake that eats it tail pays the bills.

There are always different strategies for advertising what it is that you do. There's a streamer named Caseoh on twitch whose profile you can find here: https://twitchtracker.com/caseoh_ He doesn't do grueling hours, he isn't a top tier gamer who is constantly giving out tips, he's just a guy who discovered a goldmine when he decided to take the jokes his viewers were writing about him and posted his reactions from his streams to TikTok. Tiktok is particularly great about this sort of thing because once you've watched an entire clip, you're more likely to see more clips from or about the same subject.

In March of 2023, he averaged about 1200 viewers. Today, he's got over 2.9M followers and averages 60K viewers and over 50K subscribers. He's not vulgar, he's not rude, he just gets online and does about an hour of reaction videos from his Discord and a few hours of playing random games nobody's ever heard of.

This is a guy who lives in a trailer and hasn't changed his streaming setup in forever. He gets online, streams for 4-5 hours, and then gets off to go live his life. He's making between $60 and $100K a month. He'll be a millionaire by the end of this year after spending the last few years working for a company alongside his dad. He found a niche and owned it.

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