Return of Patronage | Hacker News Reader

Return of Patronage

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39 pointsjohndcook12 comments

I've been a little surprised at the success of Patreon. I kind of assumed that it would make for a nice tip for creators, but not much more. Instead there are a few webcomics that I read, taking $1000's a month (eg. SMBC at $8700/month on Patreon alone). That's a pretty decent living when you factor in that they can still do their normal t-shirts, adverts, print books and general merch on top.

The only question now is how long it takes to build up that kind of audience - can you can get that many people willing to pay? Quickly enough to succeed? Will new authors look at the likes of SMBC and assume that they can make a living, only to realise that their Patreon is barely scraping $50 a month? If it takes years of investment to make patronage work, they may give up before they get going.

It might mean that instead of just being a great artist, you have to be a great promoter too. (Kinda like being a successful academic nowadays also involves being a successful grant proposal writer.)

Maybe we'll start seeing the rise of patronage agents? People whose entire job is to manage the promotion of new talent in order to get to a sustainable patronage level. There already exist companies that provide Kickstarter services, so perhaps internet talent agents are just the next step.

Poke through the existing campaigns and I think you'll find even the newer, smaller audiences are generating meaningful income for the artists. Their model does a few things extremely well.

It more-or-less removes the pain of paying for the patrons by making contributions small, automatic, and feel-good. You're a patron! You're supporting the cool, small artist that you tell your friends about! Your money is where your mouth is, so to speak.

Just like Kickstarter, the successful tactics "larger" stars like Pomplamoose, Walk Off The Earth, and SMBC use get co-opted by the little guys. They learn how to do self-promotion from people who are like them.

Direct monetization of fans means phenomenally fewer fans are needed to support a full-time artist. SMBC is making $8,700 per month, which is $104,000 per year! That's from a group of 3,300 fans. There are professional comedians who've been on Comedy Central who make less than that, even though their audience is 10x that size.

Patronage is an interesting and potentially great model (ref: the "1000 true fans" approach), but it's kind of a half-step in the right direction. It is part of a fuller panoply, but not complete in and of itself. A step further would be segmentation (and subsequent addressing) of one's audience—be they patrons, regular customers, or casual viewers/listeners/readers. Create flexible, multiple ways for people to get to, consume, and pay for your content. Experiment with different channels, different messaging, different price points, and different versions of your content for those channels. Essentially, what you're doing is allowing consumers to segment themselves, by opting into the types of content (and according price points) that best fit their needs.

This is different from a classic up-sell strategy. Up-selling is offering everyone the same baseline, then either encouraging or goading people into paying for "value-adds." Instead, consider that your audience is heterogeneous in terms of what it wants, what it likes about you, which aspects of your content (or you) it values most, and what it considers those aspects to be worth. One size does not fit all. So sell more than one size.

[Note that this is not an inducement to cheat people. Don't try to pawn off the exact same content at different price points on different channels. If you're going to segment-and-address, you need to customize for each segment. Kickstarter campaign structures, for example, offer a decent framework by which to do this.]

I think the clearest sign that Patreon is doing something that's significant is this: I started a Patreon for my comics because my fans asked me if I had one.

It's grown slowly over the past year; I currently get $91 every time I draw a page of my comic, and made about $450 last month - with zero effort on my part beyond putting a few links to it here and there on my site, and talking about it on Twitter and my blog when I first set it up.

Sure, there are a million ways I could distribute my comics and get money for them. But every new channel I try to play with is time I'm not spending on the comic. Maintaining two channels (free on the website, publishing books via Kickstarter and selling them at various comic conventions) already takes up a lot of my energy that I'd rather be spending on drawing more pages.

(said comic is http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/, since I always get a few people asking where it is if I don't post a link to it when I mention it around here.)

As the digital media world continues towards free (journalism first, and more recently musicians releasing their music for free) we need a new way to reward or compensate creators.

My startup, Huzza - http://huzza.io - is doing just that. It's an app that lets you tip any song or artist in the world from your phone. We like to call it pay-as-you-love, and we think it's the future of music.

I like that, but how can you send tips as low as 50 cents (as one screenshot says) without losing it all to the payment processor (and not the musician)?

Thanks! Two ways: 1) The default currency is Bitcoin, so fees are so low we can achieve this. 2) With both Bitcoin and Credit Cards, we have a topup model where you topup with, say, $3, and then can send many tips until your balance runs out. This way we amortize the fees over 6 tips instead of 1

You are collecting money on other people's behalf with no way to actually get it to them? That's kind of messed up/evil (see tip4commit and readability for example). Opt out models are hard to get right...

Tips empirically don't work and Patreon is (more than anything) a reaction to that. Its not perfect but IMO a huge step in the right direction.

The impact of this re-shift towards patronage on culture in the world of the 1% is an exercise left to the reader.

I am under the impression that most of the people making a career in this market are essentially chasing the long tail rather than providing goods and services to the %1.

This is irrelevant in the 1%'s endgame, where everyone but them is living either at subsistence or better yet in debt.

Even if you try to go for a long tail by way of say Kickstarter, the people who buy your top-tiers are going to dominate your focus.

This is more like distributed patronage, contrasted with the more old-school type, IMO. I don't see Patreon being dominated by billionaires currently.

If you think this is going to lead to a status quo where the elites dominate our culture, you should probably leave off with more than an "exercise for the reader", because your point definitely isn't self-evident at all.

Especially if you think it's going to be worse than when media distribution and funding was centralized under TV, movie studios, radio, publishers, etc.

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