Show HN: Discover new, trending, and highest-earning creators on Patreon | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Discover new, trending, and highest-earning creators on Patreon

pledgesociety.com

119 pointsAxsuul59 comments

While building a web crawling framework, I became fascinated with Patreon but was disappointed with its discoverability features. So I decided to put my crawling framework to the test and track every creator on the platform. The result of this was PledgeSociety, a side project I put together over the weekend that helps you discover new, interesting, and popular creators on Patreon. Please let me know what your thoughts are and if this is useful!

On sites like Patreon, discoverability is key. The more tools people can use to find creators worthy of their support, the better.

Very nice work!

This tool mostly feels like it'll help the popular people get more popular.

I'm really not sure how I feel about knowing that I'm currently the 3077th-best-earning creator on Patreon. (Although that number is kind of deceptive as I'm paid per creation, which can vary from 1/month to 8/month. On good months I'm more like #595, although I'm sure there are other per-creation folks who make more things per month and/or get more per thing.)

Looking at just the home page, sure, but if I bookmarked the New in Games page[1] and check back occasionally I can be reasonably assured to find lesser known creators in a category I'm interested in.

[1] http://www.pledgesociety.com/?by=new&category=7

That was definitely not my sole intention, which is why we have different filters on the page. Each creator is updated nightly so as I gather more data, the "Trending" page will be more accurate. Would love to hear your suggestions however on how I can get the unknowns more known. I have a cousin on Patreon who's extremely talented but struggles to get a fanbase so I know how you feel!

Have you considered setting up alerts? E.g. sending an email when a trending new Creator in the Games category appears.

Nope I have not and that is a great idea. Would definitely need to refine "Trending" to something that is giving useful data before implementing this however. Thanks for the suggestion and keep em' coming!

/adds feature suggestion to Trello board

Your site looks interesting but I'm mostly curious about your web-crawling framework - looks like it worked pretty well. Is it open-source?

I posted a comment about the web-crawling framework below so check that out for more info. Also, check out this if you'd like to know more about it @ http://bit.ly/1KiUmlS

Shortened link goes to:

http://roboheart.us10.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=49bc41b243...

Somwhat scummy. Oh look, I used my brain scraper:

''' Crawlspace is a hosted crawling service that handles proxyification and everything for you behind the scenes. With Crawlspace, PledgeSociety was able to crawl and track every single creator on Patreon.

If you're interested in a service like this or you happen to do alot of crawling, we want to talk to you! '''

Not my intention to be scummy. Just collecting emails and gauging interest. I had no intention to allow the public to use it but due to some others asking, I thought I'd set up a landing page for it. Appreciate the constructive feedback.

Really like PledgeSociety! It would be great to see an average $ amount per fan (earnings \ by no of supporters).

I think with that kind of filter I'd be able to find some really cool people with a small fan base, low earnings but that are bringing a lot of value to the fans they do have. Would help with early discovery!

Huh. I'm surprised by the amount of... niche material in the first few pages. I guess Patreon is a pretty good platform for industries that have constant demand for new material, but aren't necessarily large enough that it makes sense for content creators to manage payment themselves.

I think it might also be a case of a lack of funding via more traditional routes: even though 'niche material' has often been shown to be quite the money-maker it can still be quite hard to get funding for a 'niche' venture the traditional way (and even among the "new players", kickstarter doesn't allow 'niche' material).

For anyone else who wasn't thinking very quickly today, these commenters are using "niche" as a euphemism for "erotic".

What is the euphemism for "prudes"?

Porn sells. Porn sells a lot. But people who make porn have the problem that nobody wants to be associated with it, so they constantly have to find new ways of getting paid to make porn. Gumroad was popular for a while, for instance, until they altered their TOS to forbid it and started cracking down.

Right now, Patreon is cool with porn. Especially with cartoon porn - IIRC their official stance is "no porn but we turn a blind eye to cartoon porn unless you draw kids fucking or stuff like that". So all the cartoon pornmongers are leaping onto it. When Patreon decides to be tougher on porn, they'll go elsewhere.

>niche material

I was too, but then I checked "Lara with horse" and Im sold!

Patreon is an incredible crowdfunding platform. "Continuous Funding" is how I'd like to call it.

Continuous Funding solves the problem many high-value funded Kickstarter/Indiegogo projects have: not being able to deliver at a constant pace. It's one thing to write a business proposal to raise funding with excitement. Another to settle down and budgetize the money to prevent burning through it too fast or investing it too slow, meanwhile not being able to focus on the product.

Thing is people at Patreon offer continuous products or contents, while Kickstarter/Indiegogo, most of it, offer one-time products.

Most of the time that's true. Though I've seen some open source software projects being put on Kickstarter, and every one of them ends in disappointment. Either too low pace, or half of the promised features are cut. (Some joke about software estimates.) It's impossible to complimentary increase or rightfully decrease your contribution depending on performance it's one-off funding.

Slightly offtopic, but what are the legal implications of crawling a public website and building a derived service like this? I know it's usually considered gray area, but are there any clear limits? What does it take to build a legally stable business around scraping public content?

Citation from the Patreon Terms of Use on the public area: " Without limitation, you may not:

13. Use a robot, spider, manual and/or automatic processes or devices to data-mine, data-crawl, scrape or index the Service in any manner. "

Would love to hear replies on this - just because it's against their terms of use, does that mean it's illegal? Just because someone says they don't want you to look at them and write down what you see doesn't make it illegal. Of course it might be stalking / harassment in the legal sense but where's that line for spidering websites?

It depends on your local laws and where you and the other website (well, the legal entity of) are based. As an example if you are both based in the UK the website could probably bring civil charges (i.e. sue you) for breach of contract, or even attempt to bring criminal charges under the Computer Misuse Act for unauthorised access to a computer system. If the website is in the UK, and you are in China it's probably not worth the effort.

It's my hope that PledgeSociety provides more value and brings more exposure to their platform in exchange for some of their bandwidth. I think it's a fair tradeoff :)

I would prefer to use an API but they don't have one!

I was surprised that Bay 12 Games (who make Dwarf Fortress) are the 22nd most earning creator on Patreon, even though they created their account only 3 months ago! Well done!

Interestingly, they also only have a single $1+ tier. Other creators usually have multiple tiers with a lot more focus on the rewards at each level.

Well now I understand why Patreon hasn't done more to support discovery on the site, at least for game creators. Essentially all of the most popular ones are adult / erotic games.

Adult / erotic games are explicitly marked as NSFW within our system, so it would be very easy for us to hide them from discovery. We will we be working on discovery improvements in about two months; we have a quite a few higher priority things on the plate right now (wrapping up VAT compliance, other payments improvements, a mobile app, live chat, visual redesigns all over the place, and plenty more). Stay tuned!

So? Is that something to be ashamed of? Like the sibling wrote, they mark such things as being not-safe-for-casual-browsing.

Can anyone help me understand why the top earner is the top earner? It looks similar to a lot of the stuff on DeviantArt.

Fanbase and ability to convert that fanbase into a paying one (this guy seems to use tutorial videos as an incentive). A lot of less popular, less wealthy musicians sound as good or better as the top earners as well.

Nice! I always thought this kind of business model would work well for musicians/artists.

How much bank is Patron making in total?

You'll know soon enough once I push out the stats page :) Stay tuned!

I spend at least a hundred dollars a month supporting various artist and musicians I enjoy or actively encourage to make a living doing what they love.

Patreon is doing very, very well for many people.

Just pushed the stats page. Find it @ http://www.pledgesociety.com/stats :)

Nice! 5% of 3m, $150k/month - nice little earner! And I think they are still just getting started

Wonderful site! I've looked for this kind of functionality on Patreon itself and didn't find it. Two thoughts:

1) I'm also curious about your crawling framework, if you care to share any details. 2) How do you compute trending? It seems to show a mix of accounts getting their first backer with those that are already massive. Maybe this idea would help? http://www.evanmiller.org/rank-hotness-with-newtons-law-of-c...

Thanks!

1) Many of the projects I do usually have some sort of crawling aspect to it. So therefore I found myself duplicating crawling code every time and so I decided to turn it into a hosted service that all my projects could benefit from. It stores responses, handles proxyification, and has all sorts of optimizations implemented that's useful and essential to crawling. It passes data via evented webhooks and is built in Rails, PostgreSQL, and Redis. As of now, it's not open to the public but if there's interest, that could change :) For more information, please see:

http://bit.ly/1KiUmlS

2) Right now the "trending score" is calculating based on the current and previous Snapshot. The formula is as follows:

current_snapshot_earnings - previous_snapshot_earnings ------------------------------------------------------------------ previous_snapshot_earnings

Very simplified I know :) Your formula is much better and I plan on implementing that soon! Thanks for checking out PledgeSociety as well as the lovely feedback.

> handles proxyification

what is proxyification?

Would love to see a blog post on how your hosted service works :)

1) Awesome! I've signed up. Hope to hear more. 2) Absolutely, thanks again for making the site. For what it's worth, the same author recently went into much more detail on how to make an optimal 'hot' algorithm, looking at Reddit as an example. I thought it was pretty interesting, even if it's a bit more complicated. http://www.evanmiller.org/deriving-the-reddit-formula.html

Very interesting - well done! Small UI recommendation: round the earning numbers to something visually simpler (e.g. 60k, 1.5k, or at the very least take out the cents).

Thanks for the suggestion, that would definitely be an improvement :)

I just implemented your suggestion, thanks!

Interesting. "Kinda Funny" and "Kinda Funny Games" are the same people. If they were combined, they'd be in the #2 spot.

Wow some of these people are making incredible money. This is awesome and eye-opening, thanks for making this.

Why would you discover new things through patreon? Aren't you supposed to discover things on the wider internet then their creators link you to their patreon page or other funding method?

It currently says Zach Weinersmith (of SMBC) is paid per creation, but he's actually paid per month. Could indicate a bug in the crawling framework.

Fixed, thanks for the report :)

Really well done. Could you also calculate their overall network stats? Average creator earnings? Etc.

That's a great suggestion and it's something I will be implementing next. This seems to be something most people are curious about.

Nice, I never had heard of this thing.

But Crash Course is awesome I am happy they are 4th.

Their space course is just great.

Any plans for adding search?

Not atm!

Whoa, awesome!

Lots of adult content. :/

Not sure why Amanda Palmer bothers. She has a multimillionaire husband.

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