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I have seen so many content creators go full time and create awesome work because Patreon gives them a format to incentivize their followers to pay them. The ec
by pillowkusis 9y ago
I have seen so many content creators go full time and create awesome work because Patreon gives them a format to incentivize their followers to pay them. The economics are beautiful — turns out just 1,000 people (a pittance on internet mass media websites) donating $5 a month will totally change the way you run your life. And even better, these artists are independent in a way no artist has ever been before. You’re not beholden to advertizers. You’re not beholden to the whims of a few patrons (church or people). You only need the loyalty of people who value your work.
Before Patreon, internet content creators (from the BBC to a little indie band) were in a dangerous place. Paygates couldn't sustain growth but ad-supported free media couldn't sustain revenue (now more than ever with ad-blockers). Now there is an answer.
I am totally convinced Patreon (or the patreon model) is the future of content creation. Ethical, decentralized, economically viable flourishing of the arts.
If anyone at Patreon reads this, I would love to come work for you, please contact me sparrowmaxx at google’s email service. :)
- fhood 9y agoOne of the most important implications being that with services like this, creating content that a few people love is now as viable as creating content that many people like.
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y agoOf course, this also means you likely have much less in common with the person next to you.
- CaptSpify 9y agoIs that a problem? Legit question, because I'm not sure why you bring it up
- toomuchtodo 9y agoCauses havoc with societal cohesion. > Social cohesion is defined as the willingness of members of a society to cooperate with each other in order to survive and prosper. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3341872 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3341872
- simlevesque 9y agoI'm not convinced that having something in common with someone corrolates with cooperation.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 9y agoPlease read the entire article if you have the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_functionalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_functionalism
- ameister14 9y agoWell, it definitely corrolates. That's how agreements are made, after all. If you have nothing in common with another person there is no framework for understanding.
- simlevesque 9y agoWhy would the type of content you listen to prevent us from ever collaborating ? You gotta be close minded not to collaborate with people who don't consume the same content as you do...
- CaptSpify 9y agoI guess I'm not a big fan of too much social cohesion. I actually prefer societies that embrace differences. Though I would agree that can be taken to a dangerous extreme.
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y agoI don't think you could talk about anything like this as "good" or "bad"; it's happening regardless of what anyone thinks, wants, or intends. However, alienation is about to get a hell of a lot more crushing.
- AmIFirstToThink 9y agoInteresting. Who gets to decide what commons we all should share? Record labels and publishers? Youtube, facebook and twitter are already exercising undue influence in terms of algo changes to suggested videos or auto-play videos. https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/1/16072840/youtube-placing-limits-on-supremacist-videos https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/1/16072840/youtube-placing-l... It's a marketplace of ideas. Let them compete. Google deciding what's good and what's not is not fair to the people who want to decide for themselves.
- module0000 9y agoHow is that undue influence? Did you arrive at youtube without any action on your part, was it auto playing when you logged in to your computer? Sounds like you dislike big media... just not enough to tune out. tldrl; eat your own dogfood before telling others to do so.
- AmIFirstToThink 9y agoHuh? Youtube is big media? It's only in recent history that Youtube is exercising power to decide what stays and what doesn't, even if it meets the youtube content policy. This is political opinion enforced by youtube. Given Google is a public company, taking one side or another in a political discussion may not be in their interest, it would be their right of first amendment to change the sites they own as they wish, but it dilutes the usefulness and trustworthiness of their product in the eyes of the customers, and the stock holders may not like it that way. The employees have fiduciary duty to not impose their political views on their product. I am asking these companies as a fan of their platform that they keep it neutral. I am not selling any dogfood. I am asking dogfood companies to sell it to all dog owners, don't discriminate if they have a poodle or a pit bull.
- Dude2018 9y agoYou want Patreon to send you a CV and then you will interview them?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- whipoodle 9y agoSounds pretty good to me!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- PKop 9y agoI've seen Patreon kicking people off their platform for political reasons, so it is not decentralized, though certainly more so than alternatives existing before Patreon. The evolution will converge towards content creators being funded through decentralized crypto currency platforms so that the money cannot be prevented from getting to creators if someone wants to pay them. Something more along the lines of https://lbry.io/ https://lbry.io/ and similar.. Currently BTC and the like are push vs pull payment systems, so until smart contracts are widely used to enable subscription payments, this will be a blocker.
- ouid 9y agoYes, clearly Bitcoin is the only way Patreon can become a "good thing".
- bryanlarsen 9y agoThey kicked off 8chan but kept The Sarkeesian Effect so in my opinion they've got it exactly right. They keep up pretty nasty stuff in the name of free speech, but don't let you cross the line into doxing and the like. I much prefer having sensible humans at the helm than have something purely anonymous.
- dna_polymerase 9y agoThere is no "getting it right" in free speech. Either you allow free speech or you don't, if you are keeping one controversial thing but kick out the other you gave up on free speech. You can't kick someone out because you think its right and claim allowing free spech.
- frik 9y agoI have so many things that was paid by ads and now is behind a patreon-paywall. A plague. No thanks, bookmark deleted. Ads is a good business model, very unfortunate that greed created this current toxic ads crash browsers and waste way to much CPU cycles - Google & co need to step in and throttle the ads.
- falcolas 9y agoAds are only a good business model for Google and co. As it stands now, only the obnoxious ads really get any eyeballs/clickthroughs, and click fraud is a huge issue that is disincentivising companies from even offering online advertising. See the example in the original article for a great example: Peter Hollens was originally only ad supported, and was living the raman/couchsurfing life. He is now Patreon supported and making enough to support a family and touring. I don't know of any solely ad supported channels making over $11k a month for 1-2 videos.
- SapphireSun 9y agoAds are a good business model but a bad cultural model. If your users are paying the bills, only your users can penalize you if you do something an advertiser wouldn't like. If you make a hard hitting documentary that says mean things about powerful people, advertisers pull their funding but your audience might have wanted to see it.
- IkmoIkmo 9y agoAds suck, they're on the decline because everyone is discovering blockers, they pester 99% of the people with things they'll never click on, require a force against privacy, generates money for a small group of companies, and generally favours quanity-content over meaningful-content (i.e. a meaningful documentary impacting the lives of 5000 people will generate pennies, whereas a cat video that one million watch and may or may not have substantial impact, makes orders of magnitudes more money). Ads are also lovely, I get your point... but let's not pretend it's not great to see an alternative which doesn't suffer (as much) from the above issues, and can build genuine interaction/support/community between creators and users of content.
- zanny 9y agoI agree the model is the future, but a for profit American company running a proprietary web service cannot be the final solution. On one hand, patronage perfectly replaces all the draconian reasons modern IP exists as it does. Paying people to make the stuff you want them to make versus having them paid by someone looking to profit off government enforced scarcity on the produced work is much, much better for everyone involved (except the middle men). On the other, unless Patreon itself goes non-profit / public benefit like Kickstarter / decentralizes their platform it would be insane to let a private company dictate who gets to use the platform and who gets their supporters money, on top of the cut Patreon is taking - for some parties, the 5% Patreon fee only exists to get the lowered resistance to using the platform. Users who already have Patreon accounts set up are extremely more likely to support you there than on alternatives, and they then have mindshare. But that is all you are paying for if you don't also use Patreon as a content host - the mindshare effect. All the major tech companies now, all the investors, so much effort goes into creating a captive audience / market / userbase to extort. Patreon is no exception. But the stakes are much, much higher with Patreon than with the mindshare factor around Facebook et al. For the same reasons I'd argue the stakes are higher with github. Livelihoods depend on these platforms. Entire business models are being built for individuals to live their lives with work involving what these services provide. And unlike Facebook, their whole point is this model, where people do their jobs on web services - either as payment providers or infrastructure. The same applies to etsy and ebay, pretty much. I'm extraordinarily against how proprietary and controlling the companies behind these ecosystems behave, because they dictate what is a viable business and what is not.
- makomk 9y agoProbably also why they still haven't fixed their handling of security reports since they left everyone's personal information on a system with a web-accessible root Python shell for over a week after being warned about said hole, and it inevitably got hacked and leaked all over the Internet. (A researcher was complaining about not being able to report a serious issue a couple of days ago.) As long as everything's centralised on Patreon and there are no meaningful alternatives there's no reason for them to care. After all, what are people going to do? For ordinary people, Patreon is where all the artists and content are; for artists it's where all the poeple funding them are.
- laurieg 9y agoI patreon, it allows me to support podcasts and youtube producers that really wouldn't get the light of day otherwise. That said, patreon is centralised. What happens if you're a creator and that $2000 a month stops coming from patreon? I trust and believe in the now, but who knows where they'll be 5 or 10 years. PS. Patreon, please make a Japanese version of your site!
- learc83 9y ago>What happens if you're a creator and that $2000 a month stops coming from patreon? For now you sue them. If they get large enough and it happens often enough some form of regulation will likely be enacted.
- Veratyr 9y ago> PS. Patreon, please make a Japanese version of your site! So you know, https://enty.jp/ https://enty.jp/ is largely this. Some of the creators I follow there are moving to Patreon though, interestingly. The Japanese creators I see (mostly visual artists) also don't seem like super huge fans of the idea of digital content, which is what Western folks on Patreon largely expect. Japanese creators seem to like selling books and such at conventions and rarely sell their books digitally, which is a bummer for someone who doesn't want to pay international postage. I have seen some change this though (the ones who moved to Patreon).
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago>>What happens if you're a creator and that $2000 a month stops coming from patreon? That's no different from your employer shutting down, it happens, people move on.
- aninhumer 9y agoI'm not sure if you're talking about Patreon failing or them maliciously not sending you your money, but in either case the answer seems fairly obvious: You publish something to your audience telling them what happened, and ask them to use an alternative payment system. You'll probably lose some portion of your income due to the friction, but given that your patrons are likely to be fairly devoted fans, I'd imagine the retention will probably be pretty good.
- ohazi 9y agoI am totally convinced Patreon (or the patreon model) is the future of content creation. Ethical, decentralized, economically viable flourishing of the arts. I agree. It's interesting to contrast this approach with other attempts, such as App.net for social media and Vessel for video. On those platforms, it always felt like the paywall was first, and the content was second. When you signed up, you would feel fleeced -- as if you were paying the platform creators first and the content creators second. There was no mechanism for content discovery until after you paid to be part of the network. That isn't going to motivate people to join the network. On Patreon it's the polar opposite. I find interesting content on Youtube, pick a handful that I like enough to keep watching, and eventually decide that I like some of then enough to pay the creators for their work. I'm still paying the platform creators, but I'm motivated by the content. And content discovery is exactly as accessible as the get-all-your-content-for-free approach.
- chrshawkes 9y agoI have 75,000 followers on YouTube and roughly 8.5 million views. Most people don't contribute even if they love your content. At least that is what my experience has been.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago> Most people don't contribute even if they love your content. You're making that too permanent, and too general. Right now, most of your viewers aren't contributing even though some of them love your content. If you want people to contribute, you need to do specific things to get them to convert. It's the same as any other funnel optimization. Look at other successful channels, form hypotheses about conversion, and then test them.
- module0000 9y agoDo you ask them to contribute? If not, how do they know you expect/desire them to? If you already have a witty zinger answer to those first two questions; how do you quantify "love your content"?
- sprsimplestuff 9y agoit's a matter of how hard you're pushing your patreon, that's what I've seen from Youtubers w/ successful Patreons along with good perks
- stcredzero 9y agoI am totally convinced Patreon (or the patreon model) is the future of content creation. Ethical, decentralized, economically viable flourishing of the arts. Scott McCloud called this in the early 2000's. (Then the Penny Arcade guys lambasted him and his ideas.) http://scottmccloud.com/3-home/essays/2003-09-micros/micros.html http://scottmccloud.com/3-home/essays/2003-09-micros/micros....
- bigiain 9y agoThe "1000 true fans" essay from 2008 predicted a lot of this: http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
- ulucs 9y agoWow, there was even a Web 1.0 Kickstarter
- WikipediasBad 9y agoIs there a patreon specifically made for open source or coding projects?
- vyrotek 9y agoYou can use Patreon for that. Evan You has one to fund development of Vue.js https://www.patreon.com/evanyou https://www.patreon.com/evanyou
- WikipediasBad 9y agoOh very cool. So coders do use patreon but they are a minority? Maybe that itself is a good startup idea.
- Matumio 9y agoAnother successful open source coding Patreon is OctoPrint: https://www.patreon.com/foosel https://www.patreon.com/foosel
- davidjnelson 9y agoDan Abramov used it while working on redux dev tools. Seems the link expired though.