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I love Patreon but am scared for them. As more and more YouTube creators find it untenable to survive on revenue from YouTube (which is something YouTube wants

I love Patreon but am scared for them. As more and more YouTube creators find it untenable to survive on revenue from YouTube (which is something YouTube wants to happen, IMO) and they turn to Patreon... that puts Google in a difficult position, serving basically as the free-cost video host for those creators who likely won't bother putting ads on those videos either. And if Google makes a big to buy Patreon, I REALLY hope Patreon would refuse it no matter how large it would be, but I can't imagine anyone walking away from 'never have to work again' money. Google buying Patreon would cause me to wear black and mourn for at least a month. They would move aggressively to remove all creators who do anything not deemed 'advertiser-friendly' (really anything that wasn't mainstream in the early 2000s when Google came about, which is where Schmidt wishes to petrify human culture) and then progressively move to make it less and less possible for people to make a living doing things which members of the public wished to support. Such a model does not lend itself to what Schmidt sees as the proper structuring of society, with centralization of wealth into a ruling minority class establishing the 'pillars' of society, any widespread movement looks to people of his perspective like rats chewing through those pillars. He made a smart move publishing his book where he puts forward the idea that Google should use its position and power to actively 'guide' human culture for the good of the peons not as wise as he. If he'd published it online, people would read it.

shevy 9y ago
Unfortunately I fear that Google has become too big for the whole world and will slurp up everything that can be a competition, just like they slurped up youtube too at one point in time. And we all know that money moves people, so there is that - github, patreon, twitch. Google has things to buy.
kypro 9y ago
I don't think that's likely. Here's why: YouTube doesn't have to worry about major competitors because of the network effect. If it bans people from YouTube, where are they going to go? To a competitor video site no one uses? Sure, they could, but they're not going to have much success considering how unlikely it is that their entire audience will go through the hassle of signing up for the competitor's service and then remaining active on it (while likely still using YouTube) just to watch one person's content. But with Patreon there isn't a similar network effect at play. You just log in and subscribe as a Patreon. There's no real need to log in every day, or week. There is no additional benefit you get from it being the largest service of it's kind either. So if Google did buy Patreon and they did start banning people, I don't see much reason why someone couldn't just create a successful clone. Creators would even have a reason to use the new service over Patreon given they'd be less likely to loss their revenue stream by simply linking their audience to the new competitor site instead. Sam Harris recently started pointing his audience to his own donation service instead of Patreon for this reason, there really is no real cost to either the creator or subscriber doing this, I'd guess Sam probably even takes a larger cut of the donation money.

shevy 9y ago

Unfortunately I fear that Google has become too big for the whole world and will slurp up everything that can be a competition, just like they slurped up youtube too at one point in time. And we all know that money moves people, so there is that - github, patreon, twitch. Google has things to buy.

kypro 9y ago

I don't think that's likely. Here's why: YouTube doesn't have to worry about major competitors because of the network effect. If it bans people from YouTube, where are they going to go? To a competitor video site no one uses? Sure, they could, but they're not going to have much success considering how unlikely it is that their entire audience will go through the hassle of signing up for the competitor's service and then remaining active on it (while likely still using YouTube) just to watch one person's content. But with Patreon there isn't a similar network effect at play. You just log in and subscribe as a Patreon. There's no real need to log in every day, or week. There is no additional benefit you get from it being the largest service of it's kind either. So if Google did buy Patreon and they did start banning people, I don't see much reason why someone couldn't just create a successful clone. Creators would even have a reason to use the new service over Patreon given they'd be less likely to loss their revenue stream by simply linking their audience to the new competitor site instead. Sam Harris recently started pointing his audience to his own donation service instead of Patreon for this reason, there really is no real cost to either the creator or subscriber doing this, I'd guess Sam probably even takes a larger cut of the donation money.