3 ms·

Well, something that's gotten elided in a lot of the outrage is that moving the transaction fees from the creators to the patrons would have given creators 3-5%

Well, something that's gotten elided in a lot of the outrage is that moving the transaction fees from the creators to the patrons would have given creators 3-5% more money on the same amount of pledges. And while it seems "no duh" to point out that a $5 pledge is literally worth five times what a $1 pledge is, in terms of revenue, that means that many creators could have lost a surprising number of $1 pledges and still come out even (or even slightly ahead). I ran the numbers for several Patreons, big and small, based on what I could scour from Graphtreon, and the amount of money most creators lost over the last few days would have been largely offset by the money they'd get back. I'm not saying that this makes the change a good idea, or that it was communicated well, or that there aren't some really interesting business dynamics that are likely to come up one way or the other that will piss off creators. (There are only six creators on Patreon who have more than 10,000 patrons as of now; to earn that $450M valuation, Patreon may need creators who have hundreds of thousands of patrons.) I'm just not convinced this would have been the Patreoncalypse.

hn_user2 9y ago
We also need to consider that content creators might crave an audience just as much or more than the donations.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
> something that's gotten elided in a lot of the outrage is that moving the transaction fees from the creators to the patrons would have given creators 3-5% more money on the same amount of pledges Patreon really tried to make this "point". It is not actually valid; "amount of pledges" before the change is not comparable to "amount of pledges" after the change. Measured as a percentage of "money paid by patrons", revenues to creators fell -- they rose when measured as a percentage of "pledges" because the new fees weren't part of "pledges" while the old fees were.
rcthompson 9y ago
If patrons on average adjusted their pledges under the new fee structure such that they were paying about as much money as they were before, creators would end up with less money on average, because the new de-aggregated fee structure results in higher fees as a percentage of the total amount paid in almost all cases.

hn_user2 9y ago

We also need to consider that content creators might crave an audience just as much or more than the donations.

thaumasiotes 9y ago

> something that's gotten elided in a lot of the outrage is that moving the transaction fees from the creators to the patrons would have given creators 3-5% more money on the same amount of pledges Patreon really tried to make this "point". It is not actually valid; "amount of pledges" before the change is not comparable to "amount of pledges" after the change. Measured as a percentage of "money paid by patrons", revenues to creators fell -- they rose when measured as a percentage of "pledges" because the new fees weren't part of "pledges" while the old fees were.

rcthompson 9y ago

If patrons on average adjusted their pledges under the new fee structure such that they were paying about as much money as they were before, creators would end up with less money on average, because the new de-aggregated fee structure results in higher fees as a percentage of the total amount paid in almost all cases.