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I think Google/YouTube made a huge strategic mistake by not introducing a serious competitor to patreon. Pretty much all youtubers these days make a significant
by eyegor 7y ago
I think Google/YouTube made a huge strategic mistake by not introducing a serious competitor to patreon. Pretty much all youtubers these days make a significant chunk of their income through patreon, and its main features wouldn't have been that difficult to integrate into yt. They started to do a small rollout with yt red with "red only" and subscription options ("join"), but it's far from widespread and they did it after patreon had captured a sizeable chunk of its userbase.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y agoYoutube has about three orders of magnitude greater revenue than Patreon. Do you think Patreon could grow 1000 times by scaling to the size of Youtube? I love the direct-support model as a consumer/viewer, but I have significant doubts that it competes with ad dollars nearly as well as people would like it to.
- eyegor 7y agoIn terms of creator income it absolutely competes. In terms of raw spending, adtech is king by a mile. I doubt patreon would ever grow to compete with youtubes ad sales volume, but creators get a very tiny cut of the yt ad revenue. Typically single digit dollars per 10k views. Or far more views, depending on the audience (cpm varies wildly among different target groups). As someone who ran a slightly successful yt channel (20k subs), I was making a pittance from ads ($100/mo). That was back before things like patreon existed, but I'm sure I could have gotten more from donations.
- biggestdecision 7y agoDoesn't much of youtube's revenue come from music these days? Whether a patreon-style model competes or not depends on the kind of content. Individual channels making videos on youtube act like patreon is a much larger income stream for them than ad revenue.