16 ms·

Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

376 points by abakker 7y ago

tsukurimashou 7y ago
I'm dead
dependenttypes 7y ago
This was not unexpected at all. They ended up shooting their own legs by harassing lewd artists off the site.
rorygibson 7y ago
I'm slightly surprised by Patreon's pricing, given they're not a discovery platform - it's really just subscription payments and some simple CRM stuff... It's pretty easy to make a simple facility for accepting subscription payments. You can do this with any website, plus a tool like Trolley [1] - of which I'm the creator, btw - with no technical knowledge. The fee structure (2% for Trolley, plus your Stripe fee of ~2%) comes out less than Patreon, and you're not inside a walled garden. Use the webhooks to link to it a CRM of your choice - probably on a free plan - and you're golden (yeah ok, maybe this bit isn't entirely non technical) I should probably write a blog post about this, tbh :) [1] - https://trolley.link https://trolley.link
etfld 7y ago
End the lockdown RIGHT NOW!
readhn 7y ago
unfortunately this is just the beginning
- ravenstine 7y ago
  Why unfortunately? This all seems like ultimately a good thing, although it may be unfortunate for some individuals in the short term.
  - harryh 7y ago
    It's a good thing that millions of people have lost their jobs at what were otherwise well functioning businesses because of a global pandemic that also, by the way, is going to end up killing hundreds of thousands of people? Uh huh.
    - ravenstine 7y ago
      Patreon has millions of employees? Oh, your sarcasm is referring to the pandemic as a whole. Which I wasn't.
      - Kiro 7y ago
        So how is it a good thing? What are you referring to?
    - gjs278 7y ago
      yes if you work a useless job it is good that it’s gone
- paxys 7y ago
  Not the beginning. There has been a steady stream of layoffs happening for a couple months now.
  - readhn 7y ago
    2months is nothing. dark times ahead unfortunately.
tempsy 7y ago
This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don’t see it. Also annoying to basically admit that layoffs were basically avoidable given the “strong cash position” but made anyway to give the company a little more runway. Doesn’t look too great.
- foota 7y ago
  That's a fiscally wise decision. Better for the company and employees to let people go now to avoid having to do mass layoffs later if shit really hits the fan.
  - icelancer 7y ago
    Especially while unemployment is paying $2400/month on top of your normal payment. Many workers are better off just being temporarily laid off and getting a pay raise.
    - harryh 7y ago
      $2400/month is less than $30k/year. I highly doubt any of the people getting laid of from Patreon are getting a raise by going on unemployment.
      - icelancer 7y ago
        $2400/month is the amount on top of your unemployment pay. Maximum in WA state puts you at $55k/year with the bonus amount.
        akhilcacharya 7y ago
        that's...that's like a 2/3 reduction at best
        icelancer 7y ago
Nextgrid 7y ago
Non-shit link: http://archive.is/zsdOS http://archive.is/zsdOS
- icelancer 7y ago
  Really wish archive.is and Cloudflare could get over their problems, since I use cloudflare's DNS resolver, none of these links work. Oh well.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - nerdbaggy 7y ago
    Hmmm I just noticed that too.
  - sicromoft 7y ago
    Thank you, I had no idea that's why these links haven't been loading. Just switched back to google's resolver (8.8.8.8).
    - icelancer 7y ago
      Yeah, you can find more information on this standoff here: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680 https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680 There's some HN posts about it as well.
      - bepvte 7y ago
        I love that the eDNS stripping Quad9 service isn't blocked. Presumably because the owner of the service hasn't realized they strip eDNS.
  - 0xy 7y ago
    Saying this as a Cloudflare investor, CF is in the wrong here and not spec compliant.
Nextgrid 7y ago
I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years. For what it's worth I've stopped using Patreon when they included some Facebook tracking (among others) on the membership management page that when blocked will crash the entire front-end and make the entire page unusable.
- jackson1442 7y ago
  >take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out What's astounding to me is they don't even do _that_! It's a many-to-one payer-payee scheme... essentially a pretty wrapper for Stripe.
- rasz 7y ago
  Because they took VC money and need to show fake growth.
- Trasmatta 7y ago
  * Product is successful * Hire lots of people because that's what successful companies do * Product development slows way down, because you hired too fast (Mythical Man Month stuff kicks in, where adding more people to a team can slow development down, if not done carefully and thoughtfully) * Notice that development is slow, so you hire even more people to try and speed it up At least that's been my experience at 3 different companies.
  - mrnobody_67 7y ago
    100% correct. I love the Carta philosophy on hiring - every person you need means you've failed to execute: https://carta.com/blog/how-to-hire/ https://carta.com/blog/how-to-hire/ Unfortunately they didn't heed their own philosophy given their layoffs with simultaneous massive fundraise.
  - deleted 7y ago
mdorazio 7y ago
This is interesting given that, like the article suggests, patron contributions were still growing last month. Seems like they either wanted an excuse to "right-size" and this is a great opportunity, or they're expecting a significant hit to patron contributions on the back of mass unemployment, which would make the rest of the year rather painful.
- Applejinx 7y ago
  I ain't seeing it. I saw significantly more patron contributions. I guess maybe there's a danger I am just that awesome? ;P the general sense I get is people tend to rally around their creators, and I would imagine that happens across the board, and not just in special cases.
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    Yeah, I subbed to a couple new people after seeing them talk about losing other work. Obviously, anecdotal, but hoped others followed suit.
  - kevinmchugh 7y ago
    The patreon podcasts I listen to have all said they're sorry to see people go but know money will be tight for many, and that if we can stand remote recordings, they'll be making just as much content as before. Not sure if they're all just spooked or if they've seen hits already.
- gk1 7y ago
  You’re probably right about “right-sizing.” I’m close with another company in this space, and they’re seeing their biggest growth ever right now. But they do have slight variances in business models, and maybe that’s making all the difference.
- doctoboggan 7y ago
  They basically said just that in their statement: > This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones. Prior to the pandemic, we had completed an in-depth performance review cycle and deployed a new company strategy – both exercises highlighted the need for different skill sets moving forward. It was this combination of economic uncertainty, performance reviews and a shift in strategy that prompted us to make this change.
gldev 7y ago
seeing news like this really brings me down, no matter what i hate when employees take the hit and i sure hope they can find another job sooner rather than later.
0xy 7y ago
Given the purging of creators for arbitrary and political reasons, I can't say I feel sympathy for this company's collapse. Ideally it'd go out of business entirely. Creators should be cutting out the middleman anyway.
- hateMyIdeas 7y ago
  I don't really understand pateron when I have a donate button..but I imagine people who use pateron are doing better.. Gamification?
  - lmm 7y ago
    Single place, consistent UI, my credit card details are already there. I can change my card / address for everything in one go. It removes a lot of friction.
    - mixonEPA 7y ago
      and that right their is what usually keeps all these companies afloat with the convince they bring to the table..
  - kbrackbill 7y ago
    In addition to what lmm mentioned, giving to patreon usually comes with some sort of perk or special content, and it's also a subscription by default which I imagine isn't the case with a donate button.
  - freepor 7y ago
    It's the same thing that PayPal brings to the table when any website could just have a credit card form.
  - geofft 7y ago
    I've got my Patreon set up to pay some folks I like monthly, and I can't even tell you who they are off the top of my head, but I decided that I wanted to budget $x towards supporting cool people and it's been charging me in the background ever since. Meanwhile, I can barely remember to pay my voice teacher every week and I go there in person (well, not anymore) and sing for an hour.
flashman 7y ago
But I thought Patreon never took more than a 12% cut...
- winslow 7y ago
  Sign of the times
patrickyeon 7y ago
> In March, Patreon wrote in a blog post, “Not only are patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.” Additionally, the average income for creators was 60% higher in March than in previous months, according to the company. > Around that same time, however, Patreon said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than usual due to financial hardships. Still, Patreon said churn rates were stable. These two paragraphs are one right after the other. How do you reconcile the two? How is it not at least a question posed to their spokesperson of which is the case?
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Coincidentally, your username is patreon with icky in the middle!
- x0x0 7y ago
  This is guesswork. Facts: They raised a $60m D in July 2019. Guesses: Patreon loses money (ie, they're a startup). This may be due to solely due to international, the use of the round D, or not. Either way, they -- much like the startup I run -- are immediately planning how to go 24-36 months without any additional investor cash. Because your investors will still expect you to meet growth targets to get that next round regardless of covid. Speaking for myself only, we've taken to heart the cut once, cut fast mantra that every company that came through 2008 says is the right thing to do. And we've figured out how the company will go for more than two years without additional cash, or be able to tolerate 20q2 being a sales disaster. Those both require immediately cutting burn.
  - NamTaf 7y ago
    Although that makes sense as to why they may cut, none of that addresses the two statements the grandparent quoted, though. They wrote in a blog post in March that patrons are not leaving the platform, and then at the same time they apparently reported that they were in fact leaving. Which is it?
    - 7y ago
treelovinhippie 7y ago
Patreon shouldn't have any more than half a dozen employees. But alas, they joined the VC exit cult.
- tehwebguy 7y ago
  This always gets said, have you ever looked at all the documentation and helpful materials they’ve put out? If they just wanted to be a payment processing platform they would just be a payment processing platform. Instead it’s guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    Documentation doesn’t take 300 employees either. Pretty sure onlyfans is basically run by one guy out of London and maybe a handful of contractor support staff for essentially the same business.
  - pm_me_ur_fullzz 7y ago
    > Instead it’s guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more. whoopsie looks like they should just be a payment processing platform and let youtubers do that work
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sunnyujjawal 7y ago
I will simply not donate if my only option is Patreon. I want a dumb pipe between myself and the person or organization who receives the money. I do not want the pipe making any decisions about who gets to use it https://timenational.com/shop/amazon-uk/ https://timenational.com/shop/amazon-uk/
zerm778 7y ago
Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.
- dannyw 7y ago
  Tumblr v2? Patreon is not an advertising supported platform, so it can't be from advertisers. Onlyfans has no problem accepting credit cards; and Patreon is certainly at the scale where they negotiate with payment facilitators. I'm curious why they made the decision... moral superiority? If it's a brand perspective, then I think the biggest regret of Patreon in the coming years is going to be not spawning off their own Onlyfans, a reskinned and rebanded version of Patreon. I wouldn't be surprised if Onlyfans is growing faster than Patreon right now...
  - Hydraulix989 7y ago
    Patreon has always had its hands dirty in enforcing their definition of "morality" -- while I almost completely agreed with their decisions, banning "anime" was the last straw for me. https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ban_on_anime_art/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ba... Each choice they made to ban an "influencer" in the name of morality was a massive hit to their business because by definition, not only was said influencer banned, but also the massive audience that he/she influenced. Unfortunately, you can only successfully stick to an allow-all policy (with all of the dangerous content and liability/bad PR this entails), or you can haphazardly try to enforce your often-subjective definition of morality with all of its inconsistencies and edge cases, to your own detriment, like Patreon did (I'm a moral relativist). It's a Faustian bargain because neither is a good business decision.
    - hvis 7y ago
      I'm guessing Patreon is reacting to the changes in the legal landscape. The same ones that made Craiglist close its Personals section (or however it was called): the increased liability for the platform for whatever behaviors the public at large might find objectionable. Or find an excuse to take an issue with, really. From what I know, the anime genre creators were a fairly popular niche (with the associated income stream), so they probably weren't taking these changes lightly. I'd say write your congressmen (I'm not from US myself), but at this point it seems futile.
tempsy 7y ago
FWIW I’m pretty sure OnlyFans is run by one guy out of London. Maybe has a handful of contracted employees for engineering and support. Basically the same business. Not sure what the payment volume comparison is but must be hundreds of millions a year, at least.
- ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
  They’ve made ~100M over the last 4 years according to Wikipedia (quoted as saying they’ve paid out $400M since they started in 2016 and they keep 20% of payments). Still an insanely good number for a 1(ish) person operation.
- preommr 7y ago
  Where are you getting this from? I tried looking it up, but it seems like Timothy Stokely had an entertainment company that was responsible for a bunch of cam sites before eventually making Onlyfans.
- aembleton 7y ago
  There is more than one person working at OnlyFans [1]. Many of these are customers of OnlyFans, but there are others like a Social Media Manager, Recruitment, Marketing etc. 1. https://www.linkedin.com/company/onlyfans/people/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/onlyfans/people/
bayofpigs 7y ago
hahaha
doctor_eval 7y ago
Friends and I were discussing this last night on jitsi. We think that instead of throwing employees to the wolves at a time when getting a job is going to be difficult, many employees would accept equivalent pay cuts to help weather the storm. In fact I know one company that did just this, with 100 employees. The staff chose a 10% indefinite pay cut over 10% reduction in head count. Sacking people at this time is awful, and any company who has cash in the bank has options other than bankrupting some of their employees. I don’t care if Patreon had planned this before Covid-19. There are alternatives. These are dark times and companies who sack their employees as a first resort are part of the problem.
- Kiro 7y ago
  In Europe most companies are doing this instead of laying off right now. It's a conventional practice that saved a lot of companies during the 2008 crisis and in many countries it's subsidized by the government.
  - ac29 7y ago
    If its subsidized by the government, how is it a paycut? Similar programs in the US exist, for example states paying a 50% unemployment payment for employees who have their hours cut by 50%. Its a win-win - companies effectively pay nothing to keep their employees at a full time salary for reduced hours, and the government avoids needing to pay out full unemployment benefits to laid off employees. Edit: see this for an example of the program in California: https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm
    - Kiro 7y ago
      Can only speak for Sweden but you do need to take a paycut as well. In Swedish but you can see the table here: https://tillvaxtverket.se/om-tillvaxtverket/information-och-stod-kring-coronakrisen/korttidsarbete.html https://tillvaxtverket.se/om-tillvaxtverket/information-och-... For the 60% bracket the company reduces your working hours by 60% and you get a paycut of 7.5%. The government covers the difference, effectively reducing the cost for the company by 53%.
asiachick 7y ago
I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful. There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content. Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of posts by the artist". The stream is JavaScript driven so if you want to go 100 posts back you have to page through multiple pages of posts. If you want to do it again tomorrow, or if the site crashes which it does, you have to start over at post 1 and page through again. It's telling that so many artists use google drive, dropbox, mediafire, or mega to distribute their works. This seems like money Pateron is leaving on the table if they'd provide for a similar service at similar prices. They do provide a way to upload media but the UX is awful compared to Mega which has arguably the superior UX of those 5 options. Worse, because these artists are using these separate services there is no way to limit who accesses them. In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways. Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all. I can certainly imagine a service that's significantly better Patreon for this use case. Let me also add discoverabilty is horrible. Maybe this is mostly on the artists but the #1 way I find one is off of patreon. Compare to say youtube where the #1 way I find anyone is on youtube itself.
- Kye 7y ago
  Patreon is at stage 3: https://www.kyefox.com/2020/04/09/patreons-future/ https://www.kyefox.com/2020/04/09/patreons-future/ Everyone but the people at the top are getting tired of all its problems and the uncertainty, but where else do you go? So far, no one has an integrated replacement. You can build a Patreon in pieces connected by APIs, but Patreon is (unfortunately) the only place you can get everything in one place for the price. WordPress is a common alternative for membership sites, but it comes with expenses that scale up in proportion to how little you want or are able to do yourself. All the plugins for WordPress that do membership and file access control are in the $100-300/year range. Then there's the cost of hosting: cheap if you don't mind running everything yourself, more than the plugins if you get managed hosting. It's worth it, but you need the money to start, and you lose the ease of everyone already having a Patreon account.
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot. Like, a lot. A million a month or more. And I can't help but suspect that this realization necessitates changing, if not the business model, the business strategy. Patreon in 2017 is fine with Chapo Trap House and Amanda Palmer as the top moneymakers; Patreon in 2020 needs the next Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. (Better yet, the current Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.) That doesn't mean they have to actively drive out the podcasters and comics nerds and furries, but it probably means they have to put all their resources into going after whales.
- dannyw 7y ago
  A middleware that can be described as Wordpress with access control and Stripe integration, but worse in terms of performance and UX; somehow takes on $165 million in funding [1] and describes their business model as "not sustainable" [2]. Patreon is a low touch SaaS platform that charges up to 12% PLUS payment processing fees. They do not provide any meaningful level of discoverability: you must build your audience yourself. I wonder how the business would be doing if it disregarded that "raise money and spend money at all costs" model, that Softbank exaggerated? What if it had a WhatsApp-size of team: ~20 employees using sensible and well-architected tech stacks (not chasing the latest shiny thing just cuz its hip or cool)? I'm sure they'd be outrageously profitable. [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/patreon-raises-60m-series-d-targets-international-growth-and-more-customization/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/patreon-raises-60m-series-... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patreon-announces-it-will-pay-out-half-a-billion-dollars-to-content-creators-in-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patre...
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    I'm going to push back a little on this. I've run a Patreon and have a pretty good idea of what they provide for creators, and I've also looked into how I could replicate their services on my own -- and it turns out it's not really that trivial. - I want something that handles tiered membership levels with paid access control. - I also want something that keeps track of "goals" for donation drives (e.g., "if I bring in $500 a month, I'll do this thing for everyone"). - If I have rewards at different levels (which I did), it's nice to have something that keeps track of when I need to send those out and who I sent them out to. - It's nice to have what amounts to a basic CRM, keeping records of who paid me what at what points. If I say "maintain the membership at the $9/month level for at least six months and I'll send you this widget at the end of the year," I want my membership platform to be able to tell me who was at that level for six months even if they're not at that level at the end of the year. - It's nice to have a built-in mailing list if I need it. - While Patreon is very up front about not being a discoverability platform, aggregation of creators still matters: it is way easier to support a half-dozen or more creators monthly when you get one monthly charge instead of many monthly charges, and in fact people do occasionally discover new creators by discovering who creators they follow are supporting. If I were running this on my own, I wouldn't get that benefit and I probably couldn't have a "just pay me a little because you're nice" tier: it's no problem to pay $1 or $2 a month to somebody if it's part of that bundle, but it's not worth the hassle if it's standalone. (This was why everyone on Patreon screamed bloody murder when they proposed unbundling charges a few years back.) - Last but not least, not every creator is going to be comfortable putting together a Patreon-esque platform on their own. The more friendly the solution is, the more likely it is to cost money, and Patreon's pricing structure ends up being more competitive than you might think. WordPress membership management plugins that don't suck are often commercial, some with fees of $100+ per year; Memberful is free for limited use, but $25 per month otherwise; Substack charges 10% of your revenue and, like Patreon, doesn't cover processing fees that way. Obviously none of these give Patreon a "lock-in" and it might make sense for creators to jump ship anyway; I'm certainly keeping my eye on alternatives. But I'm kind of a control freak. I genuinely don't think "anyone can build their own Patreon over a weekend" is true, and I don't think the amount of money they charge over and above processing fees is super unreasonable.
0zwan 7y ago
It seems they still hiring: https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon How is it possible?
- asperous 7y ago
  Two possible reasons: - They may have interviewed for those roles internally but not found a fit Or, - Those job lists are "continual" in other words fake so they can increase their applicant pool and possibly use it in the future (or they haven't taken them down)
tobyhinloopen 7y ago
Somehow I thought Patreon was just a small service built by like 4 people...
- zhte415 7y ago
  I thought similar. Four developers/full-stack, but then a customer support function that'd roughly 0.X scale with users, then marketing - could double-hat that, then certainly a legal/compliance team after some scale, also finance which probably doesn't need to scale linearly but should be a couple of people at least and no double-hatting on these at their size. So, thinking a bit, perhaps more than four.
pm_me_ur_fullzz 7y ago
Aren't them and OnlyFans' America's number 1 employer? Although that's an automated process
billpg 7y ago
One of my pet peeves. If you sign up with Patreon to get perks, you're not really a patron any more. You're a customer.
imjustsaying 7y ago
>This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones >Still, it’s peculiar timing for Patreon, given the company touted an increase in new memberships during the first three weeks of March. Peculiar indeed. So what is a factor not yet mentioned? 69 days ago, I was net downvoted after pointing out specifically what trouble was coming for Patreon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316071 >>I wonder if consumers could use forced arbitration in the same way. >They can. Patreon is about to be hit really hard for playing thought policeman. Now we are here.
- draw_down 7y ago
  Come on
panpanna 7y ago
What alternatives to patron exists today? What happened to those French guys patron alternative for open source projects? Libre-something was is name...
- sp332 7y ago
  How about Gumroad? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733
  - Kye 7y ago
    Gumroad is working on something that can potentially replace Patreon, but as it is Gumroad's different features lack the integration that makes Patreon what it is.
- Ruthalas 7y ago
  I am familiar with creators using the following alternatives: Suscribestar OnlyFans New Project 2 Liberapay
- Matumio 7y ago
  liberapay: still exists, still growing, still tiny in comparison: https://liberapay.com/about/stats https://liberapay.com/about/stats They had some trouble with micro-payments, resulting in a big drop. It's solved now. (Basically: don't do micro payments, pay e.g. 1 year in advance, directly to each receiver.)
- muyuu 7y ago
  Liberapay? Also SubscribeStar.
mikorym 7y ago
I think there should be a music service that works exactly like Spotify / Apple Music / Google Music but with these differences: 1. No free tier 2. Your views determine which artists get your money. AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most overall views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's Scatman's World then I would have expected his estate to get all my money minus maybe 5% admin fees.
- anandoza 7y ago
  What's the difference? Maybe I misunderstood but isn't pooling the views and then giving money weighted by views the same thing?
  - syllospri 7y ago
    Slightly different. Example if the service only has 2 users: I listen to artist A's song 1 time, you listen to artist B's song 9 times. We listen to no other songs for the month. With pooling, A gets 10% of the money, B get's 10% of the money. With their suggestion, they each get 50%
  - mikorym 7y ago
    I actually had to explain this to people that listen to my music. I get ~$0 per month from Spotify and when I told this to one of my friends (who listens to my music) they were like: "But I pay $10 a month!". Then I had to explain that all the subscribers on the whole platform get pooled together.
- snarf21 7y ago
  The harder question is does everyone get paid the same per view. If i only listen to one song, does that artist get the $5 from my monthly subscription? If I view a 1000 things in a month, do they all get $0.005? It gets hard to put a value on a listen. Is it maybe $0.10? Well over an hour that is $2 and I can get audio cheaper elsewhere. I think you have to have tiers where each month you get X credits (partial rollover?) and then that is what the artist gets paid. Allow people to upgrade to higher levels on the fly The sibling reply points to discover and unknowns getting any views at all. I think that is solvable with a different model. People who are unknown essentially "advertise" with the platform at the cost of 2 "views". People who listen to the unknown's song essentially earn two more views. And they might play that song later and the artist gets paid back essentially.

376 points by abakker 7y ago

tsukurimashou 7y ago

I'm dead

dependenttypes 7y ago

This was not unexpected at all. They ended up shooting their own legs by harassing lewd artists off the site.

rorygibson 7y ago

I'm slightly surprised by Patreon's pricing, given they're not a discovery platform - it's really just subscription payments and some simple CRM stuff... It's pretty easy to make a simple facility for accepting subscription payments. You can do this with any website, plus a tool like Trolley [1] - of which I'm the creator, btw - with no technical knowledge. The fee structure (2% for Trolley, plus your Stripe fee of ~2%) comes out less than Patreon, and you're not inside a walled garden. Use the webhooks to link to it a CRM of your choice - probably on a free plan - and you're golden (yeah ok, maybe this bit isn't entirely non technical) I should probably write a blog post about this, tbh :) [1] - https://trolley.link https://trolley.link

etfld 7y ago

End the lockdown RIGHT NOW!

readhn 7y ago

unfortunately this is just the beginning

ravenstine 7y ago
Why unfortunately? This all seems like ultimately a good thing, although it may be unfortunate for some individuals in the short term.
- harryh 7y ago
  It's a good thing that millions of people have lost their jobs at what were otherwise well functioning businesses because of a global pandemic that also, by the way, is going to end up killing hundreds of thousands of people? Uh huh.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    Patreon has millions of employees? Oh, your sarcasm is referring to the pandemic as a whole. Which I wasn't.
    - Kiro 7y ago
      So how is it a good thing? What are you referring to?
  - gjs278 7y ago
    yes if you work a useless job it is good that it’s gone
paxys 7y ago
Not the beginning. There has been a steady stream of layoffs happening for a couple months now.
- readhn 7y ago
  2months is nothing. dark times ahead unfortunately.

tempsy 7y ago

This company never made sense to me from a “venture scale” perspective. It’s big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don’t see it. Also annoying to basically admit that layoffs were basically avoidable given the “strong cash position” but made anyway to give the company a little more runway. Doesn’t look too great.

foota 7y ago
That's a fiscally wise decision. Better for the company and employees to let people go now to avoid having to do mass layoffs later if shit really hits the fan.
- icelancer 7y ago
  Especially while unemployment is paying $2400/month on top of your normal payment. Many workers are better off just being temporarily laid off and getting a pay raise.
  - harryh 7y ago
    $2400/month is less than $30k/year. I highly doubt any of the people getting laid of from Patreon are getting a raise by going on unemployment.
    - icelancer 7y ago
      $2400/month is the amount on top of your unemployment pay. Maximum in WA state puts you at $55k/year with the bonus amount.
      - akhilcacharya 7y ago
        that's...that's like a 2/3 reduction at best
        icelancer 7y ago

Nextgrid 7y ago

Non-shit link: http://archive.is/zsdOS http://archive.is/zsdOS

icelancer 7y ago
Really wish archive.is and Cloudflare could get over their problems, since I use cloudflare's DNS resolver, none of these links work. Oh well.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nerdbaggy 7y ago
  Hmmm I just noticed that too.
- sicromoft 7y ago
  Thank you, I had no idea that's why these links haven't been loading. Just switched back to google's resolver (8.8.8.8).
  - icelancer 7y ago
    Yeah, you can find more information on this standoff here: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680 https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680 There's some HN posts about it as well.
    - bepvte 7y ago
      I love that the eDNS stripping Quad9 service isn't blocked. Presumably because the owner of the service hasn't realized they strip eDNS.
- 0xy 7y ago
  Saying this as a Cloudflare investor, CF is in the wrong here and not spec compliant.

Nextgrid 7y ago

I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years. For what it's worth I've stopped using Patreon when they included some Facebook tracking (among others) on the membership management page that when blocked will crash the entire front-end and make the entire page unusable.

jackson1442 7y ago
>take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out What's astounding to me is they don't even do _that_! It's a many-to-one payer-payee scheme... essentially a pretty wrapper for Stripe.
rasz 7y ago
Because they took VC money and need to show fake growth.
Trasmatta 7y ago
* Product is successful * Hire lots of people because that's what successful companies do * Product development slows way down, because you hired too fast (Mythical Man Month stuff kicks in, where adding more people to a team can slow development down, if not done carefully and thoughtfully) * Notice that development is slow, so you hire even more people to try and speed it up At least that's been my experience at 3 different companies.
- mrnobody_67 7y ago
  100% correct. I love the Carta philosophy on hiring - every person you need means you've failed to execute: https://carta.com/blog/how-to-hire/ https://carta.com/blog/how-to-hire/ Unfortunately they didn't heed their own philosophy given their layoffs with simultaneous massive fundraise.
- deleted 7y ago

mdorazio 7y ago

This is interesting given that, like the article suggests, patron contributions were still growing last month. Seems like they either wanted an excuse to "right-size" and this is a great opportunity, or they're expecting a significant hit to patron contributions on the back of mass unemployment, which would make the rest of the year rather painful.

Applejinx 7y ago
I ain't seeing it. I saw significantly more patron contributions. I guess maybe there's a danger I am just that awesome? ;P the general sense I get is people tend to rally around their creators, and I would imagine that happens across the board, and not just in special cases.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  Yeah, I subbed to a couple new people after seeing them talk about losing other work. Obviously, anecdotal, but hoped others followed suit.
- kevinmchugh 7y ago
  The patreon podcasts I listen to have all said they're sorry to see people go but know money will be tight for many, and that if we can stand remote recordings, they'll be making just as much content as before. Not sure if they're all just spooked or if they've seen hits already.
gk1 7y ago
You’re probably right about “right-sizing.” I’m close with another company in this space, and they’re seeing their biggest growth ever right now. But they do have slight variances in business models, and maybe that’s making all the difference.
doctoboggan 7y ago
They basically said just that in their statement: > This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones. Prior to the pandemic, we had completed an in-depth performance review cycle and deployed a new company strategy – both exercises highlighted the need for different skill sets moving forward. It was this combination of economic uncertainty, performance reviews and a shift in strategy that prompted us to make this change.

gldev 7y ago

seeing news like this really brings me down, no matter what i hate when employees take the hit and i sure hope they can find another job sooner rather than later.

0xy 7y ago

Given the purging of creators for arbitrary and political reasons, I can't say I feel sympathy for this company's collapse. Ideally it'd go out of business entirely. Creators should be cutting out the middleman anyway.

hateMyIdeas 7y ago
I don't really understand pateron when I have a donate button..but I imagine people who use pateron are doing better.. Gamification?
- lmm 7y ago
  Single place, consistent UI, my credit card details are already there. I can change my card / address for everything in one go. It removes a lot of friction.
  - mixonEPA 7y ago
    and that right their is what usually keeps all these companies afloat with the convince they bring to the table..
- kbrackbill 7y ago
  In addition to what lmm mentioned, giving to patreon usually comes with some sort of perk or special content, and it's also a subscription by default which I imagine isn't the case with a donate button.
- freepor 7y ago
  It's the same thing that PayPal brings to the table when any website could just have a credit card form.
- geofft 7y ago
  I've got my Patreon set up to pay some folks I like monthly, and I can't even tell you who they are off the top of my head, but I decided that I wanted to budget $x towards supporting cool people and it's been charging me in the background ever since. Meanwhile, I can barely remember to pay my voice teacher every week and I go there in person (well, not anymore) and sing for an hour.

flashman 7y ago

But I thought Patreon never took more than a 12% cut...

winslow 7y ago
Sign of the times

patrickyeon 7y ago

> In March, Patreon wrote in a blog post, “Not only are patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.” Additionally, the average income for creators was 60% higher in March than in previous months, according to the company. > Around that same time, however, Patreon said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than usual due to financial hardships. Still, Patreon said churn rates were stable. These two paragraphs are one right after the other. How do you reconcile the two? How is it not at least a question posed to their spokesperson of which is the case?

quickthrower2 7y ago
Coincidentally, your username is patreon with icky in the middle!
x0x0 7y ago
This is guesswork. Facts: They raised a $60m D in July 2019. Guesses: Patreon loses money (ie, they're a startup). This may be due to solely due to international, the use of the round D, or not. Either way, they -- much like the startup I run -- are immediately planning how to go 24-36 months without any additional investor cash. Because your investors will still expect you to meet growth targets to get that next round regardless of covid. Speaking for myself only, we've taken to heart the cut once, cut fast mantra that every company that came through 2008 says is the right thing to do. And we've figured out how the company will go for more than two years without additional cash, or be able to tolerate 20q2 being a sales disaster. Those both require immediately cutting burn.
- NamTaf 7y ago
  Although that makes sense as to why they may cut, none of that addresses the two statements the grandparent quoted, though. They wrote in a blog post in March that patrons are not leaving the platform, and then at the same time they apparently reported that they were in fact leaving. Which is it?
  - 7y ago

treelovinhippie 7y ago

Patreon shouldn't have any more than half a dozen employees. But alas, they joined the VC exit cult.

tehwebguy 7y ago
This always gets said, have you ever looked at all the documentation and helpful materials they’ve put out? If they just wanted to be a payment processing platform they would just be a payment processing platform. Instead it’s guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more.
- tempsy 7y ago
  Documentation doesn’t take 300 employees either. Pretty sure onlyfans is basically run by one guy out of London and maybe a handful of contractor support staff for essentially the same business.
- pm_me_ur_fullzz 7y ago
  > Instead it’s guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more. whoopsie looks like they should just be a payment processing platform and let youtubers do that work

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sunnyujjawal 7y ago

I will simply not donate if my only option is Patreon. I want a dumb pipe between myself and the person or organization who receives the money. I do not want the pipe making any decisions about who gets to use it https://timenational.com/shop/amazon-uk/ https://timenational.com/shop/amazon-uk/

zerm778 7y ago

Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.

dannyw 7y ago
Tumblr v2? Patreon is not an advertising supported platform, so it can't be from advertisers. Onlyfans has no problem accepting credit cards; and Patreon is certainly at the scale where they negotiate with payment facilitators. I'm curious why they made the decision... moral superiority? If it's a brand perspective, then I think the biggest regret of Patreon in the coming years is going to be not spawning off their own Onlyfans, a reskinned and rebanded version of Patreon. I wouldn't be surprised if Onlyfans is growing faster than Patreon right now...
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  Patreon has always had its hands dirty in enforcing their definition of "morality" -- while I almost completely agreed with their decisions, banning "anime" was the last straw for me. https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ban_on_anime_art/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ba... Each choice they made to ban an "influencer" in the name of morality was a massive hit to their business because by definition, not only was said influencer banned, but also the massive audience that he/she influenced. Unfortunately, you can only successfully stick to an allow-all policy (with all of the dangerous content and liability/bad PR this entails), or you can haphazardly try to enforce your often-subjective definition of morality with all of its inconsistencies and edge cases, to your own detriment, like Patreon did (I'm a moral relativist). It's a Faustian bargain because neither is a good business decision.
  - hvis 7y ago
    I'm guessing Patreon is reacting to the changes in the legal landscape. The same ones that made Craiglist close its Personals section (or however it was called): the increased liability for the platform for whatever behaviors the public at large might find objectionable. Or find an excuse to take an issue with, really. From what I know, the anime genre creators were a fairly popular niche (with the associated income stream), so they probably weren't taking these changes lightly. I'd say write your congressmen (I'm not from US myself), but at this point it seems futile.

tempsy 7y ago

FWIW I’m pretty sure OnlyFans is run by one guy out of London. Maybe has a handful of contracted employees for engineering and support. Basically the same business. Not sure what the payment volume comparison is but must be hundreds of millions a year, at least.

ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
They’ve made ~100M over the last 4 years according to Wikipedia (quoted as saying they’ve paid out $400M since they started in 2016 and they keep 20% of payments). Still an insanely good number for a 1(ish) person operation.
preommr 7y ago
Where are you getting this from? I tried looking it up, but it seems like Timothy Stokely had an entertainment company that was responsible for a bunch of cam sites before eventually making Onlyfans.
aembleton 7y ago
There is more than one person working at OnlyFans [1]. Many of these are customers of OnlyFans, but there are others like a Social Media Manager, Recruitment, Marketing etc. 1. https://www.linkedin.com/company/onlyfans/people/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/onlyfans/people/

bayofpigs 7y ago

hahaha

doctor_eval 7y ago

Friends and I were discussing this last night on jitsi. We think that instead of throwing employees to the wolves at a time when getting a job is going to be difficult, many employees would accept equivalent pay cuts to help weather the storm. In fact I know one company that did just this, with 100 employees. The staff chose a 10% indefinite pay cut over 10% reduction in head count. Sacking people at this time is awful, and any company who has cash in the bank has options other than bankrupting some of their employees. I don’t care if Patreon had planned this before Covid-19. There are alternatives. These are dark times and companies who sack their employees as a first resort are part of the problem.

Kiro 7y ago
In Europe most companies are doing this instead of laying off right now. It's a conventional practice that saved a lot of companies during the 2008 crisis and in many countries it's subsidized by the government.
- ac29 7y ago
  If its subsidized by the government, how is it a paycut? Similar programs in the US exist, for example states paying a 50% unemployment payment for employees who have their hours cut by 50%. Its a win-win - companies effectively pay nothing to keep their employees at a full time salary for reduced hours, and the government avoids needing to pay out full unemployment benefits to laid off employees. Edit: see this for an example of the program in California: https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm
  - Kiro 7y ago
    Can only speak for Sweden but you do need to take a paycut as well. In Swedish but you can see the table here: https://tillvaxtverket.se/om-tillvaxtverket/information-och-stod-kring-coronakrisen/korttidsarbete.html https://tillvaxtverket.se/om-tillvaxtverket/information-och-... For the 60% bracket the company reduces your working hours by 60% and you get a paycut of 7.5%. The government covers the difference, effectively reducing the cost for the company by 53%.

asiachick 7y ago

I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful. There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content. Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of posts by the artist". The stream is JavaScript driven so if you want to go 100 posts back you have to page through multiple pages of posts. If you want to do it again tomorrow, or if the site crashes which it does, you have to start over at post 1 and page through again. It's telling that so many artists use google drive, dropbox, mediafire, or mega to distribute their works. This seems like money Pateron is leaving on the table if they'd provide for a similar service at similar prices. They do provide a way to upload media but the UX is awful compared to Mega which has arguably the superior UX of those 5 options. Worse, because these artists are using these separate services there is no way to limit who accesses them. In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways. Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all. I can certainly imagine a service that's significantly better Patreon for this use case. Let me also add discoverabilty is horrible. Maybe this is mostly on the artists but the #1 way I find one is off of patreon. Compare to say youtube where the #1 way I find anyone is on youtube itself.

Kye 7y ago
Patreon is at stage 3: https://www.kyefox.com/2020/04/09/patreons-future/ https://www.kyefox.com/2020/04/09/patreons-future/ Everyone but the people at the top are getting tired of all its problems and the uncertainty, but where else do you go? So far, no one has an integrated replacement. You can build a Patreon in pieces connected by APIs, but Patreon is (unfortunately) the only place you can get everything in one place for the price. WordPress is a common alternative for membership sites, but it comes with expenses that scale up in proportion to how little you want or are able to do yourself. All the plugins for WordPress that do membership and file access control are in the $100-300/year range. Then there's the cost of hosting: cheap if you don't mind running everything yourself, more than the plugins if you get managed hosting. It's worth it, but you need the money to start, and you lose the ease of everyone already having a Patreon account.

chipotle_coyote 7y ago

Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot. Like, a lot. A million a month or more. And I can't help but suspect that this realization necessitates changing, if not the business model, the business strategy. Patreon in 2017 is fine with Chapo Trap House and Amanda Palmer as the top moneymakers; Patreon in 2020 needs the next Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. (Better yet, the current Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.) That doesn't mean they have to actively drive out the podcasters and comics nerds and furries, but it probably means they have to put all their resources into going after whales.

dannyw 7y ago
A middleware that can be described as Wordpress with access control and Stripe integration, but worse in terms of performance and UX; somehow takes on $165 million in funding [1] and describes their business model as "not sustainable" [2]. Patreon is a low touch SaaS platform that charges up to 12% PLUS payment processing fees. They do not provide any meaningful level of discoverability: you must build your audience yourself. I wonder how the business would be doing if it disregarded that "raise money and spend money at all costs" model, that Softbank exaggerated? What if it had a WhatsApp-size of team: ~20 employees using sensible and well-architected tech stacks (not chasing the latest shiny thing just cuz its hip or cool)? I'm sure they'd be outrageously profitable. [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/patreon-raises-60m-series-d-targets-international-growth-and-more-customization/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/patreon-raises-60m-series-... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patreon-announces-it-will-pay-out-half-a-billion-dollars-to-content-creators-in-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patre...
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  I'm going to push back a little on this. I've run a Patreon and have a pretty good idea of what they provide for creators, and I've also looked into how I could replicate their services on my own -- and it turns out it's not really that trivial. - I want something that handles tiered membership levels with paid access control. - I also want something that keeps track of "goals" for donation drives (e.g., "if I bring in $500 a month, I'll do this thing for everyone"). - If I have rewards at different levels (which I did), it's nice to have something that keeps track of when I need to send those out and who I sent them out to. - It's nice to have what amounts to a basic CRM, keeping records of who paid me what at what points. If I say "maintain the membership at the $9/month level for at least six months and I'll send you this widget at the end of the year," I want my membership platform to be able to tell me who was at that level for six months even if they're not at that level at the end of the year. - It's nice to have a built-in mailing list if I need it. - While Patreon is very up front about not being a discoverability platform, aggregation of creators still matters: it is way easier to support a half-dozen or more creators monthly when you get one monthly charge instead of many monthly charges, and in fact people do occasionally discover new creators by discovering who creators they follow are supporting. If I were running this on my own, I wouldn't get that benefit and I probably couldn't have a "just pay me a little because you're nice" tier: it's no problem to pay $1 or $2 a month to somebody if it's part of that bundle, but it's not worth the hassle if it's standalone. (This was why everyone on Patreon screamed bloody murder when they proposed unbundling charges a few years back.) - Last but not least, not every creator is going to be comfortable putting together a Patreon-esque platform on their own. The more friendly the solution is, the more likely it is to cost money, and Patreon's pricing structure ends up being more competitive than you might think. WordPress membership management plugins that don't suck are often commercial, some with fees of $100+ per year; Memberful is free for limited use, but $25 per month otherwise; Substack charges 10% of your revenue and, like Patreon, doesn't cover processing fees that way. Obviously none of these give Patreon a "lock-in" and it might make sense for creators to jump ship anyway; I'm certainly keeping my eye on alternatives. But I'm kind of a control freak. I genuinely don't think "anyone can build their own Patreon over a weekend" is true, and I don't think the amount of money they charge over and above processing fees is super unreasonable.

0zwan 7y ago

It seems they still hiring: https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon How is it possible?

asperous 7y ago
Two possible reasons: - They may have interviewed for those roles internally but not found a fit Or, - Those job lists are "continual" in other words fake so they can increase their applicant pool and possibly use it in the future (or they haven't taken them down)

tobyhinloopen 7y ago

Somehow I thought Patreon was just a small service built by like 4 people...

zhte415 7y ago
I thought similar. Four developers/full-stack, but then a customer support function that'd roughly 0.X scale with users, then marketing - could double-hat that, then certainly a legal/compliance team after some scale, also finance which probably doesn't need to scale linearly but should be a couple of people at least and no double-hatting on these at their size. So, thinking a bit, perhaps more than four.

pm_me_ur_fullzz 7y ago

Aren't them and OnlyFans' America's number 1 employer? Although that's an automated process

billpg 7y ago

One of my pet peeves. If you sign up with Patreon to get perks, you're not really a patron any more. You're a customer.

imjustsaying 7y ago

>This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones >Still, it’s peculiar timing for Patreon, given the company touted an increase in new memberships during the first three weeks of March. Peculiar indeed. So what is a factor not yet mentioned? 69 days ago, I was net downvoted after pointing out specifically what trouble was coming for Patreon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316071 >>I wonder if consumers could use forced arbitration in the same way. >They can. Patreon is about to be hit really hard for playing thought policeman. Now we are here.

draw_down 7y ago
Come on

panpanna 7y ago

What alternatives to patron exists today? What happened to those French guys patron alternative for open source projects? Libre-something was is name...

sp332 7y ago
How about Gumroad? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733
- Kye 7y ago
  Gumroad is working on something that can potentially replace Patreon, but as it is Gumroad's different features lack the integration that makes Patreon what it is.
Ruthalas 7y ago
I am familiar with creators using the following alternatives: Suscribestar OnlyFans New Project 2 Liberapay
Matumio 7y ago
liberapay: still exists, still growing, still tiny in comparison: https://liberapay.com/about/stats https://liberapay.com/about/stats They had some trouble with micro-payments, resulting in a big drop. It's solved now. (Basically: don't do micro payments, pay e.g. 1 year in advance, directly to each receiver.)
muyuu 7y ago
Liberapay? Also SubscribeStar.

mikorym 7y ago

I think there should be a music service that works exactly like Spotify / Apple Music / Google Music but with these differences: 1. No free tier 2. Your views determine which artists get your money. AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most overall views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's Scatman's World then I would have expected his estate to get all my money minus maybe 5% admin fees.

anandoza 7y ago
What's the difference? Maybe I misunderstood but isn't pooling the views and then giving money weighted by views the same thing?
- syllospri 7y ago
  Slightly different. Example if the service only has 2 users: I listen to artist A's song 1 time, you listen to artist B's song 9 times. We listen to no other songs for the month. With pooling, A gets 10% of the money, B get's 10% of the money. With their suggestion, they each get 50%
- mikorym 7y ago
  I actually had to explain this to people that listen to my music. I get ~$0 per month from Spotify and when I told this to one of my friends (who listens to my music) they were like: "But I pay $10 a month!". Then I had to explain that all the subscribers on the whole platform get pooled together.
snarf21 7y ago
The harder question is does everyone get paid the same per view. If i only listen to one song, does that artist get the $5 from my monthly subscription? If I view a 1000 things in a month, do they all get $0.005? It gets hard to put a value on a listen. Is it maybe $0.10? Well over an hour that is $2 and I can get audio cheaper elsewhere. I think you have to have tiers where each month you get X credits (partial rollover?) and then that is what the artist gets paid. Allow people to upgrade to higher levels on the fly The sibling reply points to discover and unknowns getting any views at all. I think that is solvable with a different model. People who are unknown essentially "advertise" with the platform at the cost of 2 "views". People who listen to the unknown's song essentially earn two more views. And they might play that song later and the artist gets paid back essentially.