7 ms·

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 ar

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.
dannyw 7y ago
Their UX for viewing creations is absolutely atrocious. If you're going to write a site like a JavaScript SPA, at least do it well. Scrolling down the stream of a large creator brings down my i7 Macbook Pro to its knees. That should not be happening at all. Finally, Patreon's 'no refund whatsoever' policy is acceptable for donation jars, but with the growth of creators offering $100-$250+ tiers, it is only going to hurt Patreon and its brand, and possibly in contravention of consumer protection laws in many countries (including Australia). When there is an explicit promise to provide XYZ in exchange for $$$, you need to fulfil that promise. Yes, sellers hate PayPal disputes and chargebacks, but there's a reason why buyers overwhelmingly prefer PayPal and most businesses see a substantial uplift when integrating it: customers feel more confident! The reality is that small artists and creators are often unreliable, and if patrons feel like they're scammed or unreliable (e.g. pledge $50 for a t-shirt, do not get t-shirt, patreon support tells them there's nothing they can do), that's only going turn away patrons for life.
- nolok 7y ago
  The word you're looking for regarding PayPal is trust. Buyers trust PayPal, with good reasons. And in a sad way, PayPal didn't have to offer much for that, merely ensure that you got what you paid for or your money back. It says a lot about the universe of web sites, sellers and payment processors that offering that put them well above every one else.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    The problem is that the payment processor has no capacity to really investigate fraud, so their main choice is between defaulting to enabling seller fraud or buyer fraud. This means it makes sense to use different payment processors with different defaults for different payment types, because some payment types have disproportionately more buyer fraud than seller fraud. The problem for Patreon is that they're trying to provide something useful -- a service for transactions which are more likely to be dominated by buyer fraud -- but are stuck building it on top of credit card infrastructure that the law requires to default to defending against seller fraud. Then they get stuck in the middle, because buyers can still commit fraud by purchasing thousands of dollars worth of material and then disputing the charge with their credit card company after they already have it. What's needed is a version of credit cards that themselves do what Patreon is trying to do (no chargebacks) with relatively low monthly charge limits (limiting the buyer's exposure to card theft risk), so that this use case can be met with a system that isn't a garbage fire.
appleshore 7y ago
The world is bad UX which I tend to think is a conspiracy. For example, the Postmates driver app functions like it was programmed (automated) in a parallel dimension by toddlers in a thousand year future using an analog of Visual Basic. Then ported to iOS and ran via 480 API requests that transverse space, time and logic. Nothing makes sense, everything’s broken.
- jhwang5 7y ago
  Goes to prove again (and again) that product success is weakly correlated with engineering effort / quality
  - appleshore 7y ago
    It’s so extra in its absurdism that I’d rather believe in sinister intent than systemic stupidity. The delivery address is the smallest possible font hidden behind screens. The endless dinging etc makes no sense. I feel like people designing apps have never actually used them. Or maybe it’s all designed to make one so frustrated as to question the nature of reality.
    - jhwang5 7y ago
      Yep, this is why you should call BS when tech companies claim to make product decisions based on data or customer feedback. Their north star is revenue and as long as that's trending up (because of the secular trend of creators needing better monetization), who cares about UX /s.
manigandham 7y ago
Patreon is a rather subpar product that succeeded by using venture capital to buy growth and is now struggling to find sustainability for something that should've been profitable from day 1. Also a sizeable portion of creators from Twitch to Patreon produce adult content and much of that has now shifted to other niche sites.
- nikanj 7y ago
  That's the eternal churn: 1) A new payment platform is started, small enough to be fly under the radar 2) It attracts more and more adult content producers who've been turned away by the bigger players 3) It grows big enough to attract attention 4) The Nazgûl lawyers ride from Mastercard / VISA to shut the adult business down 5) Lather, rince, repeat
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    Why does it happen though? What's the motivation behind the credit card companies? As in, what's the ultimate reason for this?
    - csunbird 7y ago
      Operation Chokepoint
    - paxys 7y ago
      There is a very large amount of chargebacks and fraud happening on adult sites.
      - hef19898 7y ago
        Which sounds like an opportunity, doesn't it? Fraud free adult patreon.
        paxys 7y ago
        It's not like every other adult site sells fraud as a feature. It's just really difficult and expensive to prevent. A single chargeback can cost the merchant up to $100 in fees.
cirno 7y ago
> 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. They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content from people that login supports and mirrors it for free. Almost every artist with more than 100 subscribers is illegally shared there. It's really quite sleazy when you consider most of the artists let you see their entire catalog for a $1 or even $5 tier. Cheating someone out of thousands of hours of labor for $1 is particularly low. I know it's the internet and you can't really stop piracy, but I'd like to see Patreon being proactive against a service that hurts both itself and its creators like that.
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  Yes, water marking downloads with account details and charging for this sort of thing would help put a stop to it...
  - michaelt 7y ago
    > charging for this sort of thing If there are zero hacked accounts ever, sure. But charging someone $500 for actions a hacker took with their account would be.... very unusual.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jermaustin1 7y ago
    A PDF I bought on sellfy actually did this. It stuck my email address in the footer of every page. That email was tied to a transaction in paypal, making it highly traceable back to myself. In 30 seconds, one could easily remove that from the PDF in Acrobat, but that doesn't mean there aren't other hidden watermarks in the file.
- tomp 7y ago
  Piracy has proven to be the best competition for shitty legacy content delivery methods. I wonder if we'd have Netflix without ThePirateBay. Fact is, people want to pay for content (not because it's "not cheating" or whatever, but because they genuinely want to support artists and want them to keep creating) but are unwilling to jump through hoops for that. It's on Patreon & co to improve their game.
baud147258 7y ago
Though for content producer without Patron-exclusive content and which are not using Patreon to distribute their content, instead using Youtube or a blog, it works well. At least that's my experience with the content creators I follow.
Strom 7y ago
> 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. It has been fixed. The artist can configure an option whether the patron needs to pay up front or after. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291283-How-charge-up-front-works https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291283-How-...
lathiat 7y ago
Until only a couple of months ago, the iOS app required you to click through each creator to see their posts only. There was no central news feed like the website and the most obvious way to consume such content. They -finally- fixed this about two months ago. Deep linking also often failed for me, i.e. I got a push notificaiton, I click the notification, and I end up on the first creator in my list's news feed rather than what I clicked. That also seems finally fixed now in the same update. So I'm glad they fixed it but I have no idea what they were doing for the last few years... I realise they can't/don't want new revenue on iOS due to not being able to use their own billing system for electronic goods and losing a chunk of the revenue but I'm sure they have many people who use the website but want push notifications to work and to read the news there.. it was bonkers.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
I don't think most consumers of content use patreon to get at the creators content eg I use YouTube to watch forgotten weapons.
- eckmLJE 7y ago
  Many creators use Patreon as a way to paywall their content behind minimum levels of Patreon support. By supporting on Patreon, you gain access to their content.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Of course they don't. Most people are willing to spend their valuable time watching said content, however only superfans pay the monthly subscriber fee to be "the first ones" or get at content that is never going to be distributed anywhere but the patreon channel and on piratebay.

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.

dannyw 7y ago

Their UX for viewing creations is absolutely atrocious. If you're going to write a site like a JavaScript SPA, at least do it well. Scrolling down the stream of a large creator brings down my i7 Macbook Pro to its knees. That should not be happening at all. Finally, Patreon's 'no refund whatsoever' policy is acceptable for donation jars, but with the growth of creators offering $100-$250+ tiers, it is only going to hurt Patreon and its brand, and possibly in contravention of consumer protection laws in many countries (including Australia). When there is an explicit promise to provide XYZ in exchange for $$$, you need to fulfil that promise. Yes, sellers hate PayPal disputes and chargebacks, but there's a reason why buyers overwhelmingly prefer PayPal and most businesses see a substantial uplift when integrating it: customers feel more confident! The reality is that small artists and creators are often unreliable, and if patrons feel like they're scammed or unreliable (e.g. pledge $50 for a t-shirt, do not get t-shirt, patreon support tells them there's nothing they can do), that's only going turn away patrons for life.

nolok 7y ago
The word you're looking for regarding PayPal is trust. Buyers trust PayPal, with good reasons. And in a sad way, PayPal didn't have to offer much for that, merely ensure that you got what you paid for or your money back. It says a lot about the universe of web sites, sellers and payment processors that offering that put them well above every one else.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  The problem is that the payment processor has no capacity to really investigate fraud, so their main choice is between defaulting to enabling seller fraud or buyer fraud. This means it makes sense to use different payment processors with different defaults for different payment types, because some payment types have disproportionately more buyer fraud than seller fraud. The problem for Patreon is that they're trying to provide something useful -- a service for transactions which are more likely to be dominated by buyer fraud -- but are stuck building it on top of credit card infrastructure that the law requires to default to defending against seller fraud. Then they get stuck in the middle, because buyers can still commit fraud by purchasing thousands of dollars worth of material and then disputing the charge with their credit card company after they already have it. What's needed is a version of credit cards that themselves do what Patreon is trying to do (no chargebacks) with relatively low monthly charge limits (limiting the buyer's exposure to card theft risk), so that this use case can be met with a system that isn't a garbage fire.

appleshore 7y ago

The world is bad UX which I tend to think is a conspiracy. For example, the Postmates driver app functions like it was programmed (automated) in a parallel dimension by toddlers in a thousand year future using an analog of Visual Basic. Then ported to iOS and ran via 480 API requests that transverse space, time and logic. Nothing makes sense, everything’s broken.

jhwang5 7y ago
Goes to prove again (and again) that product success is weakly correlated with engineering effort / quality
- appleshore 7y ago
  It’s so extra in its absurdism that I’d rather believe in sinister intent than systemic stupidity. The delivery address is the smallest possible font hidden behind screens. The endless dinging etc makes no sense. I feel like people designing apps have never actually used them. Or maybe it’s all designed to make one so frustrated as to question the nature of reality.
  - jhwang5 7y ago
    Yep, this is why you should call BS when tech companies claim to make product decisions based on data or customer feedback. Their north star is revenue and as long as that's trending up (because of the secular trend of creators needing better monetization), who cares about UX /s.

manigandham 7y ago

Patreon is a rather subpar product that succeeded by using venture capital to buy growth and is now struggling to find sustainability for something that should've been profitable from day 1. Also a sizeable portion of creators from Twitch to Patreon produce adult content and much of that has now shifted to other niche sites.

nikanj 7y ago
That's the eternal churn: 1) A new payment platform is started, small enough to be fly under the radar 2) It attracts more and more adult content producers who've been turned away by the bigger players 3) It grows big enough to attract attention 4) The Nazgûl lawyers ride from Mastercard / VISA to shut the adult business down 5) Lather, rince, repeat
- Mirioron 7y ago
  Why does it happen though? What's the motivation behind the credit card companies? As in, what's the ultimate reason for this?
  - csunbird 7y ago
    Operation Chokepoint
  - paxys 7y ago
    There is a very large amount of chargebacks and fraud happening on adult sites.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      Which sounds like an opportunity, doesn't it? Fraud free adult patreon.
      - paxys 7y ago
        It's not like every other adult site sells fraud as a feature. It's just really difficult and expensive to prevent. A single chargeback can cost the merchant up to $100 in fees.

cirno 7y ago

> 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. They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content from people that login supports and mirrors it for free. Almost every artist with more than 100 subscribers is illegally shared there. It's really quite sleazy when you consider most of the artists let you see their entire catalog for a $1 or even $5 tier. Cheating someone out of thousands of hours of labor for $1 is particularly low. I know it's the internet and you can't really stop piracy, but I'd like to see Patreon being proactive against a service that hurts both itself and its creators like that.

andy_ppp 7y ago
Yes, water marking downloads with account details and charging for this sort of thing would help put a stop to it...
- michaelt 7y ago
  > charging for this sort of thing If there are zero hacked accounts ever, sure. But charging someone $500 for actions a hacker took with their account would be.... very unusual.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  A PDF I bought on sellfy actually did this. It stuck my email address in the footer of every page. That email was tied to a transaction in paypal, making it highly traceable back to myself. In 30 seconds, one could easily remove that from the PDF in Acrobat, but that doesn't mean there aren't other hidden watermarks in the file.
tomp 7y ago
Piracy has proven to be the best competition for shitty legacy content delivery methods. I wonder if we'd have Netflix without ThePirateBay. Fact is, people want to pay for content (not because it's "not cheating" or whatever, but because they genuinely want to support artists and want them to keep creating) but are unwilling to jump through hoops for that. It's on Patreon & co to improve their game.

baud147258 7y ago

Though for content producer without Patron-exclusive content and which are not using Patreon to distribute their content, instead using Youtube or a blog, it works well. At least that's my experience with the content creators I follow.

Strom 7y ago

> 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. It has been fixed. The artist can configure an option whether the patron needs to pay up front or after. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291283-How-charge-up-front-works https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291283-How-...

lathiat 7y ago

Until only a couple of months ago, the iOS app required you to click through each creator to see their posts only. There was no central news feed like the website and the most obvious way to consume such content. They -finally- fixed this about two months ago. Deep linking also often failed for me, i.e. I got a push notificaiton, I click the notification, and I end up on the first creator in my list's news feed rather than what I clicked. That also seems finally fixed now in the same update. So I'm glad they fixed it but I have no idea what they were doing for the last few years... I realise they can't/don't want new revenue on iOS due to not being able to use their own billing system for electronic goods and losing a chunk of the revenue but I'm sure they have many people who use the website but want push notifications to work and to read the news there.. it was bonkers.

C1sc0cat 7y ago

I don't think most consumers of content use patreon to get at the creators content eg I use YouTube to watch forgotten weapons.

eckmLJE 7y ago
Many creators use Patreon as a way to paywall their content behind minimum levels of Patreon support. By supporting on Patreon, you gain access to their content.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
Of course they don't. Most people are willing to spend their valuable time watching said content, however only superfans pay the monthly subscriber fee to be "the first ones" or get at content that is never going to be distributed anywhere but the patreon channel and on piratebay.