19 ms·

Five Buck Fatigue

207 points by lawik 6y ago

electriclove 6y ago
I usually donate a one-time, larger amount. I know it isn't recurring which is what people want but this is the way that I'm able to deal with it.
- Applejinx 6y ago
  I make my living off Patreon and have many people doing exactly that. Also, I support quite a few Patreons myself but they're all ones that I can do $1 a month… forever. I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget. Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a 'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to plan for, as the creator.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I thought Brave was going to go a different direction, closer to what Apple music streaming does, where they look at your traffic over the month and divvy up your subscription between them. Or even: these are all of the things you support: which ones did you enjoy this month?
Pxtl 6y ago
You have to have a heck of an offering to get a $5 monthly out of me. Every $5 monthly gets measured against "half a Netflix" and comes up short. Edit: I'll admit I'll gladly drop $40 on an ebook from the same creators I feel weird about funding monthly. I'm allergic to monthlies.
- throwanem 6y ago
  What I hear you saying is, Netflix has swamped the market and driven down the price of quality content. Well, I say "quality". It seems like every time I look at it, their catalog's dropped something else I wanted to see. My hit rate on searches there has to be hovering around 2%.
  - amelius 6y ago
    No, really, no single human creator can provide $5/mo worth of content. If you don't like Netflix just think of a quality monthly magazine.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      IMO it's subjective. I once was horrified by a creator's video thanking his fans in an obviously poorly produced setting and style. Years later I've grown to enjoy both their older, rougher works and their newer, polished content. Maybe it's just the illusion of a human connection or hip to support indies, but I'm seriously considering making some monthly donations to support their work. Niches like theirs will always exist.
      - throwanem 6y ago
        That sounds a lot like AvE. I've been on his Patreon for, oh, must be years now, and he was very gracious when in a fit of excitement I sent a couple of photos of my first completed metalworking project. Not that he's not a bit of a drunk uncle, but it turns out you can learn a lot from one of those. And there's really nothing that's not funny about the occasional 18650 accidentally eating a hacksaw, so long as you're not in the room when it happens.
loraa 6y ago
Subscription services are bullshit.
zem 6y ago
I have the opposite feeling; very often I will contribute to someone's patreon or gofundme or whatever because I like their work and have gotten a lot out of it, but I almost never go on to read the members only writing. some part of me values it less because it isn't freely accessible.
- mjayhn 6y ago
  I do this and I feel bad about it when I'm not reading someones stuff. Please don't take it personally. There's a lot going on, my plan is to eventually get to it and support you along the way for making it. Also I'm hugely supportive to any devs going off and doing indie projects mostly out of wanting to make that a real source of income for the rest of us.
- throwanem 6y ago
  I don't tend to take advantage of members-only content either, but for me it's purely a matter of convenience. If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely would use it, but I can rarely be bothered (or even remember, really) to actually visit the website. It doesn't feel like a loss, though. I mean, if I'm supporting someone's work, it's on the strength of what I could already see before I started doing that.
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    > If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely would use it Patreon does have this feature for audio content, like podcasts, if the creator enables it: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enable-audio-RSS-feeds-for-my-patrons https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enab... But I think you mean for all content? I emulate this by enabling e-mail notifications for all posts from some creators and auto-forwarding them to Newsblur for newsletter reading. Maybe that helps.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      That actually really might! I've been in the market for a new reader, since Feedly's product people seem hellbent on making it worse with every update, and Newsblur might be just the thing. And while it hadn't occurred to me until you mentioned that (for which thanks!), any email-to-RSS gateway should let me do what I'm looking for. One thing Feedly hasn't managed to ruin, yet at least, is the "today" view, with items from all sources sorted by time. Does Newsblur do something similar? Their iOS screenshots don't make it easy to tell.
hguant 6y ago
I've found that I'm much more willing to spend a larger chunk of money in a one off payment than signing up for yet another "only 5 dollar" pledge. I recently signed up for a few substack accounts from writers I've admired, and, in a move that would have horrified my younger, eye patch wearing self, have bought a year long subscription to The Economist. They offer good writing, interning opinions that, though I may disagree with them, are well thought out and we'll constructed. Publishing in this day and age is easy - twitter and Facebook and friends have shown us how simple it can be to say, well, anything. Good writing is hard, has remained hard, and should be valued. I've done my level best to make sure that only the most dedicated institution can reliably get ad revenue from me - it's only fair that I buy and support the things I value.
reustle 6y ago
> Let's call this the Five Dollar Fatigue, sounds catchy. This is already commonly called "subscription fatigue" and has been discussed extensively
CarVac 6y ago
I'm willing to buy swag if it's particularly unique or interesting, but I won't subscribe unless it's something really really special.
627467 6y ago
What you can call "fatigue" in the first world, presents itself as impossible to overcome barrier to the rest of the world. I get that if platforms and creators charged any less than 5 bucks they probably lose even more in payment fees. Can't help but think that we still have so much to overcome with regards to cheap or free micropayments.
- waheoo 6y ago
  $1 seems to be the lower limit. Transaction fees on low volume are usually like 30c or 1% whichever is higher.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Competent sites, like Patreon sometimes, will let you support multiple creators off one transaction fee. Also if you deliberately set up for small payments, there's things like paypal micropayments offering a fee of 5 cents plus 5%.
teej 6y ago
Frankly, I've seen little evidence that subscription fatigue exists beyond a handful of complains in HN links and comments. The meteoric growth of Onlyfans demonstrates the opposite - that there's huge demand for subscriptions and we're only starting to learn what subscription content folks will pay for. I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.
- free_rms 6y ago
  I was under the impression that most subscriptions to OnlyFans were made in a.. less rational state of mind.
  - teej 6y ago
    That's absurd. Humans do not lose all executive decision making just because the pixels on their phone are in the shape of a nipple. See also: NYT, Substack, Patreon.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - didibus 6y ago
      I think OP meant that some type of content just makes more money. I'm also curious, beyond explicit adult content, I wonder how much OnlyFans is pulling in.
      - chillwaves 6y ago
        Check out Twitch streamers. I have personally witnessed a $5000 donation on a live stream from a variety streamer who mostly would dance, cosplay and stream gaming.
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      Research shows that higher order brain function shuts down when being sexually stimulated, but I understand your general point.
christiansakai 6y ago
I only contribute to two Patreons (each $5) monthly so far: - a friend of mine, because he is a friend of mine - a guitar teacher that I followed, because he constantly produce good quality materials that are only available on mmembership. worth it. I also bought some of his courses and sometimes schedule a 1 on 1 private with him. But for open source, I never contributed to anything lol. Sorry, OSS maintainers. Thank you for the awesome work. The world needs more people like you. But if I can get it for free I'll get it for free. For indie SaaS, I never pay anything as well. Sorry indie SaaS devs, but I am not an app/software heavy user even though I work as an SWE. I don't use note taking apps or any other productivity apps.
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  you seem genuinely proud to constantly take people's labor without compensation, just curious why you would think thats something to boast about?
- mywittyname 6y ago
  You're pretty typical in this respect. It's why open source software needs to be sponsored by large corporations and why indie software is "free for non-commercial use". It's easier to swipe that business CC than it is your own one.
npunt 6y ago
I wish we could just set a fixed monthly budget (e.g. $40/mo) and divide that among all the creators we wish to support. Then when we come across someone whose work we like, the question is simply "do I want to support this person's work?", and if so, they get a fraction of our budget. Right now, rewards effectively make every membership a custom membership that requires users spend extra time considering their support and dollar amount. This type of decision doesn't scale when we all want to support dozens of creators. I wrote a more detailed breakdown of this design here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-platform/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-pla...
Dylan16807 6y ago
$5 adds up quickly but $1 adds up a lot slower. So far I haven't hit my budget for $1/month support, and over a big group it's enough to fund a lot.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  $1 is not enough to qualify for the extra content many of these services are offering.
scrollinondubs 6y ago
@lawik not sure if you caught this the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563 <- that person proposes an interesting solution specifically in the context of supporting open source software that would seemingly address this fatigue phenomenon you experience: a monthly pool that you can apportion so it dilutes and supports the projects you choose. That way you set the total monthly contribution and then you're just carving that up. Assuming there was a simple enough one-click interface for doing so that could be one way to address this. Of course you'd have to get a critical mass of makers to adopt the standard in order for it to take off (or convince the Patreon's and Github's of the world to adopt it).
- lawik 6y ago
  Ah, yeah, I saw that. It could definitely be good for some cases. I think it would be good for GitHub and such. I think the incentives for fairly successful creators just isn't there. They'll get more from their dedicated fanbase. But I hope something like this shows up for and from GitHub, especially for businesses. I think a lot of dev-teams would like to portion out some stipend from their company on a monthly basis to support their dependencies. I'd do it privately too, for sure.
irrational 6y ago
The only subscription I have is to Disney+ for the kids and even that I'm considering dropping. I have friends who have Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, whatever the paid version of YouTube is called, whatever streaming service has Star Trek, etc. It's gotten to the point where they are paying as much for those services as they do for cable.
makecheck 6y ago
It’s kind of depressing how some business models can just siphon money (like cable bills going up a few dollars every month forever until it’s hundreds), while others practically have to beg. Apps that took literally years to write can ask for donations and get nothing, while a single bank’s overdraft fee probably nets more. And now of course, we passed legislation to “help” businesses that somehow couldn’t even get money (despite applying the first day) because of greedier or more well-connected applicants. This is a huge mess and it should be a massive priority for society to stop letting the leeches get away with this theft.
aj7 6y ago
Yeah, but just in time, the five-dollar-foot-long is back.
nine_k 6y ago
> I want to support, I want to engage. But I also want to be mindful in how I spend my money. And $5/month adds up pretty quickly. So basically the author cannot afford to buy all the content he would like to, but feels a pang of conscience when he has to take the content for free, even if it's made freely available by the authors. It's an interesting internal conflict to have. > I think I might need to figure out what my actual budget is for supporting independent creators on a monthly basis. I suppose there are multiple solutions that provide something like that. > I think it would be worse if they were as heavy-handed as Wikipedia I'm totally fine with Wikipedia, and I usually give them $5-15 yearly. (They, in particular, are said to receive more money than they know what to reasonably do with.) This must be a case of personal sensitivity, which varies across the audience, and it sucks to be on the above-average sensitive end. I personally buy stuff I find great / fascinating. I hear a great track or a great album on Bandcamp? OK, I pay for it. I see it on Youtube? I go to Bandcamp, or whatever other site the authors care to list, and pay there. If there's no such link, sad. OTOH I don't normally subscribe to support a particular creator. I pay for the result. Great online creators usually produce good stuff anyway, they started with producing and publishing free (to view) stuff. The number of people who paid for a particular episode / track / post / whatever is an important piece of feedback, I think.
- diag 6y ago
  When you say you're buying a product or result, you're still paying for the production indirectly.
techsupporter 6y ago
Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. But my read of this is that authors and other creators are in a no-win situation. People don't like ads (so they block them or simply don't interact with them, either way driving down the money made from the ads), but people also don't like subscriptions, and people definitely don't like one-off "plonk your credit card here" request, yet no centralized micropayment system has really taken off because people also don't take to those. So...what next? How do creators get paid? (FWIW, I am on the opposite end of this. I probably devote too much of my income--not a brag, it's likely a financially unwise thing to do--on recurring subscriptions on Patreon and Maximum Fun and other platforms because I'm very quick to "ooh, shiny" and click-to-subscribe.)
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I don't know. Personally I very much like subscriptions. As long as they're $5 a month, I can support an awfully large amount of people To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    I support around 20 creators on Patreon, and at that rate I can't really afford more than $1/creator. But they have thousands of patrons, and with those numbers even $1/mo from everyone makes for a livable wage
- CM30 6y ago
  Honestly, I'm not sure there is a practical solution. Patron style systems and donations seem to be the most plausible way for creators to make money, but the internet + high competition + ads have basicaly forced most content into a race to the bottom where people expect everything to be free and those things that aren't lose to free alternatives. It's like what happened with mobile apps. People expect everything for free/maybe with microtransactions or ads, so it's basically impossible to monetise stuff in that market.
  - 6y ago
tomcam 6y ago
Doesn't seem to be a problem for purveyors of high quality content. Often they only get a small percentage of people to contribute, but they make do. And IMHO more of them make out like bandits than one might think, especially Youtubers with multiple ways to make money. I think that number is closer to the low thousands than the high dozens.
sandoooo 6y ago
For me, the only reason I'd be willing to pay $5/m for a single creator is because of information disparity: it is difficult to find content I like, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. If I have to spend a lot of time looking this costs far more than just paying for incrementally more of the same, even though the perfect content for me is probably out there somewhere for free. AI will probably solve this problem eventually, though recommender services are in general pretty crap right now. I think there is a lot of value in a service that can go through the Amazon catalog and just cull the 99.9% of stuff it thinks I'm not interested in, then give me advanced search / preview / indexing on the rest. Problem is, it would have to do this without taking ad dollars to poison the list. Also privacy concerns.
lelandbatey 6y ago
I get the fatigue, but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic. It's such a breath of fresh air from the world of advertising. TOTALLY off topic, but I want to get this advertising analogy/story/parable/fiction out of my head, so I might as well write it down here: In the advertising-based revenue world, you see really odd businesses. Imagine a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!" As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy." "But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't give away the pizza?" moans the employee. Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." And with that you walk to your car and drive home. The frustrated employee would, by 2030 move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer sits with their eyes held open and stares into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would recieve a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments". Meanwhile in 2025, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.
- Applejinx 6y ago
  "but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic" But that would be Universal Basic Income :) think about it, that's exactly what UBI is. Pay enough people and someone is gonna come up with something amazing. They might share it, they might profit by it, but they will want it to be known as that will be the new 'need' in the Maslow hierarchy. This has more or less happened before by accident. For instance, Silicon Valley, which came out of a period of significant wealth and leisure.
bjoernw 6y ago
Companies like https://coil.com https://coil.com are solving this by giving you a single $5/month subscription and then streaming micropayments to the content creators as you consume their content. It builds on the WebMonitization standard https://webmonetization.org https://webmonetization.org
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  There have been countless attempts to create a micropayments ecosystem during the last 20 years, and they have all flopped. What makes this different?
  - bjoernw 6y ago
    Coil and Mozilla working on a web standard together, the fact that we now have a couple of years of examples of digital content creators being de-monitized on ad-supported platforms, and the fact that crypto currencies are more approachable now.
- hamstercat 6y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong. I do hope the model works. But all I can think of when I see their business model is Spotify. Where content creators are being paid cents, and have to rely on alternative streams of income like concert and merch. Except in this case, there is no alternative, the patron model was supposed to be the alternative to ads and sponsorship. I do wonder how much can be contributed to the content creator, even without considering the cut they take for their services. If I'm watching more than 5 content creators in the month, then they're getting less than a dollar each.
- fidelramos 6y ago
  This seems similar to what Brave is doing. I would like to see a side-by-side comparison of the two. For example I know that Brave pays users for watching ads, for example. There are alternatives being built around direct micropayments to authors, such as https://read.cash https://read.cash. It's a click to send any amount from $0.01 and up, and the wallets are non-custodial, so money goes straight to the creator, minus a fee for the website. This might be a solution to the fatigue described by article, as you pay especifically by the content you like, and you decide the amount.
ggm 6y ago
I offered a newspaper $60 for a years hassle free reading but they still nag me. I definitely feel the $5 fatigue here, because its a $5/mo payment threshold.
CarbyAu 6y ago
One HN comment mentioned the value of a magazine subscription, which can be ballpark similar monthly costs. For me a patreon (or whatever) subscription to a whole GROUP of specialists in a field would be valuable. As it stands: Patreon person:This thing I did/reviewed is great! Me: Is it though?...search more internet for validation
- hinkley 6y ago
  I had the thought, "why doesn't PBS or a PBS-like organization do stuff like this?" PBS doesn't exist without the local affiliates, though, and chasing after web content too vigorously would betray that relationship, if you didn't handle it very, very carefully.
sandoooo 6y ago
Are the members-only content higher or lower quality, in general? The incentive seems to be for lower quality, because the vast majority of time and effort is spent on the free part that convinces you to pay. It's a reverse iceberg.
RhysU 6y ago
Back when we bought music albums (on vinyl or tape or whatever) we didn't subscribe to a content creator. We bought a product. If we liked it, we watched for the next release. I loved $NINETIES_BAND but I sure as heck wouldn't subscribe to them in the modern sense. The old model allowed monetizing outsized genius (or fashion) as demonstrated by dribbled song releases on the radio. This new model rewards consistently-better-than average content. It is a big divide. Perhaps what is missing is the modern DJ.
AlexeyMK 6y ago
My mental model lately has been, if I'm enjoying the content, I should try to figure out how to pay ~$1/hour. If I'm not enjoying it, I should find a better way to spend m time.
alexashka 6y ago
> And $5/month adds up pretty quickly Does it? If you can't spare fifty bucks/month on whatever on top of your other expenses, you're doing it wrong :)
- twic 6y ago
  It adds up if you like fifty different things.
cercatrova 6y ago
People value a product or service more when it is priced higher, so in my opinion, good content needs to be priced a lot higher than it is now, an order of magnitude higher, even (~$50/month), for people to value it properly.
johnpowell 6y ago
Back in the day the internet for normal people was 3 bucks a hour over a 14,400 modem. I didn't consider myself a "creator" for posting my recipes for making mashed potatoes in a crock pot. I just wanted to make the world have better mashed potatoes. I did it for free. There was no "like" button or comments or monetization. Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter. That is not a joke. I had a crock pot cooking site. I didn't have a counter or anything. Maybe it was popular.. I will never know. The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.
- scalablenotions 6y ago
  That's cool, but I want people to be able to independently create content for me to enjoy, which is a bit less of a crock. That will probably takes all their time and they need to pay for ingredients for their pot. Bring on universal basic income I guess.
  - irrational 6y ago
    But there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Do we really need to support people to create more? I feel like we can enjoy what we already have and don't need to continuously look for something new. If people really really really want to create something, they will find a way to do so.
    - avian 6y ago
      > there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. I hear this often. Where is this excellent content? 99% of things online recommendations float up for me is garbage. Sometimes I see some gems, but it's rare. Already years ago I was hearing people say that the only thing we need now is good content discovery. Screw any new content. We already have too much good stuff. I'm starting to think that, if in all this time Internet giants haven't been able come up with a way to get to those hundreds of lifetimes of amazing content, maybe it doesn't actually exist? Our tastes change over time. Some things that were great 10 years ago haven't aged well. There's a long tail. What's excellent for you isn't interesting to me, and so on. In a sum there might be more content than you can watch in a lifetime, but an intersection of that whole collection with a single person's momentary interests seems to be much much smaller.
mrhektor 6y ago
"You are fighting uphill against a cultural expectation for things to be free on the web." A great solution to this problem of "free", is to make things that are "better than free". Kevin Kelly explains it really well in his essay (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/), but TL;DR is that traits like Immediacy, Personalization and Interpretation play a very important role in getting people to pay for stuff. Software: Free, The manual: $10,000
bullen 6y ago
There is a malaise in the world and no matter what you call it money will flow in other directions now. You need to force the payment; optional or piratable walls are meaningless, that means you need to provide a service the people expect to pay for and some parts have to be closed! I think 1$/month should be the goto value that we sponsor each other with. The only way to get velocity in a deflation is to spend, but you need to get spent on more than you spend which requires inflation! Let's wait and see how the money will be distributed after the "easy dead tree" has been burned, just make sure you are prepared, things are going to get hard and accelerate down for the first time!
jcun4128 6y ago
Kind of curious if there's a way to batch support... you put in a fixed amount of money/month and you can subscribe to multiple people, but your contribution gets divided... probably not viable due to transaction fees and somebody's like "oh great I got a penny"
- lbotos 6y ago
  I think this is what Brave is trying to do with attention tokens? I don't use it but I think that's what it's called.
  - jcun4128 6y ago
    I see. I was thinking about Patreon/support like YouTubers but maybe they do something like that already/reason not to.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  It would be a model I'm more comfortable with. Just set a fixed monthly fee, and let it be distributed automatically; with an option for me to review the monthly split to blacklist sites that try to game the system. Lots of issues to solve before that becomes possible though. Either some company manages to deliver the dominant solution and skims their 30% off, or the technology behind it is too easy to abuse (great, now FAANG gets another letter), or it just leads to more mountains of crappy content that exist just to lure you in and hold your attention without actually delivering (leaving you dissatisfied).
- palsir 6y ago
  see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004503
  - jcun4128 6y ago
    I can see the potential convenience of divisibility with crypto
octoberfranklin 6y ago
> There is a lot of consideration in committing that recurring payment for .. indefinite duration. It's (yet another) negative externality of the Anti-Money Laundering / Know Your Customer mania. If it turns out that a drug cartel used one of these crowdfunding platforms, the government will kill/bankrupt the platform. Requiring recurring payments is the only reliable way to screen out prepaid gift cards, because prepaid gift card issuers are no longer allowed to process fixed-amount recurring payments. Any other approach is EXTREMELY labor-intensive and still doesn't work 100% -- for example look at Amazon AWS, which devotes a huge amount of effort to playing this whack-a-mole game and yet still isn't 100% successful. AWS bills aren't the same dollar amount every month so they can't go this route. Basically AML/KYC is Why We Can't Have Nice Things like micropayments or even one-time minipayments to individuals without something like Paypal where they randomly lock up your money for 180 days while demanding "papers please". AML/KYC simply does not scale down to micropayments or even near them. It's not about the payment processing technology, it's about the legal/regulatory burden.
thathndude 6y ago
Was just thinking of this yesterday as I listened to ATP (Accidental Tech Podcast - ATP.FM). They're adding a members component to their podcast. Just $8/month. And they don't do the hard sell, but there are little perks. I listen to at least 5-7 podcasts regularly. If they all do the same thing, it's close to my cable + Internet bill from just 10 years ago. Now let's do streaming: Netflix + Disney+ and you spent another $20/month. I just don't think this model is going to work in the long term. Who knows!
- jdechko 6y ago
  I listen to ATP as well, and I did end up joining their membership program. The author mentioned CGP Grey specifically, and Cortex, his podcast with Myke Hurley on relay.fm recently announced a $5 membership. Upgrade, with Jason & Myke also announced the same $5 membership. So I see where the author is coming from. At the same time all 3 podcasts for now say that just by listening, it supports the podcast through the old channels. I do get a little of that FOMO, but I don’t feel any guilt for not paying.
AnonC 6y ago
Tangent: I don’t have access to a computer right now to analyze this website more, but it’s blazing fast! Great work, author. I’d love to know more about the technology stack (seems like it’s hosted on AWS with CloudFront).
habosa 6y ago
I often try to support a creator and find out that monthly support is my only option ... which I am not willing to do. Here are some ways we have always supported creators without subscriptions: I can buy a book, watch a movie in a theater, get a CD, attend a play, buy a painting, etc. I'm still willing to do those things, I do them all the time. I'm still willing to spend a lot of money on those things. I am not willing to lay you $5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give you $100 one time for something really great.
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  What I am writing may not a good idea, but it works. Let's assume you like 12 patreon content creators. You can subscribe one month per year to each (1st-Jan, 2nd-Feb, and so on), binge consume the contenct they made for the past 12 months, and unsubscribe to them. This way you kick your FOMO habit, get to see what you enjoy. I do this with TV series (in a way). I stopped watching Lost, HIMYM, and a few more, and then I binge watched in the end (in the very end). I watched the last 3 seasons of HIMYM and last 2 season of Lost like this. It was more an exercise to kick the FOMO habit, and avoid the 'agony' of waiting for the next episode to drop . Most content creators give you access to all their past stuff. Again, I know this may not be ethically "good", but it's part of the game of using patreon and other content sharing management services the way it better suits ME/YOU, than them. In the scenario of enjoying 12 creators, you spread them out in the year, you spend $5 per month instead of 12*5= 60 per month. In the span of a decade, that adds up to a lot. And don't get me wrong, it's not about being cheap. If you feel bad, go and donate that saved $ in a charity. It's about controlling your time and your FOMO habit.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  What's missing here is a netflix style model where your donations are distributed among people you want to support instead of having to micromanage donations. I pay about ~30 euro per month for netflix, spotify, and amazon prime. So, it's not a stretch of the imagination that I would be willing to pay for (some) of the free content I enjoy on e.g. Youtube. However, I follow dozens of youtubers asking for donations and while I like most of them, it's not going to add up to me handing out multiple dollars to each of them on a monthly basis because it would add up to vastly more than I spend on commercial content. And it's kind of unfair to single out just a few of them. But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work. It would probably add up to just a few cents per personn I donate to; but if lots of people do that, it adds up. The deal with patreon is that you rely on a handful of people supporting you while you give away most of your content for free. IMHO most of that is unrealized potential for monetization. Several youtubers I follow have numbers of followers and views that would put some tv channels to shame and they also get revenue from sponsorships. Several others are a bit more modest but still rake in tens to hundreds of thousands of views easily. I'd love a platform that gives me a simple predictable cost per month combined with a fair, no hassle way to ensure that money gets funneled to artists, writers, coders, and other content creators I care about. Donating 10cents per month is not a thing and donating 1-10$ per month means I have to cherry pick people out of group of dozens to hundreds I might consider donating to but currently don't.
everdrive 6y ago
I don't mean this as a critique of the article, but it seems this is just the burden of so much choice. There is amazing, wonderful, life-changing content out there today. And, there's so much of it. It feels so overwhelming. It's just like the calorie problem that shot up in the 80s and 90s. There's too much of everything, and the only filter is ourselves. And, much like the calorie problem most people never solved it. Most people are anywhere from a little fat to very fat. And, so it will be with content and distraction.
shadeslayer_ 6y ago
Human beings need to understand that it is simply not possible for a large portion of people to live off their hobbies - there's a reason why they're called hobbies or passion projects to begin with.
mnky9800n 6y ago
why cant the guy making videos just like sell tickets or something instead like for a normal movie?
jjice 6y ago
I've been trying to loosen up with my small subscriptions like this. Back when I became a consistent member of the internet and multiple communities on it, I was a middle school student with no money, and when I did have pocket change from mowing lawns, I had no way to exchange it online. I gravitated towards free content because of this. Even once I was working and had a bank account at 16, I still felt weird about committing to a subscription. Now that I keep my costs low and work full time, I have a disposable income that could be spent on these creators, but there are so many that I don't know where to put it. Should it go to the long time creators I've followed since those middle school days, or should I throw it towards the real underdogs right now? There is only so much to go around from my pockets, and just like the author says, it adds up quickly.
praptak 6y ago
I can relate. If I were to imagine a perfect system for this it would be something that tracks whatever I subscribe and drops unused things, with some sensible safeguards not to drop something I don't actually want to drop.
rossdavidh 6y ago
I think it would be better if people allowed a Patreon "any amount you choose", which gets you...nothing. Just allows me to contribute however much I want, in exchange for the already freely available content. The advantage of it being Patreon is that the per-charge expense is spread among several creators who I am a patron of. I rarely take advantage of any of the "special content" for Patreon supporters, anyway, I'm just doing it to support people I like. Some of them, it's $1 a month, some it's $3 a month, and I don't want or expect anything from it except what they are already providing for free anyway.
gwbas1c 6y ago
I prefer crowdsourcing incomplete but defined works. I'm always happy to crowdsource an album on Kickstarter. IMO, I'd prefer if Youtube / Spotify / ect had some kind of integration with Kickstarter or similar.

207 points by lawik 6y ago

I usually donate a one-time, larger amount. I know it isn't recurring which is what people want but this is the way that I'm able to deal with it.

Applejinx 6y ago
I make my living off Patreon and have many people doing exactly that. Also, I support quite a few Patreons myself but they're all ones that I can do $1 a month… forever. I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget. Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a 'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to plan for, as the creator.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 6y ago
  I thought Brave was going to go a different direction, closer to what Apple music streaming does, where they look at your traffic over the month and divvy up your subscription between them. Or even: these are all of the things you support: which ones did you enjoy this month?

Pxtl 6y ago

You have to have a heck of an offering to get a $5 monthly out of me. Every $5 monthly gets measured against "half a Netflix" and comes up short. Edit: I'll admit I'll gladly drop $40 on an ebook from the same creators I feel weird about funding monthly. I'm allergic to monthlies.

throwanem 6y ago
What I hear you saying is, Netflix has swamped the market and driven down the price of quality content. Well, I say "quality". It seems like every time I look at it, their catalog's dropped something else I wanted to see. My hit rate on searches there has to be hovering around 2%.
- amelius 6y ago
  No, really, no single human creator can provide $5/mo worth of content. If you don't like Netflix just think of a quality monthly magazine.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    IMO it's subjective. I once was horrified by a creator's video thanking his fans in an obviously poorly produced setting and style. Years later I've grown to enjoy both their older, rougher works and their newer, polished content. Maybe it's just the illusion of a human connection or hip to support indies, but I'm seriously considering making some monthly donations to support their work. Niches like theirs will always exist.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      That sounds a lot like AvE. I've been on his Patreon for, oh, must be years now, and he was very gracious when in a fit of excitement I sent a couple of photos of my first completed metalworking project. Not that he's not a bit of a drunk uncle, but it turns out you can learn a lot from one of those. And there's really nothing that's not funny about the occasional 18650 accidentally eating a hacksaw, so long as you're not in the room when it happens.

loraa 6y ago

Subscription services are bullshit.

zem 6y ago

I have the opposite feeling; very often I will contribute to someone's patreon or gofundme or whatever because I like their work and have gotten a lot out of it, but I almost never go on to read the members only writing. some part of me values it less because it isn't freely accessible.

mjayhn 6y ago
I do this and I feel bad about it when I'm not reading someones stuff. Please don't take it personally. There's a lot going on, my plan is to eventually get to it and support you along the way for making it. Also I'm hugely supportive to any devs going off and doing indie projects mostly out of wanting to make that a real source of income for the rest of us.
throwanem 6y ago
I don't tend to take advantage of members-only content either, but for me it's purely a matter of convenience. If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely would use it, but I can rarely be bothered (or even remember, really) to actually visit the website. It doesn't feel like a loss, though. I mean, if I'm supporting someone's work, it's on the strength of what I could already see before I started doing that.
- techsupporter 6y ago
  > If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely would use it Patreon does have this feature for audio content, like podcasts, if the creator enables it: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enable-audio-RSS-feeds-for-my-patrons https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enab... But I think you mean for all content? I emulate this by enabling e-mail notifications for all posts from some creators and auto-forwarding them to Newsblur for newsletter reading. Maybe that helps.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    That actually really might! I've been in the market for a new reader, since Feedly's product people seem hellbent on making it worse with every update, and Newsblur might be just the thing. And while it hadn't occurred to me until you mentioned that (for which thanks!), any email-to-RSS gateway should let me do what I'm looking for. One thing Feedly hasn't managed to ruin, yet at least, is the "today" view, with items from all sources sorted by time. Does Newsblur do something similar? Their iOS screenshots don't make it easy to tell.

hguant 6y ago

I've found that I'm much more willing to spend a larger chunk of money in a one off payment than signing up for yet another "only 5 dollar" pledge. I recently signed up for a few substack accounts from writers I've admired, and, in a move that would have horrified my younger, eye patch wearing self, have bought a year long subscription to The Economist. They offer good writing, interning opinions that, though I may disagree with them, are well thought out and we'll constructed. Publishing in this day and age is easy - twitter and Facebook and friends have shown us how simple it can be to say, well, anything. Good writing is hard, has remained hard, and should be valued. I've done my level best to make sure that only the most dedicated institution can reliably get ad revenue from me - it's only fair that I buy and support the things I value.

reustle 6y ago

> Let's call this the Five Dollar Fatigue, sounds catchy. This is already commonly called "subscription fatigue" and has been discussed extensively

CarVac 6y ago

I'm willing to buy swag if it's particularly unique or interesting, but I won't subscribe unless it's something really really special.

627467 6y ago

What you can call "fatigue" in the first world, presents itself as impossible to overcome barrier to the rest of the world. I get that if platforms and creators charged any less than 5 bucks they probably lose even more in payment fees. Can't help but think that we still have so much to overcome with regards to cheap or free micropayments.

waheoo 6y ago
$1 seems to be the lower limit. Transaction fees on low volume are usually like 30c or 1% whichever is higher.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Competent sites, like Patreon sometimes, will let you support multiple creators off one transaction fee. Also if you deliberately set up for small payments, there's things like paypal micropayments offering a fee of 5 cents plus 5%.

teej 6y ago

Frankly, I've seen little evidence that subscription fatigue exists beyond a handful of complains in HN links and comments. The meteoric growth of Onlyfans demonstrates the opposite - that there's huge demand for subscriptions and we're only starting to learn what subscription content folks will pay for. I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.

free_rms 6y ago
I was under the impression that most subscriptions to OnlyFans were made in a.. less rational state of mind.
- teej 6y ago
  That's absurd. Humans do not lose all executive decision making just because the pixels on their phone are in the shape of a nipple. See also: NYT, Substack, Patreon.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - didibus 6y ago
    I think OP meant that some type of content just makes more money. I'm also curious, beyond explicit adult content, I wonder how much OnlyFans is pulling in.
    - chillwaves 6y ago
      Check out Twitch streamers. I have personally witnessed a $5000 donation on a live stream from a variety streamer who mostly would dance, cosplay and stream gaming.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    Research shows that higher order brain function shuts down when being sexually stimulated, but I understand your general point.

christiansakai 6y ago

I only contribute to two Patreons (each $5) monthly so far: - a friend of mine, because he is a friend of mine - a guitar teacher that I followed, because he constantly produce good quality materials that are only available on mmembership. worth it. I also bought some of his courses and sometimes schedule a 1 on 1 private with him. But for open source, I never contributed to anything lol. Sorry, OSS maintainers. Thank you for the awesome work. The world needs more people like you. But if I can get it for free I'll get it for free. For indie SaaS, I never pay anything as well. Sorry indie SaaS devs, but I am not an app/software heavy user even though I work as an SWE. I don't use note taking apps or any other productivity apps.

toiletfuneral 6y ago
you seem genuinely proud to constantly take people's labor without compensation, just curious why you would think thats something to boast about?
mywittyname 6y ago
You're pretty typical in this respect. It's why open source software needs to be sponsored by large corporations and why indie software is "free for non-commercial use". It's easier to swipe that business CC than it is your own one.

npunt 6y ago

I wish we could just set a fixed monthly budget (e.g. $40/mo) and divide that among all the creators we wish to support. Then when we come across someone whose work we like, the question is simply "do I want to support this person's work?", and if so, they get a fraction of our budget. Right now, rewards effectively make every membership a custom membership that requires users spend extra time considering their support and dollar amount. This type of decision doesn't scale when we all want to support dozens of creators. I wrote a more detailed breakdown of this design here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-platform/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-pla...

Dylan16807 6y ago

$5 adds up quickly but $1 adds up a lot slower. So far I haven't hit my budget for $1/month support, and over a big group it's enough to fund a lot.

1123581321 6y ago
$1 is not enough to qualify for the extra content many of these services are offering.

scrollinondubs 6y ago

@lawik not sure if you caught this the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563 <- that person proposes an interesting solution specifically in the context of supporting open source software that would seemingly address this fatigue phenomenon you experience: a monthly pool that you can apportion so it dilutes and supports the projects you choose. That way you set the total monthly contribution and then you're just carving that up. Assuming there was a simple enough one-click interface for doing so that could be one way to address this. Of course you'd have to get a critical mass of makers to adopt the standard in order for it to take off (or convince the Patreon's and Github's of the world to adopt it).

lawik 6y ago
Ah, yeah, I saw that. It could definitely be good for some cases. I think it would be good for GitHub and such. I think the incentives for fairly successful creators just isn't there. They'll get more from their dedicated fanbase. But I hope something like this shows up for and from GitHub, especially for businesses. I think a lot of dev-teams would like to portion out some stipend from their company on a monthly basis to support their dependencies. I'd do it privately too, for sure.

irrational 6y ago

The only subscription I have is to Disney+ for the kids and even that I'm considering dropping. I have friends who have Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, whatever the paid version of YouTube is called, whatever streaming service has Star Trek, etc. It's gotten to the point where they are paying as much for those services as they do for cable.

makecheck 6y ago

It’s kind of depressing how some business models can just siphon money (like cable bills going up a few dollars every month forever until it’s hundreds), while others practically have to beg. Apps that took literally years to write can ask for donations and get nothing, while a single bank’s overdraft fee probably nets more. And now of course, we passed legislation to “help” businesses that somehow couldn’t even get money (despite applying the first day) because of greedier or more well-connected applicants. This is a huge mess and it should be a massive priority for society to stop letting the leeches get away with this theft.

aj7 6y ago

Yeah, but just in time, the five-dollar-foot-long is back.

nine_k 6y ago

> I want to support, I want to engage. But I also want to be mindful in how I spend my money. And $5/month adds up pretty quickly. So basically the author cannot afford to buy all the content he would like to, but feels a pang of conscience when he has to take the content for free, even if it's made freely available by the authors. It's an interesting internal conflict to have. > I think I might need to figure out what my actual budget is for supporting independent creators on a monthly basis. I suppose there are multiple solutions that provide something like that. > I think it would be worse if they were as heavy-handed as Wikipedia I'm totally fine with Wikipedia, and I usually give them $5-15 yearly. (They, in particular, are said to receive more money than they know what to reasonably do with.) This must be a case of personal sensitivity, which varies across the audience, and it sucks to be on the above-average sensitive end. I personally buy stuff I find great / fascinating. I hear a great track or a great album on Bandcamp? OK, I pay for it. I see it on Youtube? I go to Bandcamp, or whatever other site the authors care to list, and pay there. If there's no such link, sad. OTOH I don't normally subscribe to support a particular creator. I pay for the result. Great online creators usually produce good stuff anyway, they started with producing and publishing free (to view) stuff. The number of people who paid for a particular episode / track / post / whatever is an important piece of feedback, I think.

diag 6y ago
When you say you're buying a product or result, you're still paying for the production indirectly.

techsupporter 6y ago

Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. But my read of this is that authors and other creators are in a no-win situation. People don't like ads (so they block them or simply don't interact with them, either way driving down the money made from the ads), but people also don't like subscriptions, and people definitely don't like one-off "plonk your credit card here" request, yet no centralized micropayment system has really taken off because people also don't take to those. So...what next? How do creators get paid? (FWIW, I am on the opposite end of this. I probably devote too much of my income--not a brag, it's likely a financially unwise thing to do--on recurring subscriptions on Patreon and Maximum Fun and other platforms because I'm very quick to "ooh, shiny" and click-to-subscribe.)

Aeolun 6y ago
I don't know. Personally I very much like subscriptions. As long as they're $5 a month, I can support an awfully large amount of people To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  I support around 20 creators on Patreon, and at that rate I can't really afford more than $1/creator. But they have thousands of patrons, and with those numbers even $1/mo from everyone makes for a livable wage
CM30 6y ago
Honestly, I'm not sure there is a practical solution. Patron style systems and donations seem to be the most plausible way for creators to make money, but the internet + high competition + ads have basicaly forced most content into a race to the bottom where people expect everything to be free and those things that aren't lose to free alternatives. It's like what happened with mobile apps. People expect everything for free/maybe with microtransactions or ads, so it's basically impossible to monetise stuff in that market.
- 6y ago

tomcam 6y ago

Doesn't seem to be a problem for purveyors of high quality content. Often they only get a small percentage of people to contribute, but they make do. And IMHO more of them make out like bandits than one might think, especially Youtubers with multiple ways to make money. I think that number is closer to the low thousands than the high dozens.

sandoooo 6y ago

For me, the only reason I'd be willing to pay $5/m for a single creator is because of information disparity: it is difficult to find content I like, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. If I have to spend a lot of time looking this costs far more than just paying for incrementally more of the same, even though the perfect content for me is probably out there somewhere for free. AI will probably solve this problem eventually, though recommender services are in general pretty crap right now. I think there is a lot of value in a service that can go through the Amazon catalog and just cull the 99.9% of stuff it thinks I'm not interested in, then give me advanced search / preview / indexing on the rest. Problem is, it would have to do this without taking ad dollars to poison the list. Also privacy concerns.

lelandbatey 6y ago

I get the fatigue, but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic. It's such a breath of fresh air from the world of advertising. TOTALLY off topic, but I want to get this advertising analogy/story/parable/fiction out of my head, so I might as well write it down here: In the advertising-based revenue world, you see really odd businesses. Imagine a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!" As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy." "But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't give away the pizza?" moans the employee. Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." And with that you walk to your car and drive home. The frustrated employee would, by 2030 move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer sits with their eyes held open and stares into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would recieve a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments". Meanwhile in 2025, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.

Applejinx 6y ago
"but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic" But that would be Universal Basic Income :) think about it, that's exactly what UBI is. Pay enough people and someone is gonna come up with something amazing. They might share it, they might profit by it, but they will want it to be known as that will be the new 'need' in the Maslow hierarchy. This has more or less happened before by accident. For instance, Silicon Valley, which came out of a period of significant wealth and leisure.

bjoernw 6y ago

Companies like https://coil.com https://coil.com are solving this by giving you a single $5/month subscription and then streaming micropayments to the content creators as you consume their content. It builds on the WebMonitization standard https://webmonetization.org https://webmonetization.org

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
There have been countless attempts to create a micropayments ecosystem during the last 20 years, and they have all flopped. What makes this different?
- bjoernw 6y ago
  Coil and Mozilla working on a web standard together, the fact that we now have a couple of years of examples of digital content creators being de-monitized on ad-supported platforms, and the fact that crypto currencies are more approachable now.
hamstercat 6y ago
Maybe I'm wrong. I do hope the model works. But all I can think of when I see their business model is Spotify. Where content creators are being paid cents, and have to rely on alternative streams of income like concert and merch. Except in this case, there is no alternative, the patron model was supposed to be the alternative to ads and sponsorship. I do wonder how much can be contributed to the content creator, even without considering the cut they take for their services. If I'm watching more than 5 content creators in the month, then they're getting less than a dollar each.
fidelramos 6y ago
This seems similar to what Brave is doing. I would like to see a side-by-side comparison of the two. For example I know that Brave pays users for watching ads, for example. There are alternatives being built around direct micropayments to authors, such as https://read.cash https://read.cash. It's a click to send any amount from $0.01 and up, and the wallets are non-custodial, so money goes straight to the creator, minus a fee for the website. This might be a solution to the fatigue described by article, as you pay especifically by the content you like, and you decide the amount.

ggm 6y ago

I offered a newspaper $60 for a years hassle free reading but they still nag me. I definitely feel the $5 fatigue here, because its a $5/mo payment threshold.

CarbyAu 6y ago

One HN comment mentioned the value of a magazine subscription, which can be ballpark similar monthly costs. For me a patreon (or whatever) subscription to a whole GROUP of specialists in a field would be valuable. As it stands: Patreon person:This thing I did/reviewed is great! Me: Is it though?...search more internet for validation

hinkley 6y ago
I had the thought, "why doesn't PBS or a PBS-like organization do stuff like this?" PBS doesn't exist without the local affiliates, though, and chasing after web content too vigorously would betray that relationship, if you didn't handle it very, very carefully.

sandoooo 6y ago

Are the members-only content higher or lower quality, in general? The incentive seems to be for lower quality, because the vast majority of time and effort is spent on the free part that convinces you to pay. It's a reverse iceberg.

RhysU 6y ago

Back when we bought music albums (on vinyl or tape or whatever) we didn't subscribe to a content creator. We bought a product. If we liked it, we watched for the next release. I loved $NINETIES_BAND but I sure as heck wouldn't subscribe to them in the modern sense. The old model allowed monetizing outsized genius (or fashion) as demonstrated by dribbled song releases on the radio. This new model rewards consistently-better-than average content. It is a big divide. Perhaps what is missing is the modern DJ.

AlexeyMK 6y ago

My mental model lately has been, if I'm enjoying the content, I should try to figure out how to pay ~$1/hour. If I'm not enjoying it, I should find a better way to spend m time.

alexashka 6y ago

> And $5/month adds up pretty quickly Does it? If you can't spare fifty bucks/month on whatever on top of your other expenses, you're doing it wrong :)

twic 6y ago
It adds up if you like fifty different things.

cercatrova 6y ago

People value a product or service more when it is priced higher, so in my opinion, good content needs to be priced a lot higher than it is now, an order of magnitude higher, even (~$50/month), for people to value it properly.

johnpowell 6y ago

Back in the day the internet for normal people was 3 bucks a hour over a 14,400 modem. I didn't consider myself a "creator" for posting my recipes for making mashed potatoes in a crock pot. I just wanted to make the world have better mashed potatoes. I did it for free. There was no "like" button or comments or monetization. Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter. That is not a joke. I had a crock pot cooking site. I didn't have a counter or anything. Maybe it was popular.. I will never know. The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.

scalablenotions 6y ago
That's cool, but I want people to be able to independently create content for me to enjoy, which is a bit less of a crock. That will probably takes all their time and they need to pay for ingredients for their pot. Bring on universal basic income I guess.
- irrational 6y ago
  But there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Do we really need to support people to create more? I feel like we can enjoy what we already have and don't need to continuously look for something new. If people really really really want to create something, they will find a way to do so.
  - avian 6y ago
    > there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. I hear this often. Where is this excellent content? 99% of things online recommendations float up for me is garbage. Sometimes I see some gems, but it's rare. Already years ago I was hearing people say that the only thing we need now is good content discovery. Screw any new content. We already have too much good stuff. I'm starting to think that, if in all this time Internet giants haven't been able come up with a way to get to those hundreds of lifetimes of amazing content, maybe it doesn't actually exist? Our tastes change over time. Some things that were great 10 years ago haven't aged well. There's a long tail. What's excellent for you isn't interesting to me, and so on. In a sum there might be more content than you can watch in a lifetime, but an intersection of that whole collection with a single person's momentary interests seems to be much much smaller.

mrhektor 6y ago

"You are fighting uphill against a cultural expectation for things to be free on the web." A great solution to this problem of "free", is to make things that are "better than free". Kevin Kelly explains it really well in his essay (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/), but TL;DR is that traits like Immediacy, Personalization and Interpretation play a very important role in getting people to pay for stuff. Software: Free, The manual: $10,000

bullen 6y ago

There is a malaise in the world and no matter what you call it money will flow in other directions now. You need to force the payment; optional or piratable walls are meaningless, that means you need to provide a service the people expect to pay for and some parts have to be closed! I think 1$/month should be the goto value that we sponsor each other with. The only way to get velocity in a deflation is to spend, but you need to get spent on more than you spend which requires inflation! Let's wait and see how the money will be distributed after the "easy dead tree" has been burned, just make sure you are prepared, things are going to get hard and accelerate down for the first time!

jcun4128 6y ago

Kind of curious if there's a way to batch support... you put in a fixed amount of money/month and you can subscribe to multiple people, but your contribution gets divided... probably not viable due to transaction fees and somebody's like "oh great I got a penny"

lbotos 6y ago
I think this is what Brave is trying to do with attention tokens? I don't use it but I think that's what it's called.
- jcun4128 6y ago
  I see. I was thinking about Patreon/support like YouTubers but maybe they do something like that already/reason not to.
Freak_NL 6y ago
It would be a model I'm more comfortable with. Just set a fixed monthly fee, and let it be distributed automatically; with an option for me to review the monthly split to blacklist sites that try to game the system. Lots of issues to solve before that becomes possible though. Either some company manages to deliver the dominant solution and skims their 30% off, or the technology behind it is too easy to abuse (great, now FAANG gets another letter), or it just leads to more mountains of crappy content that exist just to lure you in and hold your attention without actually delivering (leaving you dissatisfied).
palsir 6y ago
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004503
- jcun4128 6y ago
  I can see the potential convenience of divisibility with crypto

octoberfranklin 6y ago

> There is a lot of consideration in committing that recurring payment for .. indefinite duration. It's (yet another) negative externality of the Anti-Money Laundering / Know Your Customer mania. If it turns out that a drug cartel used one of these crowdfunding platforms, the government will kill/bankrupt the platform. Requiring recurring payments is the only reliable way to screen out prepaid gift cards, because prepaid gift card issuers are no longer allowed to process fixed-amount recurring payments. Any other approach is EXTREMELY labor-intensive and still doesn't work 100% -- for example look at Amazon AWS, which devotes a huge amount of effort to playing this whack-a-mole game and yet still isn't 100% successful. AWS bills aren't the same dollar amount every month so they can't go this route. Basically AML/KYC is Why We Can't Have Nice Things like micropayments or even one-time minipayments to individuals without something like Paypal where they randomly lock up your money for 180 days while demanding "papers please". AML/KYC simply does not scale down to micropayments or even near them. It's not about the payment processing technology, it's about the legal/regulatory burden.

thathndude 6y ago

Was just thinking of this yesterday as I listened to ATP (Accidental Tech Podcast - ATP.FM). They're adding a members component to their podcast. Just $8/month. And they don't do the hard sell, but there are little perks. I listen to at least 5-7 podcasts regularly. If they all do the same thing, it's close to my cable + Internet bill from just 10 years ago. Now let's do streaming: Netflix + Disney+ and you spent another $20/month. I just don't think this model is going to work in the long term. Who knows!

jdechko 6y ago
I listen to ATP as well, and I did end up joining their membership program. The author mentioned CGP Grey specifically, and Cortex, his podcast with Myke Hurley on relay.fm recently announced a $5 membership. Upgrade, with Jason & Myke also announced the same $5 membership. So I see where the author is coming from. At the same time all 3 podcasts for now say that just by listening, it supports the podcast through the old channels. I do get a little of that FOMO, but I don’t feel any guilt for not paying.

AnonC 6y ago

Tangent: I don’t have access to a computer right now to analyze this website more, but it’s blazing fast! Great work, author. I’d love to know more about the technology stack (seems like it’s hosted on AWS with CloudFront).

habosa 6y ago

I often try to support a creator and find out that monthly support is my only option ... which I am not willing to do. Here are some ways we have always supported creators without subscriptions: I can buy a book, watch a movie in a theater, get a CD, attend a play, buy a painting, etc. I'm still willing to do those things, I do them all the time. I'm still willing to spend a lot of money on those things. I am not willing to lay you $5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give you $100 one time for something really great.

HenryBemis 6y ago
What I am writing may not a good idea, but it works. Let's assume you like 12 patreon content creators. You can subscribe one month per year to each (1st-Jan, 2nd-Feb, and so on), binge consume the contenct they made for the past 12 months, and unsubscribe to them. This way you kick your FOMO habit, get to see what you enjoy. I do this with TV series (in a way). I stopped watching Lost, HIMYM, and a few more, and then I binge watched in the end (in the very end). I watched the last 3 seasons of HIMYM and last 2 season of Lost like this. It was more an exercise to kick the FOMO habit, and avoid the 'agony' of waiting for the next episode to drop . Most content creators give you access to all their past stuff. Again, I know this may not be ethically "good", but it's part of the game of using patreon and other content sharing management services the way it better suits ME/YOU, than them. In the scenario of enjoying 12 creators, you spread them out in the year, you spend $5 per month instead of 12*5= 60 per month. In the span of a decade, that adds up to a lot. And don't get me wrong, it's not about being cheap. If you feel bad, go and donate that saved $ in a charity. It's about controlling your time and your FOMO habit.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
What's missing here is a netflix style model where your donations are distributed among people you want to support instead of having to micromanage donations. I pay about ~30 euro per month for netflix, spotify, and amazon prime. So, it's not a stretch of the imagination that I would be willing to pay for (some) of the free content I enjoy on e.g. Youtube. However, I follow dozens of youtubers asking for donations and while I like most of them, it's not going to add up to me handing out multiple dollars to each of them on a monthly basis because it would add up to vastly more than I spend on commercial content. And it's kind of unfair to single out just a few of them. But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work. It would probably add up to just a few cents per personn I donate to; but if lots of people do that, it adds up. The deal with patreon is that you rely on a handful of people supporting you while you give away most of your content for free. IMHO most of that is unrealized potential for monetization. Several youtubers I follow have numbers of followers and views that would put some tv channels to shame and they also get revenue from sponsorships. Several others are a bit more modest but still rake in tens to hundreds of thousands of views easily. I'd love a platform that gives me a simple predictable cost per month combined with a fair, no hassle way to ensure that money gets funneled to artists, writers, coders, and other content creators I care about. Donating 10cents per month is not a thing and donating 1-10$ per month means I have to cherry pick people out of group of dozens to hundreds I might consider donating to but currently don't.

everdrive 6y ago

I don't mean this as a critique of the article, but it seems this is just the burden of so much choice. There is amazing, wonderful, life-changing content out there today. And, there's so much of it. It feels so overwhelming. It's just like the calorie problem that shot up in the 80s and 90s. There's too much of everything, and the only filter is ourselves. And, much like the calorie problem most people never solved it. Most people are anywhere from a little fat to very fat. And, so it will be with content and distraction.

shadeslayer_ 6y ago

Human beings need to understand that it is simply not possible for a large portion of people to live off their hobbies - there's a reason why they're called hobbies or passion projects to begin with.

mnky9800n 6y ago

why cant the guy making videos just like sell tickets or something instead like for a normal movie?

jjice 6y ago

I've been trying to loosen up with my small subscriptions like this. Back when I became a consistent member of the internet and multiple communities on it, I was a middle school student with no money, and when I did have pocket change from mowing lawns, I had no way to exchange it online. I gravitated towards free content because of this. Even once I was working and had a bank account at 16, I still felt weird about committing to a subscription. Now that I keep my costs low and work full time, I have a disposable income that could be spent on these creators, but there are so many that I don't know where to put it. Should it go to the long time creators I've followed since those middle school days, or should I throw it towards the real underdogs right now? There is only so much to go around from my pockets, and just like the author says, it adds up quickly.

praptak 6y ago

I can relate. If I were to imagine a perfect system for this it would be something that tracks whatever I subscribe and drops unused things, with some sensible safeguards not to drop something I don't actually want to drop.

rossdavidh 6y ago

I think it would be better if people allowed a Patreon "any amount you choose", which gets you...nothing. Just allows me to contribute however much I want, in exchange for the already freely available content. The advantage of it being Patreon is that the per-charge expense is spread among several creators who I am a patron of. I rarely take advantage of any of the "special content" for Patreon supporters, anyway, I'm just doing it to support people I like. Some of them, it's $1 a month, some it's $3 a month, and I don't want or expect anything from it except what they are already providing for free anyway.

gwbas1c 6y ago

I prefer crowdsourcing incomplete but defined works. I'm always happy to crowdsource an album on Kickstarter. IMO, I'd prefer if Youtube / Spotify / ect had some kind of integration with Kickstarter or similar.