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Can confirm. I make my living on Patreon, but I am in the top 100 worldwide in the 'music' category (I write open source DSP plugins) and I make a bit over $200

Can confirm. I make my living on Patreon, but I am in the top 100 worldwide in the 'music' category (I write open source DSP plugins) and I make a bit over $2000 a month. It falls away very very rapidly: top ten worldwide is what people envision for 'making good money' and is competitive with say a career software developer in the 90s or 00s. Top hundred worldwide is 'getting by pretty comfortably if you don't live anywhere significant, especially if you still qualify for food stamps or what have you', and it's competitive with what a career software developer will be making by 2030 or 2040 at the most. Top thousand worldwide is already down to your $200 a month or so, and there are hundreds of thousands of people on these platforms. This is the nature of markets in an attention economy that scales worldwide: you're getting squeezed out by anybody anywhere, and if you're a niche (I'm a niche, but not alone in it: by now, there's another plugin dev who is pushing harder for money and making more than me, who is also Patreon-exclusive) then that limits the maximum size you can scale. It's absolutely going to be the same on OnlyFans, Twitch, etc. As a job mostly this sort of thing is 'spend a bunch of money to operate at a competitive level, and then you don't earn anything to speak of'. This IS free market dynamics in a state of maximum globalized low friction. Silicon Valley has spent a lot of time selling people on low friction interaction and discoverability. Tearing down the walls means you're competing with the girl with a perfect figure who's in New Delhi and has family money backing her (for whatever reason), and her competing with you means you work less. When this seriously kicks in for the very software devs who've created this situation (and it may have been inevitable, let's not directly blame) and AI begins to compete with human workers at content creation and software development, the OnlyFans/Patreon/Twitch picture becomes the world, and at that point we've got some questions to ask about sustainability. A lot of these platforms are sustained by whales. I'd do substantially better (but would ruin my positioning) if I targeted whales.

jkuria 5y ago
@Applejinx, this is interesting. Hey, I manage a forum where someone asked a question about how much Patreon fans make. May I repost your answer? (and credit you)
- Applejinx 5y ago
  I am just a data point and I've spent time studying 'Graphtreon'. You're welcome to repost my answer with the understanding that I'm just a data point trying to observe this along with everybody else. I've got no communication with anyone else in the system. With the following exception: I made a special effort to talk to Jack Conte at the second-to-last Patrecon, the one in California. I spoke to Jack and to Sam Yam, and tried to impress upon them the importance of consistently and reliably maintaining that 'tail' of $50, $100 a month. I don't know if they heard me (they may have) but my argument was as follows: consider some single mother who is absolutely broke, but has a cell phone and is able to upload to YouTube or whatever. Let's say she is able to find a double-digit number of people, no better, who'll tune in as she reads bedtime stories to her kid. She is not going to become PewDiePie, but she can pull maybe $50 or $100 on Patreon, and it's relatively consistent, especially if she doesn't tie it hard to her performance and products, but keeps it low-pressure: it's very possible to create a steady and predictable income stream that way. The Patreon guys have a stated but undefined goal to bring people to a 'life-changing' amount of income, but we are all finding that's not going to happen for 99.9% of the people attempting it. BUT, I've found from my experience that the 'life-changing' amount is around what I make: enough to build an actual business in the real world, support it, and grow. (if you're not growing in capitalism, you're gonna die). In other words, the single mom telling her kid bedtime stories on YouTube is going to fail by the terms they're predisposed to care about, 'seeding a business in LA or wherever, and getting traction to grow big'. My argument to Jack and Sam, which I don't know if it was heard, was this: I have been homeless and seen very tough times. Being able to count upon fifty, a hundred dollars a month that is not dependent on your precarious job, keeping a roof over your head (as long as you have the phone and can upload), that is YOURS and sort of steady consistent bonus income no matter what other hell goes on in your life, is HUGE. The monetary amount is much less significant than the manner in which it is earned. It doesn't wildly vary from month to month, it's not tied to other obligations: anyone who has lived precariously knows the value of an extra fifty a month. This is at least an order of magnitude below what the Patreon guys assumed was 'life-changing', because I don't think they had the context to understand it. So I pitched them on the importance of what they are doing, and of keeping faith with the 'tail' rather than getting too distracted by trying to create millionaires. I don't know if they heard, they may have, but that's the one time I talked seriously with 'the Patreon system'. Other than that I'm just another bozo on the bus, representing the tail end of the top 100 worldwide :)
wyclif 5y ago
at that point we've got some questions to ask about sustainability Not at that point, though. The time to ask those questions was yesterday.
- wruza 5y ago
  Personally idk if these questions are even worth asking at all. Modern economies are mostly automatable bullshit not worth a constant human attention. The only reason why we have to work hard is that making content and appliances by organized human labor is hard. It’s high time to switch attention from this crappy hamster wheel efforts to humane things.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Best time is 25 years ago. The second best time, of course, would be right now :)
conradfr 5y ago
Is the other one Analog Obsession aka Tunca? He makes good money, especially as he lives in Turkey. Anyway some friends are convinced deepfakes and "nudify" websites will compete with OnlyFans but I'm not convinced, at least in the short term.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  I'm not sure there's only one other, but I am thinking of Analog Obsession, yes :) As for deepfakes, it depends on how easily that can be done, and how much 'celebrity' fakeness can outcompete non-celebrity reality. From what I'm seeing in all these fields, they've got a point. If you can identify the #1 most popular celebrity for 'porn wanted of them', the desire for that could well be orders of magnitude beyond 'real person doing actual porn', and removing the identity of the source person seriously devalues them (in the process of making the deepfake porn). They cease to have market value as themselves though they have another kind as 'plausibly standing in for the celebrity while doing deepfake porn'. There's also the problem of hyper-displays: suppose you want Kardashian porn but you can't have it. So you deepfake it. But what if you chose, since you're doing CGI anyway, to exaggerate the characteristics of your actors, or straight up CGI them, to go way beyond what the human Kardashian would even be? This really complicates the market, I think. We cannot assume that 'deepfakes' will stick to being realistic or plausible: at some point ingenuity will lead to these things being exaggerated versions of themselves. I wouldn't dismiss your friends' concerns too quickly. In so many ways we're going to a world where unreality substantially outcompetes and crowds out reality. And it's all down to the market dynamics, and exploits within that. A truly free frictionless marketplace doesn't have ethics: those count as friction and will get selected against.

jkuria 5y ago

@Applejinx, this is interesting. Hey, I manage a forum where someone asked a question about how much Patreon fans make. May I repost your answer? (and credit you)

Applejinx 5y ago
I am just a data point and I've spent time studying 'Graphtreon'. You're welcome to repost my answer with the understanding that I'm just a data point trying to observe this along with everybody else. I've got no communication with anyone else in the system. With the following exception: I made a special effort to talk to Jack Conte at the second-to-last Patrecon, the one in California. I spoke to Jack and to Sam Yam, and tried to impress upon them the importance of consistently and reliably maintaining that 'tail' of $50, $100 a month. I don't know if they heard me (they may have) but my argument was as follows: consider some single mother who is absolutely broke, but has a cell phone and is able to upload to YouTube or whatever. Let's say she is able to find a double-digit number of people, no better, who'll tune in as she reads bedtime stories to her kid. She is not going to become PewDiePie, but she can pull maybe $50 or $100 on Patreon, and it's relatively consistent, especially if she doesn't tie it hard to her performance and products, but keeps it low-pressure: it's very possible to create a steady and predictable income stream that way. The Patreon guys have a stated but undefined goal to bring people to a 'life-changing' amount of income, but we are all finding that's not going to happen for 99.9% of the people attempting it. BUT, I've found from my experience that the 'life-changing' amount is around what I make: enough to build an actual business in the real world, support it, and grow. (if you're not growing in capitalism, you're gonna die). In other words, the single mom telling her kid bedtime stories on YouTube is going to fail by the terms they're predisposed to care about, 'seeding a business in LA or wherever, and getting traction to grow big'. My argument to Jack and Sam, which I don't know if it was heard, was this: I have been homeless and seen very tough times. Being able to count upon fifty, a hundred dollars a month that is not dependent on your precarious job, keeping a roof over your head (as long as you have the phone and can upload), that is YOURS and sort of steady consistent bonus income no matter what other hell goes on in your life, is HUGE. The monetary amount is much less significant than the manner in which it is earned. It doesn't wildly vary from month to month, it's not tied to other obligations: anyone who has lived precariously knows the value of an extra fifty a month. This is at least an order of magnitude below what the Patreon guys assumed was 'life-changing', because I don't think they had the context to understand it. So I pitched them on the importance of what they are doing, and of keeping faith with the 'tail' rather than getting too distracted by trying to create millionaires. I don't know if they heard, they may have, but that's the one time I talked seriously with 'the Patreon system'. Other than that I'm just another bozo on the bus, representing the tail end of the top 100 worldwide :)

wyclif 5y ago

at that point we've got some questions to ask about sustainability Not at that point, though. The time to ask those questions was yesterday.

wruza 5y ago
Personally idk if these questions are even worth asking at all. Modern economies are mostly automatable bullshit not worth a constant human attention. The only reason why we have to work hard is that making content and appliances by organized human labor is hard. It’s high time to switch attention from this crappy hamster wheel efforts to humane things.
Applejinx 5y ago
Best time is 25 years ago. The second best time, of course, would be right now :)

conradfr 5y ago

Is the other one Analog Obsession aka Tunca? He makes good money, especially as he lives in Turkey. Anyway some friends are convinced deepfakes and "nudify" websites will compete with OnlyFans but I'm not convinced, at least in the short term.

Applejinx 5y ago
I'm not sure there's only one other, but I am thinking of Analog Obsession, yes :) As for deepfakes, it depends on how easily that can be done, and how much 'celebrity' fakeness can outcompete non-celebrity reality. From what I'm seeing in all these fields, they've got a point. If you can identify the #1 most popular celebrity for 'porn wanted of them', the desire for that could well be orders of magnitude beyond 'real person doing actual porn', and removing the identity of the source person seriously devalues them (in the process of making the deepfake porn). They cease to have market value as themselves though they have another kind as 'plausibly standing in for the celebrity while doing deepfake porn'. There's also the problem of hyper-displays: suppose you want Kardashian porn but you can't have it. So you deepfake it. But what if you chose, since you're doing CGI anyway, to exaggerate the characteristics of your actors, or straight up CGI them, to go way beyond what the human Kardashian would even be? This really complicates the market, I think. We cannot assume that 'deepfakes' will stick to being realistic or plausible: at some point ingenuity will lead to these things being exaggerated versions of themselves. I wouldn't dismiss your friends' concerns too quickly. In so many ways we're going to a world where unreality substantially outcompetes and crowds out reality. And it's all down to the market dynamics, and exploits within that. A truly free frictionless marketplace doesn't have ethics: those count as friction and will get selected against.