9 ms·
Normally, I'd first go with "So what did they do wrong?". But since it's the security team, I'm gonna go with Patreon is in dire financial straits and this is
by noodleman 4y ago
Normally, I'd first go with "So what did they do wrong?".
But since it's the security team, I'm gonna go with Patreon is in dire financial straits and this is the tip of the iceberg.
- sleepybrett 4y agohow could they not be rolling in cash. their product is not that sophisticated and i assume they take a decent haircut from every subscription. Seems like a money printing machine to me.
- nebula8804 4y agoFurthermore, if Patreon goes then a lot of indie people are royally screwed. So many demonetized Youtubers or people at risk of being booted depend on Patreon.
- ainar-g 4y agoThere are still Ko-Fi, SubscribeStar, as well as YouTube memberships. To say nothing about OnlyFans and Fansly, which have been trying to become less… porn-dependent.
- miguelazo 4y agoYouTube memberships? Demonetization on YouTube is one of the main things that drives people to use Patreon.
- sofixa 4y agoDemonetization on YouTube means YouTube won't show ads on your videos so you don't get money from them, and YouTube recommends them less. Having members on YouTube doesn't impact that at all. The members will pay and discover, same as if they were on Patreon. Non-members might have a harder time discovering, but it's not like it's easy to discover content through Patreon either.
- jimbob45 4y agoSubscribeStar does basically the same thing, right? I imagine everyone would just move right over, business as usual.
- paranoidrobot 4y agoIt's not that straightforward. For the Creator, even if you exclude the things that interact with Patreon to do the benefit-management bits, you have to also do any KYC/Identity verification bits, re-setup account transfers. Then you need to reach out to all your supporters and convince them to move over. They're going to lose some percentage of those people -- how much is going to depend on the creator and the fanbase. Some people are just going to ignore it, every single one of them though are going to re-evaluate that math in their head as to whether they really want to continue supporting that person. Patreon also has major brand-awareness. Someone telling you to move over to SubscribeStar, Liberapay, Buy Me a Coffee or whatever might get a "This seems like a scam" type reaction.
- nomel 4y agoMoving over for a content creator is probably trivial. Having all their patrons move over with them is most certainly not.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
- nebula8804 4y agoNormally you'd think its just right wingers and yeah a lot of their garbage ends up demonetized but its also people that are pro-Union, anti-establishment (right wing and left wing), people who are anti-empire/anti-war/anti-Israel/Pro-palestine (Abby Martin for example). Craziest example I heard of recently is people who post anti-Tesla videos are getting attacked and demonetized by their fanboys.
- egypturnash 4y agoThe queer lefty independent webcomics scene leans on Patreon a lot too, I’m one of them.
- JohnFen 4y agoA lot of those demonetized YouTubers are technical ones, not political. Electronics, chemistry, software, history, etc.
- tartoran 4y agoIf there’s a need in the market someone will step in and fill the void. Probably it’s for the best if they don’t get greedy and keep it simple, shave a bit as a fee and that’s all.
- lmm 4y ago> If there’s a need in the market someone will step in and fill the void. Only if the Visa/Mastercard duopoly approves. It's not a real market.
- miguelazo 4y agoExactly, plus PayPal/Venmo-- look at how they pulled the plug on Mintpress.
- conradludgate 4y agoYou don't need cards to make payments anymore. At least in the UK you can make direct payments from your bank through a standard e-commerce checkout. Cardless Subscriptions are also here (disclaimer, that's my role at a large open banking company) although some more legislation needs to be done before they can be used for ecommerce
- nebula8804 4y agoTell that to Parler and the aftermath of their disastrous data leak. There needs to be more respect for the effort that goes into making well built online services. Turns out its much harder than a lot of people realize.
- shawn-butler 4y agoOnlyFans is just waiting to be “legit”
- cosmodisk 4y agoI don't think that'd be the case. When Russia started war against Ukraine, a lot creators left the platform by simply taking subscriber contacts and moved to a different platform. You pay for individual creators, so whether it's Patreon, YouTube,or Substack, people are likely to follow into a new platform.
- TillE 4y agoI have faith in their ability to screw up a good thing for no reason. A couple years ago, they tried to change their whole payment system so each subscription was billed individually, racking up more fees for patrons. They kept defending it and finally backed down at the last minute after a ton of their biggest creators yelled at them.
- renewiltord 4y agoWhy on earth would they do that? That kills micro-subscriptions on their platform.
- davidgerard 4y agoyeah, they were trying to shake off the $1/mo subscribers, they thought they were surplus. no, I don't understand either.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoPatreon takes the lowest cut of any platform. Only something like 12% vs most others taking 20-30% or more. E: see this video https://youtu.be/bGvfYv5nzs0?t=138 https://youtu.be/bGvfYv5nzs0?t=138
- nomel 4y ago12 cents on every dollar seems like an absurd amount of money, for a relatively basic microblog.
- tomcam 4y agoHave you ever had to do your own accounts receivable, fraud detection, government compliance, and subscription management?
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoNo, but I have paid Stripe 3 cents on the dollar for pretty much all of the above. To be fair our business was much smaller than Patreon
- michaelt 4y agoMaybe, but that's pure profit. This isn't like a newspaper, finding neither ads nor paywalls will make ends meet. They're not phone app developers, finding users will barely pay $1. It isn't an ad-supported business that can only make a fraction of a penny per user. Their moderation needs are at a pretty small scale, with most user accounts tied to known bank accounts. They don't have to negotiate with rights holders for copyrighted content and get taken to the cleaners. They don't have to store and distribute gigabytes of video per second. They don't face big customer acquisition costs. Youtube and Twitch are doing a lot more work for their cuts.
- Dylan16807 4y agoGenerally, their users don't need a platform, they need a payment processor.
- simlevesque 4y agoThey serve videos. That can be easily more costly than the cut they get.
- bparsons 4y agoDon't they use Vimeo?
- makeitdouble 4y agoIt's not free either
- detaro 4y agoThey do currently run a closed beta of their own video thing, so technically they do serve video, but the vast majority of videos on Patreon are indeed embeds from Vimeo (or other sites, but Vimeo has a direct integration)
- Dylan16807 4y agoThey serve videos for what percent of pages? And they could make that an extra fee; plenty of creators seem to be happy with unlisted youtube videos. They have zero reason to lose significant money over the video feature, especially since it's still in closed beta.
- picardo 4y ago> Seems like a money printing machine to me. Only if the creatives are making their money on their platform. Since Patreon's entire business model is based on taking a cut of the revenue artists make on their platform, they don't make money if the artists make money elsewhere. Many creatives use Patreon only for fan outreach, and sell merchandise outside of Patreon. If Patreon charged a fixed rate for their software, they could make more money, but they would lose the business of small creatives. That's the dilemma.
- dorkwood 4y agoMore people turning to things like Stable Diffusion instead of commissioning artists likely has an effect too.
- r00fus 4y agoI would seriously doubt if people are relying SD for commercial art so quickly.
- dorkwood 4y agoI've been freelancing for a studio over the past month and I've personally seen them using Midjourney and SD for multiple projects. Surely ten million other people doing the same thing is going to have some sort of effect.
- r00fus 4y agoYour sample size is 1 (ie, anecdata). If they outcompete their adversaries maybe then others will uptake. You could be correct, but I posit it'll take 2-3 years minimum before it's used widely.
- LegitShady 4y agoPatreon has raised hundreds of millions (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/patreon/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/patreon/company_fina... - according to this $414M in 10 rounds) in venture capital. Meanwhile in January they said they had taken in a total of $3.5 billion in creator lifetime funding. At lets say 8% average cut that means they've made a total of $280M in their whole history, although earlier accounts got grandfathered at the original 5% rate I think. We'll go with 8% to be generous. Even at 12% that means total lifetime income for patreon is $420M, around the same as their VC funding. Then they have to pay all the processing fees, their own development and operational staff (~300 employees in 4 offices), etc. Then they have to actually make money as profit to satisfy investors. VC funding killed patreon.
- dagi3d 4y agoyou don't have pay back your vc's you raised from(unless you raised debt). another story is that their investors might have forced them to cut costs and make everything needed to become profitable as soon as possible.
- LegitShady 4y agoedited my post. We don't know the terms of the funding so that was just a guess. Even still I don't think they're rolling in money. They're ~10 years old but until 2019 they were only taking 5%. I'd guess they've always lost money.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoThat guy from Pomplamoose taking Patreon to VCs is what killed it.
- sailfast 4y agoGood point. I also can’t help but notice their CEO monetizes almost entirely on YouTube with scary pockets and other videos.
- robocat 4y ago> VC funding killed patreon. A company is worth it’s future cash flows. You are making an incorrect argument about the sunken costs (sunken costs do admittedly have relevance to individual funds, but not to your argument). You don’t get 10 rounds of investment without a convincing argument (or believable story) for future profitability at each round (even if some rounds turn out to be duds later).
- rodgerd 4y agoThey are rolling in cash. But they are on the "increasing growth every year" treadmill, which is why they're trying to gouge more and more out of the payments to creators.
- maerF0x0 4y ago> But since it's the security team, I'm gonna go with Patreon is in dire financial straits and this is the tip of the iceberg. a couple additional cases that can cause a security team to be laid off: 1. Outsourcing or Offshoring 2. evidence of significant corruption or incompetence within the team requiring a full reset
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoIf I had to bet, I'd say it's 3. the C-suite not understanding what they do. Borrowing from the old IT truism: "We've never had a security breach, what am I paying you for?" "We're having a security breach, what am I paying you for?"
- jstarfish 4y ago3. Whistleblower elimination, pre-emptive or otherwise. It doesn't happen often, but when I get requests to investigate a C-level for misconduct, the first thing I do is update my resume.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mancerayder 4y agoSecurity people cost a lot, and infosec people in particular can sometimes be utterly useless bureaucrats, while the security engineers are extremely hard to find. It could be something terrible happened, and it was realized they're all useless and need to be replaced. Alternatively maybe the devops or other team took over their functions. They're not legally required in that industry, while in some industries / publicly traded companies they can be.
- ReGenGen 4y agoYeah who needs security for Financial services.
- tjr225 4y ago
- jszymborski 4y agoYes.
- t-writescode 4y agoYes.
- mancerayder 4y agoIf Patreon falls into the category of financial services, then I take back that piece of what I said. I view them as a media hosting company of sorts, like YouTube or Vimeo. The fact that they collect money makes them nothing special, since everyone technically collects money somehow.
- SpelingBeeChamp 4y agoPatreon does not host media to any meaningful extent. I have a Patreon page with hundreds of supporters. If I want to post a video for my supporters, it has to be hosted elsewhere. Patreon will not host and serve it.
- xani_ 4y agoI dunno, in about 2/3 of our clients the security team could be summed up as ivory tower that throws decrees and enforces half-useless constraints. Like, we HAD TO change our passwords every 30 days.... but our default modus operandi was not having password auth in first place + hardware tokens for authentication, which made whole password thing totally irrelevant, but no, security, change your password you don't use every 30 days.
- adrr 4y agoWhat’s was your second factor if you didn’t use passwords? Webauth is relatively new and I have yet to see any company use it.
- kccqzy 4y agoWebauthn is well supported by the top websites. Even if they didn't support Webauthn, security keys were supported long before Webauthn.
- coredog64 4y agoAt my last employer, the security guy’s gig was “run Qualys”. He didn’t help us filter anything, he didn’t provide context, he didn’t provide guidance on how to correct or implement a compensating control. There was a business need to run Qualys, and so he was the human crontab. The rest of the time he spent vaping and complaining about compensation.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y agoThe next iteration of that terrible idea is to have a security contractor do that role and report to someone else who decides whether to read the report or not. DevSec is next, right?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- peteradio 4y ago
- xani_ 4y agoCould be as simple as "they just whined from their security ivory tower so we just made developers doing actual code and ops doing actual ops do their job". You want people focused on security, but separate security department all too often just becomes annoyance that doesn't understand business, or architecture, just drops decrees.
- worthless-trash 4y agoIts a tough gig, focusing on making meaningful changes to improve the security of a process without being in the weeds for individual issues. This is why the decrees are made, I guess it strongly depends on the tone of the message and the messenger. A little bit of social engineering of engineers goes a long way.
- ergocoder 4y agoI don't think so. Laying off the entire team is too strange. There was probably something specially bad going on and they don't know who to trust. If they are in dire financial straits, they can definitely afford 1-2 security engineers to keep the light on.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ryan_lane 4y agoOr maybe they're going to be announcing a major breach and need to scapegoat the security team.
- unity1001 4y agoI'd very much think that being able to get ~8% of what is paid to creators (2 billion in 2021) make them pretty much able to run their operation solely with their own revenue if they wanted to. Most of the activity would be concentrated on the large creators, who tend to have the top plan (12%), so Patreon's average percentage revenue over that payout would likely larger. And they seem to be consistently growing in both creator and member counts of the platform. So in 2022 they will probably distribute more than 2 billion. So they don't seem to have any problem with income. VCs have little reason to pressure them for anything either - this is a startup that is making 125-130 million revenue every year already, and its subscription revenue - the holy grail. Any pressure that comes in from that side would likely be in the direction of pushing for growth. Which may be one of the reasons for the layoff. Excepting some major incident related to the security, of course.