You didn't include perhaps the most interesting part. You currently have 662k subscribers on Youtube while 1,221 subscribers on Patreon. Those numbers obviously aren't constant throughout the entire time frame of that graph, but it would generally indicate that less than 0.2% of people becoming patrons was enough to surpass the revenue from Youtube. I still have my doubts of how this scales for both consumers and Patreon as a company, but there is no question that this model is great for established content creators.
It could be a scaling issue. The parent has put out 26 videos in two years. There's a good chance that doubling the amount of videos released would roughly double the ad revenue, but might not double patreon revenue. Gamersnexus, for example, likely gets twice as much revenue from ads than patreon, but they also release daily videos.
Youtubes algo killed animation. Notice how all the big animated youtube videos are about 10 years old now. Its impossible to make money on it. The only channels that can survive are the ones that can pump out a video per week or more.
Kurzgesagt make high quality animated videos and seem to be doing quite well. 13 million subscribers on the English channel alone. All of that despite only releasing about one video a month.
I doubt they make much YouTube revenue, they also have 14,856 patrons on Patreon. Probably the only reason that it's worthwhile for them to continue to make such high quality animated videos.
CGP Grey is another animator. Looking at his Patreon, he's current at over $40k/month. Considering he's mentioned having a staff now, I'm sure that gets split between his entire project, but it still seems like it's significantly funded by supporters over ad revenue.
To be fair though, the animation part of the content is only a minor part of it. The educational and entertainment value of what's actually said is much more important.
Do you mean YT algo does not recommend animated videos enough?
From my experience I don't watch as many, except may be crash course history, and therefore don't get much reco either.
I think it's rather that the YT algo promotes channels that put out a steady stream of content more than channels that put out content once in a while. Animation takes a lot of work and thus time. This makes them much less likely to put out a lot of content.
Its also the fact that the payments are fairly equal. One animation that takes months to do gets as many views as someone playing a videogame for an hour.
The numbers might be similar, but I don't love the comparison due to the ethical differences between the two. There is a lot more shady psychology and manipulation going on with Zynga than there is when a creator of free content starts accepting donations through Patreon. This is especially true when the membership bonuses are setup like Ben's in which they are mostly just being thanked in slightly more elaborate ways as the donation level increases.
Importantly, there's a limit to how much money you can spend on a single 'client' [0]. I don't think Zynga had meaningful limits on whale spend per game?
[0] I assume client is the inverse of a patron? Just going by Roman usage.
Is there? Apart from the preset tiers, you can usually specify a custom amount to donate monthly, so you could easily spend a few thousand per month on a single creator.
That depends on the user behavior and expectations. For example, I get exactly nothing back directly for any of the patreons I back. No gifts, no bonuses, no personal interaction, nothing. Some send things to backers but I ignore it as it doesn't interest me. OnlyFans and Zynga there is I feel an expectation and goal of a personal reward for your payment.
I think it works similarly well even for newer Twitch streamers from anecdotal evidence.
It's really the variety on Patreon, from a podcaster/youtuber to a Twitch streamer to even open source devs, which kind of shows how well it's working.
Interesting you got YT Red on there too. I heavily rely on YouTube Red to avoid ads on mobile, I hope they never get rid of it. I'm guessing the revenue is so low for it on your chart because most people don't have YT Red, not because it's not pulling its weight as compared to ads. I would probably just stop using YouTube on mobile if they ever removed YT Red, I don't know how people can stand the ads. There are so many ads.
YouTube without YouTube Red is not worth the trouble.
The YouTube Red / Google Play Music decoupling has me worried for the future of the product. I'm both upset Google Play Music is going away and that it might risk YouTube Red.
Honestly I wasn't aware that Google Play Music was still around until I got an email telling me it would discontinued. I've been using YouTube Music since I signed up for YouTube Premium a few years ago, and I've been pretty happy with it.
Play music’s iOS app was riddled with bugs. The YouTube music replacement has all of the same features as play music with none of the bugs. The only regression is that to upload my own music I have to upload it to YouTube rather than a (supposedly somewhat) private personal library.
I much prefer Google Play's UI & did not experience the "riddled with bugs" you speak of.
Just because it has the same content does not mean it's the same App or offers the same UX, it going away does not make me happy. I've been with Google Play from the start and am more likely to switch now, if it weren't for ad-free YouTube I would have quit because of this.
Used the Android version, but I agree Play had/has a much better interface.
I know it's my age talking, but there are some people that still prefer to listen to entire albums. Make it easy for our kind to find albums, and then don't default to play a mix of singles after.
The UI sucked and the app sucked. I’m glad google did something because the previous state of atrophy was unacceptable. It would have been nice if they simply maintained their services, but replacing them with equivalent ones is acceptable.
Here is a list of the tiny sliver of the total bugs that I had experienced and knew off the top of my head six months ago.
I did make the switch to Spotify (although I don't really watch much youtube, so youtube red wasn't a blocker for me). I haven't been super thrilled with Spotify's ability not to repeat the same songs okay the course of a few days when I listen to it throughout the day while working, but I'm slowly having success getting it to give me more variety. This might just be due to me having a smaller set of music that I'm interested in listening to (classic rock, progressive rock, and some blues) compared to their average user who might be willing to listen to anything popular from the past several decades of music, including new stuff as it comes out.
The auto generated lists are repetitive, but you can find any music playlist anyone's ever made on YouTube and those aren't. So instead of looking for a song and hitting play, which will start an autogenerated list based on your youtube likes, look for a playlist that has that song and play that instead. Also the more likes you have the less repetitive it will eventually get, but it's still a bit repetitive for me and I've been using YT Music for over two years now or however long since it's come out.
YouTube music sucks. Now that google play music is canceled. I either continue paying for yt red and stick with the worse music platform. I switch to prime music. Or I ditch yt and google music all together and use Spotify.
I still don’t get why google deprecated me as a customer. Google’s churn is exhausting. Starting to want the “Microsoft” & “Apple” experience of it just works.
> YouTube music sucks. Now that google play music is canceled. I either continue paying for yt red and stick with the worse music platform. I switch to prime music. Or I ditch yt and google music all together and use Spotify.
I was worried about this too, but have you tried it lately after doing an import of your Play Music data? I've been a subscriber to Play Music nearly since its inception and none of the functionality I cared about seems to be missing from YT Music in its current form. Indeed there are a couple of YT Music features I am using occasionally (the lyrics for example).
I think the impetus here is really just to unify all of their streaming content services under the YT brand, which if anything instills some confidence in me that they won't simply kill it off (Play Music was feeling like abandonware for a long time, being under the YT umbrella with an app under active development seems like an improvement).
That said, there are plenty of other ways to get the actual music files. I treat this service as a way to discover playlists and new artists only, and if there's something I want to retain access to I acquire my own copy to ensure I will not lose access to it in the future.
I still don’t get why google deprecated me as a customer. Google’s churn is exhausting.
I tend to attribute the product "churn" due to how promotions/raises are handled where releasing new products is heavily favored over maintaining existing ones.
Neither of those are significant for paying musicians, even if they're better than Spotify. This is why things like Patreon and Bandcamp have become so significant: the streaming providers are essentially not able to pay content creators at all, so none of them constitute a business plan for anything but themselves.
'better for the artist than Spotify' is… not a high bar :)
Spotify has no option to pay more because the labels eat all their profits. Apple being able to eat that cost because of their other ventures is anti-competitive. Blame the record labels, not Spotify.
> Please choose Apple Music or Tidal - they pay musicians substantially more than Spotify
Funny how you say that when Tidal have been caught faking plays[1] of artists close to Tidal-management, giving more money to them and less to everyone else.
But what do you expect by a streaming-platform literally run by “gangster”-rappers?
Do you know how much money Google has ever invested in Waymo ever?
I tried to search for a number, but couldn't come up with much. Obviously, this number would be very important in judging whether self-driving will be a loss for them.
Thanks. I should have thought to check on Wikipedia!
If you are willing to wait and just judge by eventually realised revenue, Waymo might still turn out to be a loss. But if you judge by current valuations (which reflect informed investors best guess of future revenue streams), then even after a recent major decrease we still have 30 billions USD.
That looks pretty decent for an investment of 1.1B + ~3B total.
You hit the nail on its head. Google usually discontinues products which have high maintenance cost so even if it turns out that YT Premium makes less money than people watching ads (and I highly doubt the average person watches more than $10 worth of ads in a month), they'll still keep it.
Not really, for example Reader had really low maintenance costs. In fact at some point it was maintained by some of its former developers in their 20% time with no official head count.
I think it is a side effect of what keeps google from turning into IBM. Ossification is a perennial problem for large corporations especially traditional growth companies. They make their few big things then iterate on them. The "ADHD" shown by google, while it is annoying to users to have a perfectly serviceable piece of software discontinued unceremoniously, probably keeps the internal structure from becoming rigid and failing to adapt. I think they are probably slightly too far over on the side of kill stuff and move on but I'm not a multibillion dollar company.
Having zero headcount is the death knell for a project about to be cancelled. It only had low maintenance costs because the team was disbanded, presumably because it wasn't worth paying to maintain.
Google Play Music is being transitioned to YouTube Music, I already got migrated, and I'm now using and is fine/comparable to Play Music, just reskinned. The only annoying thing is its tied directly to my YT account, so all my playlists show up in YT too, but any music I play/like in YT also effects what it considers my preferences and its led to some odd stuff popping up in the personalized mixes. It is kind of neat that I can listen to anything that's been posted as a video.
All that to say its not being decoupled, its being extra coupled. Your YouTube Red subscription comes part and parsel with YouTube Music since its the same thing.
Funny, every time I get an ad for YouTube Premium pop up at the bottom of my iOS client, the feature they tout is "videos keep playing in the background" which sounds like an anti-feature. I use "killing the YouTube App" as the most-convenient method of stopping YouTube videos because it's less work than dealing with the on-screen controls.
> I'm both upset Google Play Music is going away and that it might risk YouTube Red.
What do you mean? YouTube Premium (“Red” is a legacy name from waaay back) won’t go away. When Google Play Music dies, YouTube Premium will instead pay for YouTube Music (the new, “equivalent” service) which will still be around.
Isn’t it Youtube Premium now? For some weird reason Google sadly won’t let you buy ad free YouTube, unless you also have Youtube Music. I’m sure there’s a point to decision, but I don’t thing it has a basis in consumer demand.
I quite like the model - either you pay for Youtube or you don't. If you do, you get a bunch of stuff, some of which you might not use; but the total is still cheap, so who cares. I'd hate it if all-you-can-eat restaurants would make you decide up front if you want access to the desert buffet, too.
It scales, though. It makes sense that a thing like Google YouTube exists: if you can scale enough, it becomes worthwhile at least to yourself to provide it. Your main benefit is control and exclusivity: you can expect very large results from very small controlling actions.
Most likely doesn't make you enough money to redistribute it to lots of content creators, though it serves your purposes to have 'em thinking that is what they're there for.
I'm happy enough to serve consumer-grade video content at no cost to me through YouTube, on their terms. It's limiting, but I can put a lot of video out there without paying a host to serve the bandwidth. And YouTube gets to continue to pretend they are the only game in town.
If avoiding ads is your only concern, then Youtube Vanced [1] does the same as well. Have used it for the last couple of months and can happily recommend it. It's practically just a modified Youtube client, so every feature just works out of the box _(unsure how this compares with Newpipe though)_.
For the people that do not want to give Google any money ever, you have many alternatives. I personally use Firefox(the 68 version) + Ublock Origin on Android, but you can simply use Brave out of the box. You can log to your account and have your full preferences and history. Also I use an addon to allow background playback on Firefox, but in Brave it's also out of the box. I would never support Google in any way, so no ethical concerns on my part. I support some channels through Subscribestar. Patreon does not support free speech, so it's a no go for me too.
I prefer not to support SubscribeStar in any way, as that normalizes right-wing extremists who break the Patreon TOS. I guess it depends on how much distance you want between yourself and your brand and right-wing extremists, and what things you're willing to accept under the guise of 'free speech'.
But that is the mother of all sub-threads, so it might not be worth us getting into that infinite recursion fueled by dishonest argument :)
I prefer that the tool I use to be the middleman between me and the creator I support to not decide for ME who is acceptable or not for ME to support. But I understand your point, this discussion would have no end here in Hackernews. Let's agree to disagree :-)
YouTube is just monetizing a different part of your funnel. They both work together — you might not get many viewers interested in sending you money via Patreon either if your videos weren't getting an audience on YouTube via said algo...
>In other words, my Patrons mean more to me than the YT algo.
Good, but isn't YouTube algo your primary discovery funnel?
Does YouTube provide you metrics such as organic visits e.g. searching in YT, clicking on related videos, trending etc. vs direct visits e.g. clicking your video link from Reddit, HN, other websites etc.?
That's probably similar to a lot of people. It seems like a lot of the people I've watched for years on YouTube have started significantly cutting down on the length of their videos, usually sub 10 minutes, and making the full video available on patreon. It's like YouTube is just a way to get a foot in the door because it's the biggest platform, and they ditch it as soon as they can.
I love that you continue to treat your channel as a hobby. The fact that you only post things you find interesting keeps the quality extremely high. There aren’t enough hobbyists around these days. I’m so glad I discovered your channel!
That's awesome, not only for you but I especially applaud those who pay for your content. As a game developer it makes me wonder if there's a viable & addressable market there, to work on a single game "long-term" without feeling the crunch from Steam/reviews/etc.
There seem to be some developers who make mod content for games who do well on Patreon.
Edit: I also just realized I know of a game developer on Patreon for a game that hasn’t been released yet. It seems he (and presumably his team) earn $40k/month: https://www.patreon.com/alexmasse
Dwarf Fortress has been crowd funded since before Patreon existed and now has a Patreon page. I'm not sure you'd call it a total success though as the creators lived frugal lives for a long time in order to survive off the donations.
Will Patreon become the real YT killer? They already have the best content creators on their platform, what’s to stop them building out a similar video hosting setup with search and discovery?
Google might want to nip this in the bud now with a cheeky 2bn $ acquisition...
> what’s to stop them building out a similar video hosting setup with search and discovery?
for starters the absolutely abysmal performance of their site. I think Patreon found a good idea but good lord scrolling through a patreon account with someone who has a lot of posts basically stress tests my laptop fan
Throwing money, people and time at a slow web app just about never improves bad performance. 999 times out of 1,000 (and I’m not exaggerating that figure), it remains where it is or gets slower. Of the remaining one in a thousand, the substantial majority are due to them realising just how bad things are and clawing back some of the performance that they have steadily thrown away, but even then they’re not improving it to where I will arbitrarily decree it “should” be.
Note that I’m specifically talking about improving bad performance. If I was talking about having good performance, largely meaning designing the app to be fast from the start and never letting it get bad, the figures would be a bit more favourable, though they would still be very heavily skewed against large teams or companies. My conclusion is simply that the more people you have, the harder it is to make fast stuff.
I’m quite serious about these numbers. Not all small teams can produce fast apps, but over time no large teams can produce fast apps unless they very deliberately design it in from the start, in which case it’s merely extremely difficult to maintain (again, over time).
In theory, yes. In theory you can often fix a slow web app without rewriting it, too. But in practice if you have a large team, your rewrite is statistically extremely unlikely to succeed in improving performance meaningfully or even at all.
You can still opt in to keep using their old interface thankfully, the difference in both performance and UX is staggering. When that option disappears from the site, so will I.
The day they discontinue old.reddit.com is the day I stop visiting the site. The new version is like a case study in everything I hate about "new" web UX.
YouTube's real killer feature is its video discovery. Having millions users endlessly streaming content without many connection hitches while showing a dozen recommended videos each time does wonders for authors.
I'd be more worried about YouTube getting their shit together and making a Patreon killer than Patreon building video hosting.
YouTube's killer feature is ability to INFLUENCE video discovery. There is no need for them ever, ever to care about being able to pay creators in a competitive way, when they can be paid (or simply needed) just to get the content out there and seen by an audience.
As long as they are YouTube they can capitalize on being the gatekeepers and there's no reason for them to care about becoming also the ticket-takers. There's also no need for them to try and kill Patreon to replace it: Patreon is taking pressure off of them and enabling them to enjoy the really useful part of their dominance, with no consequences to them. With Patreon out there, YouTube doesn't even need to care whether it seems like it pays creators or not.
It's called "channel memberships" - if you look at [1] you'll see a 'join' button to the left of the 'subscribe' button (or at least, I do in the UK)
I can't imagine it'll replace Patreon though, as a lot of creators see Patreon as giving them back control from Google's inscrutable, capricious treatment.
Bandwidth is expensive. You need to be big enough player to have your own CDN spread across the world, with favorable peering agreements or bills will just kill you.
I don't know about that. A relatively small player can get several mbps per dollar all over the US and Europe. That means you only need about 1 dollar per month per peak concurrent user.
Terrible idea. They're not a content hosting platform, they're a content creator payment system. Why become a bandwidth provider and directly fight Google in a domain that Google has already scaled into?
Youtube operates on a freemium model where most people pay nothing other than a few cents received here and there viewing ads. If Patreon starts becoming the new Youtube their bandwidth bills will skyrocket and they will have to reduce creator compensation. If they become a paywalled YouTube (after the hypothetical death of YouTube) it will harm discovery.
I sub to heaps of science infotainment channels and the YT algo hasn't ever recommended your channel. I think that anecdotally shows how broken the YT algo is. You just got one more YT sub and a potential new Patreon sub, too. Cheers!
Do you have paying subscribers through YouTube? I'm curious to know, when presented an equal choice of Patreon vs subscribing via YouTube, what % of paying subscribers choose each option.
Probably the convenience of paying multiple creators with one credit card transaction, and one login. I guess you could call this a network effect. YT had/has various direct payment options, but they are confusing and never made as much sense as Patreon's model, which allows per-month or per-creation pledges. Strange since YT's existing infra would seem a big advantage in doing exactly what Pareon has.
I think it varies a lot. Some Patreon creators use it as a sort of "tip jar", where the rewards for various tiers are relatively minimal compared to the main product that is given away for free. This is very common for web comics, and I'm guessing also common for Youtubers. In these cases, the main "reward" is helping to ensure that the creator can continue producing the content they're releasing for free. Other creators use Patreon as the medium by which to deliver their content, and only patrons hace access to it. So this is more like a traditional subscription model than a tip jar. And of course there are various gradations in between, and probably other models as well.
So because Patreon is used in such a wide range of ways, It's hard to make generalizations about all of it. And by that same token it's also hard for Patreon to make changes in a way that doesn't interfere with the way someone is using it. (Not that this in any way excuses their numerous blunders.)
Glynn Stewart (sci-fi author) uses it [0] to release his novels 2 weeks before they land on Amazon, which is when they get removed from Patreon as he is part of KU. So both to give people an alternative to Amazon despite technically being Amazon exclusive and to allow people to get them early.
The nice thing about Patreon is it explicitly is structured for tiered subscription support and removes the need for creators to do any payment system managing.
It's not a discovery platform. Essentially (and I know Jack Conte would like to evolve this but it already works without such an evolution) there's no reason to even be on a Patreon page unless you were already fixing to pay the creator. That makes it pretty self-selecting.
[Not op] There are a few reasons, but two big ones are being directly supporting the creator (YT requires you use memberships which are flat-rate and not user-adjustable) and getting perks for pledging (like Discord access, access to pre-release work, etc).
Someone posted a widely-downvoted comment of "They are another facebook. They will turn cancerous very soon, if they haven't already"; while I certainly don't think Patreon is another Facebook, it's at least worth considering what their sky-high valuation means. With this round of funding, they've officially passed "unicorn status," and that's kind of a double-edged sword.
The problem, at risk of stating the obvious, is that investors are hoping for big returns, and that means big revenue -- and that means changing the definition of "success" on Patreon. To hit a few hundred million in revenue a year and earn their valuation, they're going to need to start competing with not just YouTube and Twitch, but major music labels and indie-friendly TV/film studios. They're going to need to recruit the new Taylor Swift, the new Lady Gaga. Hell, they may need to recruit the current Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.
The most successful campaigns they have now are bringing in tens of thousands a month, but those are wild outliers. The vast majority of their creators are making side money, not a living; bringing in just $1000 a month puts you in the top 5%. (It's hard to be sure, but I think there's a good chance it puts you in the top 1%, given that there's about 178K campaigns total and there are folks in the top 1000, according to Graphtreon, barely making over $1K a month.) And... that vast majority of folks won't be Patreon's focus in future years. It can't be. (One can argue it isn't now.)
I don't think Patreon will "turn cancerous," per se -- but the Patreon of 2022 may not look that much like the Patreon of early 2020, which some would argue didn't look as much like the Patreon of 2018 as ideal.
I use Patreon (albeit in a pledge capacity) sparingly. Many years ago they dropped Naomi Wu[1][2][3]. This situation was particularly scary: she was making a decent chunk of her living through Patreon pledges, but because of the limited size of her audience, and marginalized position she had no recourse.
While I agree that they're not currently cancerous I do think they illustrate part of the broader problem with modern society: over-dependence on central infrastructure-like sources that are private and can change on a whim. It's great that people can make a living on Patreon, but this should be tempered by the inherent risk of being on a platform you don't control.
Regardless of the back and forth accusations with Vice, a no doxing rule seems reasonable. Online mobs can be dangerous and are one of the thornier complexities of managing social networks.
Yeah, Patreon has to maintain their rules for their service. It doesn't matter how someone feels wronged, they don't get a pass. Can you imagine the road they would've been going down if they'd let Wu stay? Every single ToS violation would've been litigated through social media. Whether or not Vice did something wrong is a matter for Wu & Vice to resolve, not Patreon.
> She doxxed a Vice editor when she felt they failed to maintain a privacy agreement.
Why is it that you choose to use "failed to maintain a privacy agreement" to describe the Vice editors publishing her personal information without consent, while using the much more loaded term "doxxed" when she did the same to them?
Do you understand the difference in likely consequences for each party here?
Is there any rational argument that can be made to exonerate the totally shitty behaviour of Vice and it's writers/editors in choosing to invade her privacy after having agreed not to?
Vice had not published the story yet, yet Wu believed they might doxx her when questioning details about a reddit controversy. Wu had preemptively doxxed the editor.
Vice shouldn't be exonerated but do we live in an "eye for an eye" rule of law?
(According to Wikipedia) she published Vice's editor-in-chief's home address. I assume she did that to "explain" how she felt threatened physically by ensuring that the editor in chief feels physically threatened as well?
She could have acted differently. She could have taken legal means; perhaps asking for help to her patrons. Supporters can support in many ways and not only with money.
Can somebody who knows more about the details explain why her behaviour should have been tolerated by Patreon?
Obviously her doxxing was a poor choice. However, she didn't have much legal recourse. She lives in China, and viewed herself as being at risk of retaliation from the CCP due to some of the personal details Vice choose to release. (Despite knowing (from her) the danger it would put her in.) Many (most?) people feel that the doxxing was her only means of retaliation given the circumstances.
Both actions are bad. But if I have to pick one to be "more" bad, I'd pick Vice's.
Those two points are probably what's at the root of the calls against Patreon here.
We don't live under eye-for-eye law. (Maybe China has some laws like that?) But people often view things in that light socially.
She was interrogated by the police not so long after. She posted that she was going with them when event happened, I recall. But afterwards the Twitter history was scrubbed... Unknown if it had any relation to the Vice case.
I think the problem for Patreon is that they have a policy and it’s best to enforce it consistently, rather than apply it based on some judgement of moral right.
> Vice shouldn't be exonerated but do we live in an "eye for an eye" rule of law?
This is not about the rule of law and the issue is not whether Wu was right to do this; rather that presenting Wu's behavior as worse than the Vice editor's is extremely unfair. Furthermore, the consequences of doxxing for some north american influencer type vs those for someone living in an authoritarian dystopia are quite different. Finally, in one case the offense was arguably perpetrated in a state of panic while the other was done in cold blood so to speak.
If she has no recourse than the only form of justice she has available is an eye of an eye.
She's a single person against a huge conglomerate like vice. Sadly, legal means are not relevant in that situation.
If you don't want to live in an eye for an eye rule of law, attack the causes, not the victims.
It's a shame we live in a society where most of the discourse has to be polarized. If you're a victim you can either be blameless or else it's victim blaming.
From the information I could find it appears vice engaged in immoral behavior and she responded in kind.
Furthermore she didn't so that in order to protect herself but in order to retaliate.
While I don't agree with the morality if her retaliation, that doesn't automatically make Vice's position any better. They are still much worse. For one they are a company with legal department etc and should know better.
As for whether she has legal recourse or not… a honest question:
According to Wikipedia she had an agreement with Vice which they broke. What kind of agreement is an agreement that cannot be upheld in court. Can an american company just do what they please anywhere in the world?
Retaliating is a legitimate form of protection. Of course, it doesn't help retroactively, but a realistic risk of retaliation keeps people honest. It's a key part of game theory in the tit-for-tat strategy to the prisoner's dilemma: https://ncase.me/trust/
Sure, after having tried other approaches. She has a fan base that can exert pressure.
People have personality. If her personality is to say "fuck you, I'll fight you back using your same weapon" then my personality can be "I don't like that, I prefer a society where people don't react to force with force and being jerks to jerks"
EDIT: just to be clear; she's free to choose her strategy, but here we were talking about whether patreon should side with her and exempt her from their policies. They are not in a position where they can fully judge who's right
> Supporters can support in many ways and not only with money
I don't think a witch-hunt would have been a better option. Honestly it was an ugly affair, but Patreon shouldn't have gotten involved. Much like MasterCard or Visa didn't get involved in Vice.
I’m very curious why you chose to phrase it that way. It sounds like to me she was doxxed by the editor, but you chose the phrase “failed to maintain a privacy agreement”
Vice had not published the story yet, yet Wu believed they might doxx her when questioning details about a reddit controversy. Wu had preemptively doxxed the editor.
Vice had not published the story yet, yet Wu believed they might doxx her when questioning details about a reddit controversy. Wu had preemptively doxxed the editor.
> They will turn cancerous very soon, if they haven't already"
Ever since Patreon sided with those fucking shit heels Sarah Jeong and Jason Koebler at Vice Magazine, and took away Naomi Wu's Patreon supporters - I've had Patreon firmly in the "cancerous" category.
I'm still using them where I have to, because some of the people I choose to support want to be supported that way. But I've made sure I have non-Patreon contact details wherever I can so my donations can follow the creators, and Patreon as an organisation can die in a fire for all I care.
Time to go contact all the creators I support, and remind them I'd prefer some other means to send them monthly donations instead of via Patreon - before these new investors put the squeeze on and start ripping me and the people I support off (even further)...
They already are cancerous. From banning people for things happening outside their platform or even not linked from their platform. To trying to prevent people acting according to TOS they themselves forced with legal action. I don't see it to be very stable platform to operate on.
And on other hand I can't see how their model can justify the value. They are only there to to take a small cut from donations. Will this really be so big business? Pretty big changes are needed to something else.
"Donation" is not the word the OP should have used, because it implies Patreon is some kind of charity middleman. They are not. Patrons are not donating money to creators, they are paying them to create; creators are not receiving donations, they are receiving income. Patreon is charging a service fee to them, and they know this up front. It is no more or less ethical than any other similar business proposition like setting up an online store with Shopify or selling an ebook on Amazon.
That’s really not true. Subsidising creation maybe, but for most patreon that I’ve seen most of the value produced by the creator is public.
There might be some exotic sideshows (eg access to a discord server, time-limited exclusivity is also common) but I’d see it more as funding creation than paying to create, the latter implies much more direct transaction and benefits / exchange e.g. commissioned work, that is “paying to create”.
they are not taking a cut. if anything they are providing a payment structure to relieve the work of credit card handling including fraud work. Very similar to how twitch began selling bits to viewers who could then use them to tip streamers.
On July 17, 2007, Zuckerberg said that selling Facebook was unlikely because he wanted to keep it independent, saying "We're not really looking to sell the company... We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company."
I think FB started turning bad around 2015. So if we're comparing Patreon to FB, give it another 10 years before they look like something else. Even Google had to be worth several billions before they dropped the "don't be evil" motto.
Interesting theory. Hopefully you're right -- it'd give someone else time to come up with a viable competitor. Ideally, competitors, plural, of course. (Kickstarter had been working on one, but evidently decided the numbers didn't add up.)
> To hit a few hundred million in revenue a year and earn their valuation, they're going to need to start competing with not just YouTube and Twitch, but major music labels and indie-friendly TV/film studios. They're going to need to recruit the new Taylor Swift, the new Lady Gaga. Hell, they may need to recruit the current Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.
No one that can be Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga needs Patreon because they can already monetize their content through mainstream channels. There is no to little value Patreon can add on top of that. Patreon exists to enable monetization for the long tail of creatives, which means they need to increase breadth, not depth, and not lose the current growth in demand for these channels to competition.
I love the idealism, but the problem with most long tails is that in practice they are way more weighted to the head than we tend to think they are. I found what seem to be slightly more concrete numbers than I had in my original post: less than 4% of Patreon's total number of creators make $1K or more a month, but they account for about 70% of Patreon's revenue. Their single top-grossing creator accounts for a full percentage point of revenue.[1] The bottom half or so is probably alarmingly close to a rounding error.
I could certainly imagine Patreon making a pitch to bigger creators about taking control of their own destiny and keeping more of their money. Would it work? I don't know. But a single creator who averages $1M a month is twice as valuable as a thousand creators who average "only" $500 a month. If you're idealistic, you may still prioritize the thousand, but if you've taken multiple rounds of VC money at a multi-billion dollar valuation, you're gonna look real hard at what you can do to bring in that one.
I don’t see this from an idealism perspective at all. Patreon is just a payment processor platform that made it easy for the long tail to have subscriptions, that was their unexploited profit opportunity. That opportunity diminishes as the monthly revenue numbers increase, because if people are making enough, they will just have other, custom channels available to them.
In other words, no one who can average $1M a month has anything more to gain from moving to Patreon’s platform, or any other payment processing platform for that matter.
> less than 4% of Patreon's total number of creators make $1K or more a month, but they account for about 70% of Patreon's revenue.
That describes the shape of the curve, but doesn’t describe the total volume. If the overall market size is increasing, which it does, regardless of the thin long tail, their aggregate revenue will increase. It doesn’t need to do anything special, it just needs to make sure it is not going to lose its share of the ever growing pie.
And I would like to invite all Hacker News participants to call me out and make fun of me if it turns out I'm wrong. Come back in 2-4 years and respond to this comment calling me an idiot if I'm wrong.
After all, what's the point of making a prediction if people can't call you out for being wrong when it doesn't come true?
It's more likely that Patreon will turn into YouTube than it turn cancerous. They have the creators and they have the eyeballs; there is no need for those creators to be on YT to "reach wider audience" because those freeloaders aren't paying them. If Patreon could become the YT of paid content, it could be huge.
Then again, YT can turn Patreon functionality on in a blink, offer everything for free and then some, offer features to subscribers that Patreon doesn't have, and over time, slowly, erode a big chunk of their users.
Even though Snap has not completely died yet, Instagram was able to suck out their oxygen pretty bad by simply offering a wider audience to the creators. YT can't pull the same trick here, but once they found what works, it's only a matter of time.
> To hit a few hundred million in revenue a year and earn their valuation [...]
Revenue doesn't earn a valuation, profit does. Hundreds of million in revenue is worthless on its own – unless you can dump your shares on the next Greater Fool.
The race is on to develop the open alternative to Patreon before Patreon becomes the monster and squeezes creators out of necessity.
I put forth that Wordpress, Peertube, Substack, and ActivityPub are all inspiration for what comes next (with Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle support for patron payments/subscriptions). The primitives already exist.
Having an external audit and a response plan is, helpful for finally solving the payment processor / money transmitter issue.
Though the real solution for Patreon, and so many other issues, is some kind of automated escrow service built on top of that, with a best case outcome of seller and buyer agreeing and a contested case of review by other registered entities in the service deciding the outcome of the contract.
Unfortunately if you want to reach critical mass you need popular appeal, and a large part of that means a snappy name for your project. It's shallow but it's true.
GNU is pathologically incapable of coming up with appealing names.
I think there’s research to be done around how to better improve the Liberapay experience to reach parity with Patreon, so whatever changes can be made that stoke a significant amount of migration of creators from the latter to the former are made.
Liberapay is missing subscription tiers. But the main disadvantage seems to be network effects/lack of adoption. Creators who have accounts on Liberapay and Patreon make far less on Liberapay, which means that people are willing to ignore the extra fees because Patreon is convenient.
Patreon is indeed a billion dollar unicorn not because it's immediately going to funnel money to shareholders… did Amazon?
Patreon is clearly the PayPal of… being Patreon. The network effects and defining of the brand have already kicked in. I'm pretty happy about it (but then I would be as I'm one of the more successful people on it) but, like I personally told Jack Conte and Sam Yam, I am also happy about what Patreon means TO that 'long tail', because some of the qualities that benefit me also benefit the small fry.
You can't live off a steady and ever-so-slightly growing $50 a month. That's the long tail: people not being discovered, who have only their little crews of supporters. There is no plan to make them all earn thousands of dollars a month because practically, that can't happen to all of them.
BUT, if you have a predictable slowly growing $50 a month (because it's not tightly tied to new product releases of yours, there isn't the feast-or-famine cycle of being entreprenurial in the traditional sense, which I have also done) that becomes a small supplemental income that you can depend on. The value of that is incalculable… certainly worth a billion VC dollars that Patreon means THAT to people.
An extra $50 can mean life and death to someone who is really on the edge. The example I used to Jack and Sam is a single mom with just a cell phone, who can livestream telling bedtime stories to her child. And other moms tune in, and support her and her stories for $50 a month: they can spare it, and that is now food for her child. It doesn't HAVE to make her J. K. Rowling, to count. It matters at all scales.
Bryan Lunduke heavily pushed locals.com as an alternative. His arguement, rightfully so, is that Patreon is painfully slow to use. Sadly he now seems to be mostly focused on moving people to locals, and not producing the same quality content as previously.
The creators I want to support are all on Patreon, so that’s the platform where I have account, but beyond setting up the subscription I new use the site. It’s a sad experience, slower than the Reddit redesign, it’s pointless to try to do anything meaningful on Patreon.
They need to invest in their site, but the valuation seem high for what they provide.
With crypto, there is no gate keeper. No Stripe or Patreon or Paypal in the way. I love Stripe by the way, but they too could in theory block me for whatever reason. Also on the other side of the coin, you have the buyer who can cancel their subscription at any time. You could even have a smart contract for 30 day refunds - which allows the refund for any reason but at least the buyer has committed by having their funds held in that contract for the 30. Stable coins can take the speculation out of it and are ideal for small amounts of "cash" for these kinds of transactions.
I think this problem is a great example of where crypto can shine where normal finance is held back. You can have the idealistic platform - Wordpress on your own server and some PHP code or something to check for payments - no one "owning it" on your behalf. Someone can wrap that as a SaaS, but anyone can, there is no need to go with the big unicorn provider.
That leaves the question of how to market your little market stall on the internet? Well like anything else, just use the right tool for the job. You don't need the payment platform to be the way people find you.
The limitation isn’t moving money, there are tons of ways for consumers to pay creators money, it’s all the services around payment that Patreon provides to both producer and consumer. Things like recurring charges, places for premium content, charging structure tied to content release, fraud protection, support, and marketing. A decent chunk of that is outside the scope of what crypto can solve.
I think the idea that creators should cobble together Wordpress websites kind of weird. Most of these creators are artists, not engineers. They probably don’t have the inclination nor the skills to build a DIY patreon. If they’re going to move, someone needs to provide a turnkey solution for them.
Yeah you are right about wordpress. Bad example. Something like substack or even blogger might be better. But anything like that should run through their own domain "just in case".
Wordpress can be turnkey - someone needs to set that up? I mean wordpress.com is kind of that. Or another company could set up an instant install and make it look good and make it fast wordpress service. They probably exist.
Maybe they could do it for free and then charge a take from Stripe.
Crypto solves some problems beyond this, but I am not sure it will be adopted because walled gardens and central corporations seem to win for the obvious reasons. Crypto gives the buyer more control and the seller more freedom. The seller can have zero fear of getting their funds cut off by the platform.
Recurring payments are not possible from the PULL side, but I like that. If something is valuable the customer will keep on paying. A smart contract could allow for subscriptions from the customer side by pushing the money until the contract is stopped. This solves the "remembering to do it" part.
Many of the most successful Patreon profiles use the platform only as a way to provide a paid addition to their free podcast feed. You start supporting them, grab the private RSS feed and add it to your podcast app, then never visit Patreon again.
You turn off Patreon emails and push notifications because the episodes just show up in your podcatcher like any other podcast. Patreon isn't offering anything in the relationship beyond recurring monthly payment processing. RSS + your parasocial friendship with the podcast hosts are what builds the relationship.
I'd love it if a podcast-focused company stepped in to fill the same role. They could provide the same custom features that ATP and Dithering/Stratechery have added recently to their paid feeds. The UX of having "Free" and "Paid" feeds for the same podcast really sucks.
Another thing Patreon offers is a central place to support many creators (of various types) with a single profile. I mostly support youtubers, some web comic makers, and some podcasts. Ans already having the profile makes it very low friction to support new creators (if only I had money for that). So it's a bit hard to see podcast creators trying out a new platform - network effects at play and all.
This. My niche is web serials with some “youtubers” thrown in, but despite having considered individual donations of old I never actually did it until I git access to a platform where I can readily and relatively safely provide support for multiple creators easily.
This seems like a feature to me. Patreon helps me support my creators, takes their fee and gets out of my way. That's how things are supposed to work IMO.
I suppose I like it as well... but the point being that in the case of these podcasts Patreon is only rent-seeking and not actually "building a community of fans" or hosting/delivering/surfacing the content. (And those aspirations are I'm sure what underpin the $90M investment and entire company growth strategy.)
Podcasters could save ~10% on Patreon fees and maybe even gain some useful dedicated RSS tools and membership perks that would work inside a podcast app.
Patreon is trying to be a YouTube/Facebook-like community platform that controls the relationship between creators and paying fans. There's no reason to pay an extra 12% on top of credit card fees if you already control your own distribution and membership list, as all RSS podcasts do.
I'd like to see the podcatchers build this in. I'd push a "support me on Patreon" button. All it has to do is open up my web browser.
Some podcasts put that info in the episode descriptions, but I usually end up finding it via Google.
Bonus points if it could automatically switch me to an ad-free feed for paid supporters, but that would require some infrastructure. Just putting a "pay" button prominently on the app would nudge people. It really is one of those things where $1/month times 5,000 people could make a going concern.
Sahil built a fantastic personal brand, and now that he's VC-free and profitable, he always forgets to mention that it was done on a back of dozens of employees, through $8m of other people's money. In that sense, taking on VC was anything but dumb.
But since COVID he's been posting on his channel a lot more frequently and – knowing his dayjob – the production value and time he spends on these things is really impressive
I scrapped Patreon earlier [0] this year to find out how big the platform actually is and what's the composition of its users. I was very surprised to see that it's a truly mom & pop platform with very few whales.
Interesting! But I was a little confused by how you use the word “whale”. I thought it was a person who spends a lot of money, so in this case a patron who contributes a lot of money or to many campaigns.
I don't understand why they need to raise money. Don't people constantly give them a cut of money? And most of the code is written already? How many maintenance programmers and customer support people do they need? Or is the money just so that a few people can get richer now somehow.
Like most web based startups, the cost of programmers and customer support becomes insignificant once the model is proven, and the investors are convinced b7y the pitch deck that says "If we now pump a hundred million (minus the founders table sweep) into marketing and acquisition, we'll exit at 100x within 3 years!"
> Or is the money just so that a few people can get richer now somehow.
Why _else_ does anything happen in this fucking industry?
One possibility is the Owen Benjamin lawsuit, the suggestion being that patreon would have to pay for arbitration (under their previous TOS) for every complainant.
Patreon's UI is atrocious! At least for the things I use it for. If all it was was a way to give people a donation and nothing else then it wouldn't matter but many people use it as a way to distribute digital media for $$$
But, there is no catalog of media. All you can do is go through old blog posts. The UI of the blog posts is a single page app that you pick "more" at the bottom of every 10 posts. It crashes often and you have re-start back at post 1 when it does and paginate your way back to where you started. Fixing the pagination would be nice but fixing the entire UI around actually helping people distribute their media would be even better.
In fact many people don't even put their media on Patreon given how bad the UI is and are forced to find 3rd party solutions
Also, Patreon is horrible at discovery. For the most part you have to find out about people to become a patron of offsite. Some of that is the people on Patreon not knowing what they are doing but arguably Patreon needs a better way to browse people and concretely know what they'll get access to. Not just "you'll get access to special videos" but rather tell me exactly which videos, how many, how long are they, what is each individual video about, etc....
Even for artists Patreon could generate a series of thumbnails, small enough that just the thumbnails are not enough but large enough that you can tell what art you'll get access to.
Given how bad the UX is it's slightly infuriating they're the most popular of such sites. I guess that just means there is plenty of room for someone to steal their market.
Further, Patreon has lots of people scamming for $$$, reselling other people's art. There are Patreon accounts for blogs of pirate videos like someone runs a blogspot blog of torrents and has a Pateron to support their activity. Or someone uploads videos they don't own to a video site and has a Patreon to support their "cataloging".
Rubbish. For any given "new patron" relationship, most content is past content. I wrote up how horrible the experience is in a comment on a past thread:
As far as I can tell, Patreon's most compelling attribute is a clever name. If some other company nailed the discovery and "new connection" experience, they'd own the niche. There's a small network effect but I doubt it's terribly compelling since creators can easily exist on multiple networks.
Minor anecdote on amount of attention Patreon pays to UI. About 2 months ago I've discovered that you can access some locked videos without being logged in. I've reported it to their security team and they replied that's already been reported and it's in their fix queue.
Well I've just checked, and the problem is still there and not fixed. I guess their fix queue is long.
Yeah, the site itself is horrible enough, that I set up email notifications for new posts, which then get auto-send to a newsfeed address at my Inoreader (RSS "provider") account. So I get all new posts in my RSS feed and I barely ever hyve to visit the site
Seems they are growing well. They already have pretty good name recognition. It doesn’t seem like a high resource business, unlike video hosting, and they already have a good monetization strategy (they basically take 2.9% of donations). Given that they are pretty close to a billion dollars a year, that would be close to $29 million/year.
Given all this, what is the purpose of raising more money at this time. They already have good name recognition, and should be turning a profit by now.
Sometimes, too much funding can end up being a curse, where the business loses focus on their core competency and tries to branch out too much.
EDIT:
Thanks to the commenters below, It looks like they take somewhere between 5 - 12% of donations. That is on top of the 2.9% processing fee. So it looks like they they could easily bring in between $50-100 million/year with the $1 Billion/year in donations that they are pretty close to bringing in(depending on the mix of plans people sign up for). This further reinforces the point that they have a pretty good monetization strategy.
But $29M/year I isn’t that much. Especially as they’re located in San Francisco and have about 200 employees (pretty sure not all are there). That gives you $145k per employee. That’s roughly enough to cover salaries, assuming no other cost to run the business.
My question is WTF are those 200 people doing considering the main product of the company is an automated process and the code has already been written & tested over the previous years?
Running business requires people. Accounting, support, marketing, hr, security, procurement teams, lawyers, fraud teams, etc, etc. To build tech company you require more than just engineers.
Given the extraordinary valuations being handed out right now in public markets to companies like Fiverr ($4.4b), Square ($74b), Etsy ($16b), Shopify ($136b), and so on, Patreon should just go public. Investors apparently can't get enough. Even persistently disregarded Overstock recently went up 2,000% in just five months, hitting their highest levels in 18 years of being public. Patreon can just say: cloud! remote! ecommerce! payments! and they'll get a sweet $10 billion dotcom bubble-style valuation. Wait a few days after the IPO, announce a stock split, and drop some more shares on the public's head, your stock will double. Tell them the follow-on is to expand your remoteness and cloudiness.
For the first time in two decades it often makes a lot more sense to be publicly traded for funding purposes than private. The public market hasn't been this ravenous for money losing tech'ish stocks since 1999-2000. If you're Patreon, it has to be a serious consideration to take advantage of the unhinged mania in the air. (Obviously with the understanding that Patreon may have other reasons for remaining private; although that can't last forever though, and when you're on a series E it's getting that time).
Own those stocks before they go up a lot, sell before they go down a lot. Not being snarky at all, that's actually the ideal way to take advantage of it; it's very difficult to time properly, and difficult to know which stocks will ultimately hyper-perform and which will not. For example, Upwork (UPWK) isn't participating comparatively much at all, while Overstock goes up ~3,900% bottom to top, and Fiverr goes up ~500% (disclosure: I don't own any of those stocks). Who expected Overstock to go from $3 to $120? It's wild speculative behavior by investors, a feeding frenzy pouring out of the boom in Shopify's stock (along with the relevant aspects of the pandemic, including online ordering). In general the best bet for an average investor interested in taking advantage of the insanity, is to not try to perfectly time a top or bottom - if you catch a wave, accept good enough and get out, instead of reaching for the final pennies on the table and riding it back down.
Generating large returns has been easy for a while now. You have to retain the self-discipline to remind yourself that getting 40% in a day is ridiculous (as with Zoom today), that in normal times that is two or three years of good returns. It's about consciously restricting your own reach for greed. Average investors that get lucky in bubbles also tend to get crushed by them as well.
As an example, back in March I posted my thoughts on buying during the crash and I was buying Square in the $30s at that time. I'm out now. If Square goes on up to $200 or $300 per share, I simply don't care. My returns were easy, ridiculous and good enough, I sleep extremely well having exited with the gains I generated. They're mine now, I captured that return, locked it in, and that's the single most important thing. It's a far better thing to secure already massive gains than to reach for more, being greedy, and risk all of it if the mania turns south (which it will at some point, nobody knows when though and trying to pinpoint that is most often a fool's errand). Always have the discipline to walk away if you hit a homerun. The crazy returns (ie anything far beyond reasonable, very outsized) generated at this time are mostly not skill, they're luck; spotting a position to enter can be skill from years of mental training, however getting 500% on eg Fiverr in five months is mostly dumb luck (to be clear, it's the particularly outsized return that is the dumb luck part of that); cash that luck in, as it will inevitably turn against you.
There are some very straight-forward moves an average investor can make to shield theirself as well, requiring no particular skill. For example if you generate a large return quickly in this market, remove the initial principle, maybe a reasonable chunk of profit as well, and let the rest ride if you have a strong desire to continue to participate. Mentally accept that portion as money that may very well go to zero, to emotionally steel yourself for a bad outcome if the market crashes at some point; that's your speculative money in this gambler's market, having safeguarded the other portion. If you care to, you can even constantly peel your principle back out of these stocks as they climb, rather than aiming for a particular high point to sell in bulk (and trading fees are widely now zero, which can add-up in that context depending on the position size). Losing a big chunk of your principle investment generally stings a lot more than losing a big chunk of some easy outsized gains, always keep that in mind. It is most often easy come / easy go in markets like this one, and the only way to avoid the easy go part of that is to exit the gains at some point.
You might see a lot of people saying the market can't go down because interest rates are so low / zero. Interest rates have been between very low and zero for a decade now, and they'll probably be low for a long time into the future. The market can return to its former multiples from eg 2014-2015 (when rates were also de facto zero), while rates are at zero. Don't let yourself fall for that premise, as though this market's extreme upward trajectory is guaranteed. A crash just back to the multiples we had in 2014-2015 would hammer this market, taking it down by 30-40% (and the more bubbly stocks would particularly get smashed).
I'm not an advocate for day trading, I'm primarily a value investor. What I'm advocating for here is some very basic risk management, risk limiting, for an average investor swimming in a bubble (with some existing gains). If you're an average investor just now looking to enter the market, my advice would be to only do that via on-going buying of an index fund or equivalent, something you plan to continue in good times and bad for example.
That's not to say there are no buys remaining in this market that will yet produce huge returns, rather, I personally wouldn't provide advice on specific stocks on the premise of seeking large returns here (ie which stocks will be the next SQ or SHOP; what's going up 500% in the next six months). Square under $40 was an easy buy, it had a large margin of safety in its valuation; at $166, six months later, I consider it dangerous and wouldn't advise anyone to buy it as a new position (that's what 300%+ in six months will do).
When the parent asked how an average investor should take advantage of the situation, I took that to mean: how should an average investor that is already in this market manage the context (rather than it meaning to enter the market for the first time here and now). I'm looking at this market from a particular angle: I'd say an average investor, already in the market, should take advantage of the situation by looking to exit some or all of their gains (take advantage of the market to exit value; which is what eg Tesla is doing when diluting now, or SV companies are doing rushing to the IPO exits); that's merely my opinion though.
I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.
Say you bought Square (SQ) between $40 and $80 during/after the March plunge (or even if you caught it in June and are already up 50-60%). Not an abnormal scenario, as many people will be sitting on large gains from the past five or six months.
So one of two scenarios related to what I've said (simplified a bit for brevity):
1) You're sitting on a large gain now, maybe 100%-300% in a mere five to six months. Take your principle off the table only, optionally with a bit of profit as well, and let the rest ride if you want to continue to participate in this market mania to see how far it can go. Or sell it all, if you're fully comfortable with your gains, and bag the full profit here. Either scenario is quite reasonable depending on the person doing the investing. It will heavily depend on your personality type, it's important to understand yourself, your impulses, your weaknesses & strengths, how you react to things. Some people might want to leave more of the profit in the market, some might feel better pulling it all. What I'd suggest at this point for an average investor, given this scenario, is removing the principle at a minimum.
That's not day trading. I'm not suggesting jumping in and out of SQ, trading it constantly trying to profit on small swings. The scenario is that you established a specific position, eg at $40, $80 or $100, and now you're looking at how to either exit or otherwise reduce risk in a reasonable manner. In my view, most of what is left to take advantage of here, is the selling opportunity being presented.
2) You noticed your position was up a lot in a short amount of time, eg it went from $40 to $60, or $60 to $100. Rather than debating when exactly to sell all or a big chunk of it, you sell gradually as it climbs, until either you're entirely out of it or you've extracted your principle (then decide on strategy for the profit remaining). It's of course nothing more than averaging across sales, some people feel more comfortable doing that than selling all at once, especially if they think a stock might keep moving higher yet and they want to try to capture some of that remaining upside.
Start 20 shitty Patreon accounts a week, pump stolen content through them until you see any sign of traction on one or a few. Double down on those, rebuilding and re-uploading the content to hide your plagiarism. Focus your future 20 weekly spam Patreons on similar subjects/demographics and cross-pimp any successful one to each others supporters.
Then lie outrageously about how profitable they are and sell them to some other sucker with a get rich quick dream and no work ethic to back it up. Rinse, repeat.
The same crappy minimum-effort rent-seeking SEO-spamming techniques that every "get rich quick building affiliate websites" snake oil salesmen use...
so they pay out $1B and charge 8% for middle plan which is $80M revenue a year?
i don’t see how that works in public markets...though to give them credit they should probably try to go public sooner rather than later to take advantage of the froth...
also 8% on top of payment processing fees seems like a lot, though I guess creators just account for that in deciding what fees to charge...
Not having to deal with chargebacks and the upkeep of such a website to receive donations is enough for creators to pay the 5/8/12% [0]. It also helps that Patreon has been around for a while, so users see them as safe both in terms of security for their CC info, and for being easy to cancel a subscription whenever they want.
As a patron, there is also very little friction in adding an extra creator to the set you are supporting, which turning it around is a huge value-add for creators: fans are more likely to add them to their Patreon account than to create a login for a pay wall or regularly click a "donate now!" button.
It's good to see Patreon doing well. For me it didn't really work out that well, with 300 USD / mo being the height of support for openfaas. Github Sponsors is doing better - but one thing Patreon taught me was to send regular updates to sponsors, and that seems to work reasonably well with retention. Link on GitHub if anyone wants to see how I run it http://github.com/alexellis/
I currently earn $941/month on Patreon and I am grateful to my patrons. However if you are reading this and you support me, I would kindly ask you to do the chore of switching over to GitHub Sponsors. They take 0% of the donation, as opposed to 10%, and although I would prefer to use a not-for-profit service, the fact that Microsoft is already well-established financially and Patreon is on a collision course with Capitalism, the GitHub Sponsors money feels more secure.
In my opinion it was deeply unethical to start Patreon as a startup instead of a non-profit. How can you justify it? For-profit means the goal all along was to skim some portion off the top rather than to make a livelihood enabling content creators to make ends meet on their own.
I'm surprised it's only 10%. Just dealing with credit card fees is going to cost them ~2%, and probably more since they take so many tiny donations. Then they have to deal with chargebacks, customer support (both for patrons and creators), and the overhead of building out the business.
A nonprofit isn't all it's cracked up to be. It must means that it doesn't have shareholders who own the company. It can still pay employees, sometimes very well. It gets tax benefits in exchange for limiting the kind of business it does to something for the public good, but Patreon doesn't really fit those existing categories very well. It looks more like a payment processor, the kind of service you hire like a web page developer or carpenter.
I suppose there's room for somebody to try to squeeze them out by charging even less, perhaps by dogfooding their own service. But if they're charging only ten cents on the dollar, there's not an enormous amount of room for competition, and you'd need to start by raising a ton of money from people purely for charity.
Interesting view, but what would you do when Github grabs a market share, and then start to take 15% off? I am not trying to be cheeky here, legitimately curious. Microsoft isn't in the non-profit business either, and they will try to make money off anything they could.
For example, did you know that when Microsoft bought NPM, they starved NPM employees for oxygen, forcing people to quit over time, as they were unable to work on anything?
That's anecdotal, and I am simply trying to say that MS isn't charity. Maybe it's worth it to support Patreon and help them to avoid (delay, perhaps) their future predatory behavior?
I am just brainstorming here. I don't know what the right answer is.
WordPress.com with one of the paid plans is good for the same reason. It's backed by a real company that's been around a long time in tech terms. Their membership thing works similarly to Patreon in that a person manages their subscriptions in a central location instead of going through different proprietary payment flows, but the money goes to your Stripe account.
It would be nice if they also made the subscription in Stripe so it's portable, but Automattic has been around long enough to trust with handling it. On the customer/supporter side, I think knowing they aren't at the whim of the blog owner for cancellation is a perk.
> In my opinion it was deeply unethical to start Patreon as a startup instead of a non-profit. How can you justify it?
Non-profits seem rather complicated / constrained, at least in the US (but probably elsewhere as well) e.g. you could ask the same about Mozilla.
Also, why is it unethical? Middlemen are a universal fixture of US society. And patreon does provide value in convenience and reliability over the previous standard of… idk, beg for donations via PayPal or something?
Even PayPal offers better payment fees (especially for micropayments).
The only thing I see Patreon offering is a fairly coherent system for managing and communicating with one's "patrons". That's not worth nothing, especially to people without existing website infrastructure already. But it's not worth a lot to people who have that in place.
YouTube is a capricious and uknowable black box controlled by an ever changing algorithm that can decide on a whim that your content is not worth paying you for and which will grant advertising revenue to any any corparation whose work you are covering/transforming under fair use. It can destroy your livelihood in the blink of an eye and you likely will not have any human oversight unless you manage to raise a major fuss on social media.
PayPal offers nothing, afaik, to manage your community or tiered rewards and certainly has no ability to show how much a given creator is receiving. It was clearly never designed for recurring payments and when I've used it for those it seems like it was only grudgingly implemented.
None of these other systems have a good experience for the person, like myself, who donates to a large number different people. On Patreon I can easily view and manage all my contributions in one place. Becoming a patron for a new creator is seamless.
Despite my love for the platform though, them doing investment rounds seems bizarre to me. They've got a good thing going, and I'm not sure that dramatically increasing profitability requirements is a good thing.
Very fair points. I hadn't really considered it from the "patron" side of things (I'm a patron but only to 2 people).
I mentioned YT as a discovery mechanism, I wasn't implying anything about it as a revenue mechanism. I probably haven't thought it carefully enough, given that I don't really need the discovery mechanism to support my own work.
PayPal's micropayment service is MUCH better than Patreon's. (or anyone else's as far as I can tell). I make most of my income via PayPal, and the majority of the payments are US$1. PayPal's micropayment fee structure saves me 22c per $1 transaction. That's a huge impact for me (possibly as much as US$2k per month). The only way I could feasibly move away from PayPal is to somehow force/convince most of the people who support my software development work to pay more than US$12 (the point at which regular fee structures start to be better). That would mean convincing roughly 4500 people ("patrons" :) to switch payment platforms too.
Jack Conte has been doing patreon full-time for years now, it’s unlikely he’ll have more work than when he was actually trying to get the thing off the ground.
The current pomplamoose setup is probably not going to change. You can find old vlogs where they explain the setup they were intending, and Jack posted a video somewhat recently where he explains the thing, but basically they arrange and record a month worth of songs in a day.
Wow, they got the dude from Pomplamoose to make this video, that's awesome.
On a serious note, I would LOVE for Patreon to offer a video platform (add a peertube node or something? no idea how it works), maybe I can even stop using YouTube.
See very first comment here, the “join” button certainly isn’t “a better deal” for creators, you need a much larger user base to get good revenue.
Not to mention… patreon isn’t limited to youtubers? Webcomics or serials authors can be on patreon, what would they do on YouTube? Likewise podcasts, the average podcast listener has no reason or incentive to go sub to a YouTube channel.
Patreon is facing the possibility of going through the arbitration process with 72 people, who are seeking it on the basis that by banning a creator, Patreon is interfering with a business relationship between viewer and creator.
The theory that Patreon will go bankrupt is based on the assumption that these 72 instances of arbitration will go through and the costs of arbitration will be enough to bankrupt the company.
It was in Patreon's own T&C's that required users to go through the arbitration process. I believe the 72 are just from the followers of Owen Benjamin who are suing. There could potentially be many more from other followers of users that Patreon kicked off.
The two questions to me are (a) what content will they ban and (b) how badly do they want to increase their cut of pledges?
For (a), they've already banned a lot of adult content (thus the rise of OnlyFans, until they follow suit), and they'll probably ban more if they get enough attention from either media, angry card processors, or both.
To add to a) they have flagged gay porn as CP [0], and are generally banning anime porn with certain features [1] (both articles have links to other Patreon-related articles if you'd like more examples, such as kicking creators off for content violations that happen off-patreon). The issue seems to stem from payment processors pressuring Patreon to stop supporting creators that don't follow their values since both Visa and MC forbid adult content [2].
All links are NSFW, but not graphic unless you open the embedded tweets.
Adult content on an international scale is REALLY tough. I'm not a bit surprised there are problems.
If you're at all familiar with the issues of building a public-facing business on adult content, you know that there are entire industries (hint: VISA credit card processing) that will categorically refuse to let you be in that business at all, or to deal with you if you're facilitating it. Patreon must maintain working relationships with VISA.
There are countries in which it is a criminal act to expose the belly. Patreon attempts to operate internationally, which means the content creators they enable become part of a negotiation where countries like that are at risk of demanding Patreon get rid of ALL 'criminal' creators or be refused permission to operate in the country.
Adult content is a hell of a can of worms. To facilitate it at ALL at this scale is impressive. And the issues we run into are not coming from inside the Patreon-like company: if anything, their scale helps them negotiate terms. It's the credit card companies, the restrictive countries, which are setting the terms, and what Patreon facilitates is already an impressive feat within the context of what you can get away with anywhere else.
Seriously, if you're casting aspersions at Patreon over handling of adult-content creators, first try to make a dildo company and then negotiate being able to accept direct payments through VISA :)
(disclaimer: I have not actually made a dildo company and then tried to negotiate being able to accept direct payments through VISA)
They'll be fine since the credit card processor pushback is unlikely since they seem to use ccbill which is generally OK with adult content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24294801
OK so these 2 influencers don't like Patreon but I'm trying to figure out why the OP says it's "another facebook" and "cancerous" and not sure if those 2 have the same reasons as the poster.
They are already cancer. So not sure where this "very soon" comes from.
This extra money to Patreon is just another example of morality and trying to work towards a common good can't beat evil incumbents (Without becoming the evil incumbent perhaps)
Neutral platforms just don't seem possible, maybe Bitcoin might change that, but it's place seems like a solid alternative to mainstream, never mainstream.
they are brok AF. someone needs to pay for the litigations they found themselves in by censoring their own creators before they go under. lol. only dumb mofos pour they money into this black hole.
So many big tech cos are rely on the regulated nature of payments to dominate their market. The more regulation, the more the need for an intermediary to act as the tyrannical banker. This makes the case for crypto more obvious.
Once upon a time (still in this century!) it was so hard to have voice conversations via the internet, people were willing to pay substantial amounts of money to the phone company to reach someone on a different state.
Right, and to solve ease of use crypto problems we essentially made new banks (i.e. Coinbase). And we are back to step 1 of people not wanting middlemen taking cuts.
But hey, keep dreaming crypto is somehow going to solve problems differently the last hundred+ years of the physical financial world, because as far as I can see, the end results are going to be the same short of implanting chips directly into people.
And by deplorable morals, you mean people that don't share your morals? So, like, most of the world I imagine?
Morality is an opinion. And in my view, your electric company shutting off your power because they don't like who you are would be positively dystopian.
Let's say Patreon took a strong moral stance that you absolutely disagreed with. Would you still think it commendable?
Yes, morality is an opinion. "Nazis are bad." That is indeed my opinion. If I found out that Amazon was working with Nazis, I would try to pressure Amazon to stop.
What would you do? No, honestly. What would you do?
Do you think Amazon should freely and proudly work with Nazis, "because of neutrality"?
"So, like, most of the world I imagine?" No, I think there's a pretty low bar of morality that most of the world does in fact agree upon. I'm not asking for much more than that. Others might, and I might hope they lose out in the long run.
To answer your questions:
"Deciding to punch or not to punch old ladies is an important decision. I think it's commendable that Patreon is making a moral decision." Yes, it's implied that I commend Patreon because they are making the moral decision I agree with, not just that they have made a moral decision.
"How to stop old ladies from getting punched" is a political discussion. "In general, people shouldn't punch old ladies" is a moral position. "We will not work with people who advocate punching old ladies" is a moral decision I would agree with. "We will exclusively work with people who advocate punching all old ladies" is a moral decision I would disagree with.
Judging a company by their actions is a valid thing to do. It's remarkable to me that this is up for debate.
And I would judge that power company as being morally wrong, unless I agreed with them that the person they shut off was repugnant. Should PG&E provide power to the California Nazi Party? Maybe not.
If you want to make fun of me, perhaps you would enjoy this song:
Quite frankly: no, unless you subscribe to the sort of philosophy that that believes there is such thing as morality. It's an attractive philosophy, but nobody I've met has ever actually behaved that way.
If I punched your face and gave you a bloody nose, you would almost certainly not act like I simply have an alternative opinion about where my knuckles belong.
Edit: I think we might have a difference in how we're using language. An opinion, as I'm using the term, is a belief that we don't strongly believe that other people ought to believe as well.
Patreon endorses its customers. Therefore they should police their platform as they see fit.
Amazon is completely different. If Amazon hires a Nazi as a warehouse worker then it is not endorsing whatever opinion the warehouse worker has. The warehouse worker is only there to provide his labor and receive a paycheck. Amazon can decide to not let Nazis be in charge of press releases and it also has no obligation to publicly talk about the political affiliation of its factory workers.
Don't you see the huge difference? Some people sign up for Patreon because Nazis are on their platform. In the Amazon case you're not buying Amazon products because Nazis are handling them.
> Patreon endorses its customers. Therefore they should police their platform as they see fit.
I'm sorry but that's what I've been saying, and you've been disagreeing with me.
> Amazon is completely different.
No, it's not.
Amazon Prime. They should police the content on there.
Amazon Marketplace. They should police the products that are sold on there. Blood diamonds should not be for sale on Amazon.
> If Amazon hires a Nazi as a warehouse worker
There are many things Amazon does. I've highlighted some where yes, Amazon should police themselves, and not support Nazis. You've highlighted one (laborers with Nazi views) where Amazon should maybe turn a blind eye.
What about the Direct of Communications? The VP of Human Resources? Is it okay if Amazon hires a self-avowed white supremacist, card-carrying member of the Nazi party, for a senior leadership position? I'd say they should avoid it. I might even boycott them if they kept someone like that in a senior leadership position.
> Amazon can decide to not let Nazis be in charge of press releases
Again, you're agreeing with me. Why do you pretend like you're not. You are 100% agreeing with me, and occasionally pointing out edge cases that I agree with.
> Don't you see the huge difference?
I agree there is a difference, and there are situations in which (as you agree), Amazon should police Nazi's out. That is my position, and you agree with it, and you've spent a great many words telling me I'm wrong.
Nazi behavior is immoral. Companies that support Nazis are wrong. Hiring a menial laborer who happens to be a Nazi, who doesn't bring it up at work, is probably fine. I hope they're exposed to people from other backgrounds, and stop being a fricking Nazi.
If it was just about morals I might not mind. But they've shut down a lot of content and content providers in ways that don't seem to be based on any moral stance they're taking.
I don't really feel like making a list, but you can look up how they've been weird and inconsistent with adult content, emphasis on inconsistent for how it doesn't feel like any kind of moral stance.
The most recent one I saw was Patreon demanding an artist delete all adult images of a specific character on all websites because they found an old image where this weird monster thing didn't have breasts as a design choice.
Policing content based on morals makes no sense. There is no arbiter of morals so whatever policing there will be is going to be highly subjective. You police content because your business is generating publicity for your customers and thereby you are endorsing and supporting your customers and which also means directly helping their cause. If Patreon makes "Nazis" famous then Patreon's reputation will reflect that. Of course the owners of Patreon don't want their platform to be associated with Nazis whether that is because it is bad for business, the owners don't like nazis, the payment provider has decided to cut off Nazis or any other reason. What it certainly doesn't have to do with is "morals".
When someone is talking about morals in the way you did then they are usually talking about their own morals.
>"I hope they succeed, and I personally hope that companies that have morals that I think are worse than theirs fail."
This is a good example of you talking about your own morals. There is no objective criteria for "worse morals". The only way you can make a statement about morals being worse is from your own viewpoint.
The worst thing about your comment is that you are implying that your own morals are the only good ones.
>EDIT: Judging a company by their actions is a valid thing to do. It's remarkable to me that this is controversial.
The problem is not Patreon in this case. You are the problem.
> Policing content based on morals makes no sense.
Sure it does. And pretty much everyone does it. There are things that are legal but wrong. Policing wrong content makes sense.
> There is no arbiter of morals
Each person decides what is moral.
> so whatever policing there will be is going to be highly subjective.
Yes, that's true. It's a marketplace of ideas, and each of us should shop accordingly.
> If Patreon makes "Nazis" famous then Patreon's reputation will reflect that.
Yes, and that's as it should be. Someone who allows Nazi propaganda is wrong. Someone who polices Nazi propaganda, and removes it, is right. How are you not agreeing with me?
> Of course the owners of Patreon don't want their platform to be associated with Nazis whether that is because it is bad for business, the owners don't like nazis, the payment provider has decided to cut off Nazis or any other reason. What it certainly doesn't have to do with is "morals".
I think you don't know what the definition of morality is:
"Morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."
It is absolutely about morals. In your example, Patreon would be saying that Nazis are wrong, and have bad behavior.
What do you think morals are?
> When someone is talking about morals in the way you did then they are usually talking about their own morals.
Yes, each person has their own ideas about what is right and wrong or good and bad behavior.
> This is a good example of you talking about your own morals. There is no objective criteria for "worse morals". The only way you can make a statement about morals being worse is from your own viewpoint.
Yes, absolutely. And I support people who share morals similar to my own, and I try to not support people with morals widely different from my own.
If Hacker News was flooded with content from MAPs (Minor-Attracted Person) trying to normalize pedophelia, then I would stop coming to Hacker News, and seek out another community kept that content off of it.
> The worst thing about your comment is that you are implying that your own morals are the only good ones.
Each person thinks their morals are the best ones. That's... literally... how morals work.
But no, you misstated my position - I do think other people have morals that are similar enough to my own, and so also good. (I don't think my own morals are the only good ones.)
I look for compatibility. Some people are in favor of forced sterilization for criminals. I think that's wrong. Some people think it's okay for a woman to wear white to someone else's wedding. I mean, yeah, that's wrong too, but it doesn't matter to me anywhere near as much as the first one.
You shouldn't buy blood diamonds. You shouldn't shop someplace that sells them. Even as an option to their customers. That's my morals.
Yes, I think my morals are the best ones. I suspect you think yours are the best, too.
You may think Freedom of Speech is the most important principle, and all other rights or concerns are less important. You may be okay with libel, slander, harassment, inciting violence, violating copyright, sharing a "recipe for playdough" that actually produces cyanide gas, animal abuse, snuff films, advocating for race wars, etc.
I think someone who could police that content, and chooses not to, is wrong.
> The problem is not Patreon in this case. You are the problem.
I think either a) you're misunderstanding me, which may be my fault, or 2) you haven't considered the content that gets policed all of the time, and if you did, you'd agree with policing it.
I propose each person tries to tell good people from bad people, and I encourage each corporation to do the same.
You're trying to pin on me that I was saying there should be a single authority, judging all people. I didn't say that, and I reject that view. Nazis were totalitarians that killed people.
I'm saying a company should chose who it does business with, depending on what that person is doing.
If someone wants to find another person to work with, they're welcome to try. If I agree that what they were doing is bad, then I hope they fail.
Doctors: great question, no, they should try to save everyone's life. If I found a doctor that didn't, I would judge them to be a bad doctor, and would boycott them. I would boycott their entire practice, hoping they would fire that doctor. Wouldn't you?
Lawyers: great question. I believe when the government is prosecuting someone, they deserve a defense, so in that case, I hope some lawyer will defend them. If it's a civil case, like if Exxon is trying to sue some grandma to drill in her back yard, yes, I would hope lawyers are deciding not to take that case, and I might (if it ever came up) boycott a law firm that worked cases like that.
Question back for you:
You walk into a job interview, and the receptionist greets you with, "Heil Hitler! How can I help you?" Not sure you heard what you thought you heard, you answer that you're here for a job interview. The receptionist tells you to have a seat. A moment later, someone comes out and says, "Heil Hitler! I'm the hiring manager, are you ready for your interview?"
Do you take the interview, or do you walk out?
We do and should judge people based on their actions, and we should shun people who make extremely bad decisions. Like following Hitler. Like normalizing pedophelia. Like advocating for a race war. Like selling arms to terrorists. Like selling blood diamonds.
I think it would be wrong for a Catholic to boycott a Lutheran business. I happen to think it's wrong for a cake maker to not make a cake for a gay wedding. I might even boycott that baker. I don't go to Chic-fil-a or Hobby Lobby.
I wouldn't want to work with or socially interact with Nazis. But this doesn't seem relevant in the context of infrastructure companies like Patreon. There's a difference between providing a formalized service to someone and putting your creativity and energy into working with them. In providing a formalized service, companies like Patreon are more akin to doctors and lawyers then to coworkers and friends.
There is a difference, and there are lines to be drawn, and different people will do it differently.
If Patreon sub-contracted a large project to Nazis Developers Co., then I would be mad at them.
If someone wanted to create Nazi propaganda, with a YouTube channel for patrons, all about racial cleansing, I personally would want Patreon to say, "No, thanks."
If that Nazi group wanted to receive donations, I'd want Credit Card companies to say, "No, thanks."
This is where I stand. That's my morals. I don't want companies to normalize Race War propaganda, providing a platform to it. I may well boycott a company that doesn't try to de-platform Race War advocates.
I think we should support companies that each of us think act responsibly, and avoid or boycott companies that each of us think is acting irresponsibly.
It a) happens all the time, and b) is a good thing.
Question for you:
You walk into a job interview, and the receptionist greets you with, "Heil Hitler! How can I help you?" Not sure you heard what you thought you heard, you answer that you're here for a job interview. The receptionist tells you to have a seat. A moment later, someone comes out and says, "Heil Hitler! I'm the hiring manager, are you ready for your interview?"
Do you take the interview, or do you walk out?
I happen to boycott Hobby Lobby and Chic-fil-a. Is that really horrifying to you?
People on Hacker News propose boycotting Google because they fired Damore, or because they were researching providing Search to China, or because they did or didn't work on AI weapons systems, or...
Do you similarly berate those posters? If not, what's different about what I'm saying?
"Totalitarianism: a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state."
I am proposing that private individuals and corporations don't do business with moral monsters, like say for instance, Nazis.
If a jewelry store sells blood diamonds, I propose to boycott them.
If a shoe is manufactured by slave child labor in China, I propose to not buy it.
It sure sounds like Nestle is doing some awful stuff around the world, maybe we shouldn't buy from them, either.
Do you really disagree with those positions?
Because this is just Free Association, where people have the right to associate or do business with whomever they like. And it could happen under a completely Libertarian government. Or even under an anarcho-capitalist or anarcho-communist society. Basically, the exact opposite of Totalitarian government.
Sounds like maybe you boycott businesses that work with totalitarian governments?
