Hi everyone!
First off, I think the world owes a lot to Patreon. Patreon has enabled hundreds of thousands of creators to make some level of income directly from their fans. This has meant that creators weren't solely dependent on being 'advertiser-friendly' on monetization platforms and have been able to create content on Twitter, Discord or any number of other methods and platforms, including itself.
When people were getting furloughed in various countries and states during early pandemic times, Patreon was an absolute lifeline for so many people... both for people who needed to earn some kind of income, but also for people who wanted to be entertained.
At it's heart, this is what Patreon does best... it enables fans to pay creators a monthly amount to entertain them. Creators can set different levels of patronage, $1 or $2 per month will give you some level of access, but $15 or $20 a month should provide you with so much more content.
The problem is, unfortunately, a very similar story with a lot of different apps.
Patreon was perfectly placed to grow extremely well... after all, so many creators would mention their Patreon accounts during their videos, or in their account bios. Creators have been continuously advertising for the platform for years. Unfortunately Patreon wanted to grow bigger and faster and so has taken on some much venture capital.
Look at these funding events, the last one was 2 years ago at $155M to bring it to a valuation of $4B. How does a payment processing platform get to be worth $4 billion dollars? The truth is, it isn't... Patreon is now worth about $1.5B.
It's raised $412,000,000 in total but that's now just under a third of the company's value... and those investors need to see a decent rate of return. Do they expect to see 10 times their investment? 16 times? Will those investors push Patreon to launch a public IPO to make their money?
With investors undoubtedly driving a lot of the decisions at Patreon now, the creators and or their fans are likely to be the ones to get squeezed. Patreon's new features are all about locking creators into their platform and increasing the percentage of fees they can extract from those creators.
Patreon's CEO just released this video... it's extremely compelling, he is a wonderful creator:
Jack isn't wrong... creators are constantly harmed by the various platform algorithms. Every time I jump on Instagram the majority of things I see are advertisements and things from accounts I don't follow. These platforms chase growth over everything else, it's getting really hard for people to just enjoy the content they like.
Patreon may solve some of that, but it will absolutely come at a cost to the creator. The exciting features Jack was talking about will cost the creators a higher percentage of their income. These features may increase a creator's audience... but they will certainly extract more from the creators.
Again, Patreon has to provide a decent return on investment to its investors... that is the top priority. If Patreon launched a public IPO, it would be the same thing... public companies top priority is to increase shareholder value.
This comment on Jack's video is perfect...
This post isn't intended to throw shade at Patreon... they've done a huge amount of good for the world, especially during the global pandemic... the problem, as I see it, is with the venture capital model... and I worry that creators will suffer for it.
If you love Patreon and it works well for you, great, that's awesome and I wish you so much success.
If you're worried about Patreon, well, I've got some alternatives for you!
These other platforms aren't exactly the same as Patreon, but they may still work for you.
The first one is obviously our little Hive blockchain.
Patreon requires creators to share a percentage of the revenue that they make. It used to be 5% for people, some people now pay 8% and others pay 12%. As these new features roll out, creators will likely pay their 8% plus 3% for one or more features.
The Hive blockchain is not run by any company. It's run by a group of individuals. The blockchain mints new tokens every day, and the individuals that run the blockchain are paid by that daily minting. Creators are upvoted by their audience for each post, video, photo, review, question answered, micro-blog, etc and creators are rewarded from that daily minting as well.
On Patreon creators receive a monthly pledge from their audience... because monthly transactions are cheaper to process than daily.... but if a creator doesn't create anything that month, they still get paid until their audience gets fed up and unsubscribes.
On the Hive blockchain, creators get voted on the content they create... which usually happens when people consume that content. If an audience really loves a creator, they can set up an autovote system so the creator receives an upvote for all content they create.
This blockchain has no fees on any transactions, so once you've got it set up it is absolutely lovely to use.
Another platform, is our own little gFam.live.
Again, its not the same as Patreon, there is no monthly pledge system.... but once the Interledger Protocol is released, it will likely have a monthly subscription service for all creators. This means that all creative content will be open to subscribers, but only the creators whose content you spend time on will get paid.
Currently though, creators create posts... and receive a percentage of the advertising revenue depending on their traffic and audience engagement.
An audience that really loves a creator can tip them, and or, a creator can create gated-content posts that are only opened with a pre-specified tip amount. Creators can also create tutorials to help people learn, and receive advertising revenue and tips on those... and any user can earn through participation of challenges.
The difference between Patreon, and both Hive and gFam is that top priority. Hive and gFam don't have any venture capital to pay back. As long as people are using Hive... the people running it are happy, and gFam is aiming to be a public good. Neither Hive or gFam need to make a profit, and they definitely don't need to 10x investor ROI.
I'd argue that growth as the primary goal makes platforms worse. The primary goal should be to make both the creators and their audience's lives better and easier.
Thanks for reading!
Posted from my blog with gFam : https://gfam.live/blog/patreon-is-changing-for-the-better
I hate yellow journalism and that mania that some people have to give only the information that is convenient, and use it to clearly without lying, omit certain parts of a story to make others look like heroes.
Why do you emphasize so much that other platforms make monthly payments and omit or see it unnecessary to clarify that payments to the creator are made once closed the 7 days in which the votes count?
In Patreon if I create, to give you an example a guide to eat better in June 2022, and someone subscribes to get it or support me, I still get my profit (Clearly with discounts), in Hive for example, no matter how many people like or are interested in that content, if you want to get it you can get it for free, and make use of giving me a tip to help your content creator.
And I don't hate Hive, nor do I think that Patreon is taking care of its creators with these measures; But the way to sell this, our platform is not with lies.... Because the problem is not, has not been and never will be, attracting public to Hive, the problem of Hive is that there is NO USER RETENTION and this is because we sell this as the future of the world, the holy grail, the internet revolution and it takes people little more than two months to realize that it is not so.
It's good to want to attract the public, it's good to show the benefits of the platforms... But omitting information and selling a product by making it look better than anything else, benefits no one.
I created this information primarily for the gFam blog which aims to introduce Hive to a brand new audience. For that reason, I tried to distill all the information about Hive into something easily consumable and not overwhelming.
I actually thought about explaining the 7 day vote system, but decided against it because it might be too confusing... especially since most users on Hive are receiving small amounts of income most days. If you look at my wallet I'm receiving tiny amounts of Hive every day, despite posting irregularly. So, I left it out to refrain from confusing new people.
I definitely don't think I was lying with this omission, most users I know are posting every day, so they receive payments every day. This is not the case with Patreon.
If someone subscribes to your June 2022 guide, that's great... but how many people are subscribing monthly for one-off content? Patreon is introducing a tipping feature with its new changes, which I think will support this usecase a lot better.
Yes, the way dApps work on Hive at the moment is that everyone receives content for free, but upvotes also don't cost the audience anything except for the opportunity cost, so a creator providing content for free isn't negatively impacted.
On gFam.live, I mentioned that creators can provide gated-content which does require a tip to unlock, this is a cost to the audience who transfers their cryptocurrency from their wallet to the creators wallet in order to access the content.
I disagree with the user retention for Hive. You can see here the peaks and troughs:
and you can get more statistics and information here:
https://peakd.com/hive-133987/@arcange/hive-statistics-20231007-en
Again, I'd like to clarify, I didn't omit information to mislead my audience, but instead wanted to introduce Hive to new people without overwhelming them.
Good info. I thought about patreon in the past when I wanted to do YouTube more seriously and it's still an option in the future, though I feel I need to get over my fear of being in front of the video camera more or somehow find another way to develop a larger audience.
I'm not surprised they are going to take more of the profit, that seems to happen with a lot of companies once they get bigger. Just look at YouTube itself, they used to allow anyone to make money and then they made it so difficult that I've never made one cent even though I have a video with close to a hundred thousand views... I know that's not much compared to many other YouTubers, but... Still... I gave them a lot of views and have earned absolutely nothing in return... Quite frustrating.
I think there are lots of YouTubers that provide great information even without appearing on camera themselves. I think as long as people want the information you provide they'll tune in.
I do agree though, I saw the latest monetization requirements of YouTube a week or two ago and it's absolutely brutal:
3,000 public watch hours (in 365 days) or 3 million public Shorts views (in 90 days). Just absolutely massive numbers to hit before you can even earn a cent.
An automatic and decentralized infrastructure like Hive is definitely a great chance to make it cheaper and less centralized, avoiding that content creators may lose their fanbase because of some new Terms&Conditions from the company or simply because of a default from the company itself
It is so funny how I have never heard about Patreon before and it makes me feel like I'm lagging but thanks so much for sharing because I am surely going to check it out
I didn't know about it before but after reading your post I found out that money can be earned through this app as well, now if there is a good way to earn money then we see youtube there. But people are earning crores of rupees per month so how much money will we be able to earn through this app and its usage is also mentioned by you so we will try to use it too.
With so much I learnt about patreon in your post today, I strongly believe patreon really was owned much