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Patron seems like a classic long tail situation. The fall off to 100th place is only 1/7th the number of subscribers and 1000th place ~1/37th the number of subscribers as first place.

Patreon’s fees range from 5-12% so they could easily be making more make more money from the 10,000 to 100,000 creators than they do the top 10,000. Further, people can hide earnings which makes estimates of their finances difficult.



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Something like 350 of the top 1000 creators have their financials public. There are several in that list that likely bring in less than $100 per month for Patreon. That tail has to be pretty long and flat to justify 230 employees and any hope of the type of growth that many investors demand.

The list is not sorted by earnings but number of subscribers. So the 1000th most profitable content creator is unlikely to be on that list.

Also, they have three different fees. The 5% to 12% fees are on top of the CC fees and money transfer fees. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027674431

Ex: Someone with 500 subscribers at 3$ per month after CC fees on the middle 8% tier is 120$ per month to Patreon.


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