Patreon is one of the few places where it actually makes sense to give $1-2/month such that it's not all eaten up by fees. This is one of their most important features, and it's baffling that they don't seem to understand it.

The impact is already clear, and that's without any major creators jumping ship yet:

https://graphtreon.com/patreon-stats

If they're absolutely dead set on this decision (for scary legal reasons, I guess?), the only useful compromise I can think of would be to allow an annual pledge; let me transfer $12 or $24 at once.

Only if the creatives are making their money on their platform.

Since Patreon's entire business model is based on taking a cut of the revenue artists make on their platform, they don't make money if the artists make money elsewhere. Many creatives use Patreon only for fan outreach, and sell merchandise outside of Patreon.

If Patreon charged a fixed rate for their software, they could make more money, but they would lose the business of small creatives. That's the dilemma.

While I agree wholeheartedly with what you said, I still wonder about if Patreon might be a reasonable way to charge for services. There are at least a few people making a living off of Patreon. Of course, I've not really heard of anyone scaling it beyond that. It's possible to make a non-trivial amount of money, though.

What I really wonder is whether or not you could somehow look at Patreon as a normal payment processor for a recurring service. Possibly it's not appropriate for a non-service related piece of software (why am I paying monthly?). But if you had a service attached, I'm not really sure it's such a bad idea. I seem to remember they take 5%, which is not that bad as a payment processor with the benefits they provide. In fact, that's essentially what Youtube people are doing: sign up to my Patreon and I will make recurring videos.

But, the main point is that "I might write blog posts and you get to vote on new features" is not a business plan. Why do I want to spend a monthly fee? Writing new features might be a business plan (For example, Tarn Adams makes between $7-8K a month on Patreon for his work on Dwarf Fortress). However, you need to have an audience that wants new features and is willing to pay for them.

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”.

I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you are not a creator on Patreon...

Patreon kicking people off is a serious issue because Patreon works so much better than all of the competition, from Flattr to Gratipay to Paypal to Bitcoin. As it happens, I'm a creator on Patreon myself (https://www.patreon.com/gwern), at ~$600 a month. I wouldn't go homeless or anything if I was kicked off Patreon (thanks, Bitcoin), but it would hurt me a lot. When I started using Patreon in July 2015, it immediately roughly quadrupled my monthly earnings from donations as compared to anything I'd ever gotten from Flattr, Gratipay, Paypal, Google AdSense, or Amazon Affiliates, Bitcoin either with or without Coinbase (and much more than that comparing to May/June but that's a little unfair since they tended to be spiky). That is, incidentally, despite Patreon having net fees of 2-5x what the others do. And the total amount has since tripled.

I hardly even advertised it! (Heck, I hardly even advertise it now or provide any rewards or anything.) Now that is a network effect.

Could people have given me money other ways? Sure. Heck, some of my readers invented or worked at the payment methods in question, and were fully capable of it. And they did, a little. And yet, I finally get around to signing up for Patreon and boom. There were people who were willing to give me substantial amounts of money... but only via Patreon. They were set up for Patreon, and that made donating easy and convenient for them, and this makes all the difference in the world. One website, one account, one payment.

Saying Patreon has no real network effects or can easily be replicated or that being kicked off of it would be trivial is the strict contemporary equivalent of the HN discussion of Dropbox where everyone writes it off because 'you can simply rsync your files to your personal server'. It sounds reasonable; and yet it is profoundly wrong in every way that matters to real people.

Is being kicked off Patreon going to hurt those creators? Oh yes. Quite aside from the porn-specific issues with the alternatives, just leaving Patreon is costly - they'll be lucky if they can scratch together even half what they were getting before. Call that 'other ways' if you wish, but I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it.

I'd love to see the breakdown of Patreon subscription amounts.

Personally, I support around 15 YouTubers each with $1/mo, meaning I pay $15/mo for my YouTube content. If I paid them individually with PayPal, the fees would be 30% and the creators would only get 66 cents. Since Patreon bundles the payments, the fee is only 5%, Patreon takes their cut and the creators get 90 cents.

To me, Patreon is basically a micro-transaction bundler.

Well, isn't the the same thing in the end? Both you and the person you want to pay need to have ths same platform? If someone uses chrome, won't they need to go and "find" the site using Firefox to pay.

What you want is to be able to pay for something once you've found it? I get that, and it's a slightly different model than patreon, but in the end it is the same problem: micropayments are expensive and currently require someone to batch them.

The bigger problem is that requires another shared middle man that some people may not like fot whatever reason.

Why does the price have to be low? You can pay yearly, for instance.

However, the main point I was trying to make is that with Patreon people voluntarily contribute $1, $5 or whatever. It hasn't been a problem and it's done every day.

If you're not willing to put up with "whipping out a wallet for yet another recurring service", it means you don't value the product.

Again, I don't even think it's the size of the website because many community-supported projects are 1 solo content creator.

Nothing forces Patreon to take a cut for each and every donation, let alone such a hefty fee. Plenty of micropayment services charge instead a fee for transactions into and out of their system, and internal transactions don't incur any cost or transaction fee.

If Patreon insists in taking a hefty cut from each and every donation, that's a problem caused by their business model.

Interesting. What are your sources for that info? :)

Ahhh.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that being optional either.

Many Patreon creators don't though, so it's kind of hard to tell. :/

That being said, I kind of wonder if the % of people paying creators is much different to the average % of people who pay for online services.

From (probably dodgy?) rough memory, that's something like 4% of users.

No idea how that works out when compared to $ from Youtube viewers though. :)

This is probably not representative over the whole population, but, I have a Patreon. I had a few people pay me $50/month (where the base tier is $5/month). The $50/month tier has no extra benefits besides a vanity Discord role. So why did they do it? They genuinely want to support whatever I'm doing. That's it.

I don't know, most people it seems block ads nowadays, and if you ask them how they compensate creators, they bend over backwards talking about how much they love Patreon.

So either people are either greedy and lying, or Patreon is actually pretty viable.

Why don't you take a look at https://www.patreon.com/policy/benefits? Millions of creators are disenfranchised by Patreon.

Also, you need a credit card / bank account to accept transactions from Patreon.

With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment.

That's decidedly false. The entire point of Patreon is to support creators, and to make it easy for creators to get that support.

> There is no good reason for this,

There are. Legal reasons. Banking reason. Simply put, lumping together transactions is dangerous. Dangerous for creators, dangerous for patreons, and dangerous for customers. I'm surprised they did it this long.

> as even paying to the creator should be lump sum via ACH,

What does this have to do with the majority of people paying via CC?

They're not, but apparently they're trying to so they have a justification for increasing their cut.

Patreon started as a way to tip / nanofund artists whose content you enjoy, because subbing a buck of 5 to a writer or drawer/painter is easy.

It's interesting that we might view Patreon as "begging", rather than selling your work to more people, for a smaller amount.

We're literally in a topic about creators and Patreon where Patreon is a substantial source of income to quite a few creators.

And the dismissive tone about donations in general... well, I won't comment on that

> The platform such as Patreon could simply quote the value in dollars instead of BTC or whatever cryptocurrency.

Or they could just not bother.

> Recurring payments with crypto will have to be done manually anyways

Ah yes. The great digital system of the future where even such a simple thing as recurring payments must be done manually

Basically "we can't prove this, lol."