> There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author).
These numbers are off [1]. There are a few creators who do earn more than that, but don't disclose their earnings, only the number of patrons. But even if we restrict our discussion to only those who disclose their earnings, there's at least 10 people who make more than $5000 a month on patreon in the creative writing category.
And how many are making a living out of their Patreon? Most Patreons I’ve seen are hobbyists making a few bucks on the side. Those aren’t careers, so the 100k number is meaningless. (In fact, I looked it up, and 100k is the number of “creators” making at least $1, or have at least one patron.[1])
Hmm, now that I look into it more closely, most of these authors are making less than I expected. I've never actually visited most of their patreons to actually check, but yes most of them aren't making that much from it.
It doesn't actually counter your main point, but I do think I have dug up more than 1 making more than $5000/month.
https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL has 3317 patrons with a minimum donation of $3 per month, so even though the actual number is hidden that should be more than $5000
> You would think that without Patreon, nobody would be interested in their creations. I'm sorry but -wow-. You've got other ways to collect payments from people who support your work... and if you have a fanbase already, I'm not sure where the problem lies in moving off the platform.
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.
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”.
You don't have to take their word that people would pay. They already are paying. Millions[1] of people go out of their way[2] to pay creators monthly or per-work.
However, a lot of that "web content" needs to realize the actual value of their content might be ~$0. Advertising distorted the market; a lot of people were able to extract revenue greater than the actual "market value" of their content.
[2] While Patreon isn't very hard, having to take the extra step of vising (and maybe making an account) a 3rd party service is not a proper "micropayment" system. The goal of micropayments is to make trivial to immediately pay for something without any extra friction (perhaps a button/whatever in the browser to send a tip/donation, no need to worry about Paypal/Patreon/etc)
> Patreon is methodically trying to burn that payment aggregation to the ground and call it a feature.
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:
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.
> It also seems odd that creators don’t just use PayPal directly and ask for scheduled transactions
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.
None of those scale. I pointed this out elsewhere, but how much money would a creator on Patreon make if all creators were on Patreon, hoping to make at least $1 per month per follower? Musicians alone would push me into the hundreds of dollars (which really means a vast majority of musicians would make nothing from me; less than they're getting via Spotify).
How much are you willing to pay for tickets to the 20th tour in a week that's in your area? For their merch? As for myself, precious little. Probably not enough to even cover their tour costs, let alone the cost of producing the music (and merch) in the first place.
> Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over.
Patents and copyrights make it practical to cover the costs of realizing those ideas in the first place. Ideas aren't worth anything until they're realized, be it in writing for a book, or a performance for a song.
Books often take a minimum of 6 months of full time effort to produce. There's multiple people involved - the writer, the editor, the proofreader, the typesetter. How do they pay for it if they can't make any money from actually selling the book?
Music takes weeks or months of effort in a studio to produce. How do you recoup those costs if you can't sell the output?
> I'm quite interested in learning more about what kind of things people are willing to pay 80-100 USD a month for on Patreon.
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.
The numbers the author gives for patreon are blatantly false though. There's a few posts down in the thread of people like me who are wondering where those numbers come from.
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.
> Regardless, if they're doing multiple episodes per week, each receiving 50k downloads at minimum, and each with multiple sponsors, I'd guess they're making a much more comfortable living than their Patreon numbers suggest.
So, what do you think? Their Patreon subscribers are only ~$60,000. Are we talking $500k total with ad sponsorships? $1M? More than that?
> In March, Patreon wrote in a blog post, “Not only are patrons not leaving the platform, we’ve even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support their favorite creators during this challenging time.” Additionally, the average income for creators was 60% higher in March than in previous months, according to the company.
> Around that same time, however, Patreon said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than usual due to financial hardships. Still, Patreon said churn rates were stable.
These two paragraphs are one right after the other. How do you reconcile the two? How is it not at least a question posed to their spokesperson of which is the case?
> Few creators actually manage to make a living wage through YouTube and Patreon — two of the relatively more mature, robust platforms, both of which are in need of distributing more income to their less popular creators.
You can make that argument about YouTube (and complain about Patreon's cut) but on Patreon consumers choose who they want to give money to. Are Patreon expected to take off an extra X% and subsidise the less popular creators?
These numbers are off [1]. There are a few creators who do earn more than that, but don't disclose their earnings, only the number of patrons. But even if we restrict our discussion to only those who disclose their earnings, there's at least 10 people who make more than $5000 a month on patreon in the creative writing category.
https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing
reply