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Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

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Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#71

Post by egypturnash »

pc86 wrote: post #55
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should make a profit. What we don't want is to spoil the nice service with desperate attempts to earn enough profit to satisfy investors.

Ah, so they should make a profit but not too much.

Sure!

Like, okay, Patreon has a staff of so many people for development, so many people for admin/moderation, and they have offices, and hosting, and whatever other costs I'm not thinking of. And all of those things need to be paid. I'm quite happy to give them a few bucks for every page of comics I draw in exchange for them making this lovely system to funnel money to myself and other creators, and keeping it running.

But the core mission of Patreon is "nothing short of helping every creator in the world achieve sustainable income. We’re making this happen by building the best platform for creators to make money, run their creative businesses, and connect with the fans who matter most." (Taken from their careers page, https://www.patreon.com/careers)

Once all those above costs are met by skimming off a small percentage of the money going through their setup, what do they do with that money? Do they start lowering their cut? Do they start donating it to charities? Fund other weird business ideas? Or just pay back the people they've borrowed money from, who won't be satisfied by anything but huge returns?

I know Kickstarter's built itself into a "public benefit corporation", which makes it explicitly bound to consider things aside from "how much money will this make regardless of other costs"; Patreon makes similar noises but I don't believe they've taken the step of formalizing this yet. And I would be delighted to find out I'm wrong on that.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#72

Post by otalp »

tomp wrote: post #53
otalp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, YouTube seems to be punishing any mildly controversial topic, so the positive side is that Nazis and other crazy people can't use it as a viable platform, but on the flip side you can't really talk about anything really serious without getting your ad revenue cut.

By "Nazis" you mean Jordan Peterson? Because it's the likes of him that are getting banned - in his case temporarily, thank god, but non-ultra-leftists without large social following are doomed.

>but non-ultra-leftists without large social following are doomed

Completely false, "left" YouTube channels I know of: like Philosophy Tube and Contrapoints are having serious problems with their videos being demonetised and removed. Videos which even mildly critisize capitalism are being demonetised, it's pretty much impossible to run a left wing YouTube channel without Patreon. Virtually all political videos are demonetized.

For example, PhilosophyTube wanted to make a relatively straightforward series on the history of Liberalism, but even before uploading the videos was told by YouTube(when he contacted them) that under the new rules videos like that wouldn't qualify for ads(https://twitter.com/PhilosophyTube/status/898261400786657280)

So you're displaying a huge persecution complex if you think this doesn't apply to the left even more, since Google and advertisers are large corporations, which means they are de facto fine with pro-capitalist content while obviously against helping spread or advertising on anti-capitalist content.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#73

Post by EGreg »

wongarsu wrote: post #40
EGreg wrote: post #9

What if there was a crypto-currency for this? :)

Currency exchange is too high of a barrier for supporters. A large portion of Patreon is artists asking for support for content they offer for free, with only token benefits for the supporters. Making the act of giving money as simple and convenient as possible is key in that scenario. Using a crypto-currency is pretty much the opposite.

No, I mean one crypto-currency specifically designed for what Patreon does.

Instead of paying Patreon with a credit card, you'd pay to buy this crypto currency. And then distribute it micropayment-style to all kinds of things.

Isn't anyone doing that? IMHO the hardest part is the Coinbase thing - collecting credit cards and dealing with chargebacks etc. in a compliant way in many countries.

The other stuff is easy - such as localization in many languages.

You know who does this also? Kickstarter. They just launched in Japan!

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#74

Post by jasode »

clarkevans wrote: post #60

This market segment might support a cooperative model, similar to Stocksy United ( https://www.stocksy.com/ ), where the artists collectively own the monetization platform. Stocksy bootstrapped with a 1M investment loan (not equity) which is now paid off. Now Stocksy is fully owned by artist-members.

The viability of co-op depends on what content creators want from a patronage/crowdfunding platform:

scenario 1: If artists just want a straight monetary passthrough, then artists-owned entity like ASCAP (collects music royalties) may be workable. ASCAP is "boring", but it does what it needs to do.

scenario 2: However, if artists want a payment platform that evolves towards a combination of Facebook+Medium+Ticketmaster+Slack+Youtube+cdn+etc, a co-op model will be underfunded. (In this scenario, you'd have to imagine that there would be future features that artists don't even know they want.)

In the marketplace of ideas, it's possible for both business models to be offered. E.g. artists sign up for co-op platform because it's 2% fee instead of VC-backed Patreon for 5% fee. However, it's possible for artists en-masse to abandon the co-op business for the VC-funded business because its enriched platform gives them ability to earn more which overshadows the higher 5% fee.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#75

Post by clarkevans »

jasode wrote: post #74
clarkevans wrote: post #60

This market segment might support a cooperative model, similar to Stocksy United ( https://www.stocksy.com/ ), where the artists collectively own the monetization platform. Stocksy bootstrapped with a 1M investment loan (not equity) which is now paid off. Now Stocksy is fully owned by artist-members.

The viability of co-op depends on what content creators want from a patronage/crowdfunding platform: scenario 1: If artists just want a straight monetary passthrough, then artists-owned entity like ASCAP (collects music royalties) may be workable. ASCAP is "boring", but it does what it needs to do. scenario 2: However, if artists want a payment platform that evolves towards a combination of Facebook+Medium+Ticketmast…

Since venture subsidizes losses till critical mass is achieved, perhaps it is more likely that a VC-funded platform will initially be much less expensive compared to a revenue financed cooperative.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#77

Post by AVTizzle »

clarkevans wrote: post #60

This market segment might support a cooperative model, similar to Stocksy United ( https://www.stocksy.com/ ), where the artists collectively own the monetization platform. Stocksy bootstrapped with a 1M investment loan (not equity) which is now paid off. Now Stocksy is fully owned by artist-members.

Where can one find access to these 1M investment loans?

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#78

Post by Cederfjard »

dmix wrote: post #65
Dirlewanger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, just like Kickstarter, there's Patreon clones for as far as the eye can see.

It's not just like Kickstarter. Patreon has a business model built on recurring monthly revenue stream. Kickstarter makes money off of one-off events. It's a totally different business.

I think the point was that Patreon has a lot of competing services in the same space, just like Kickstarter has in it's. Note that I have no idea if that's true, but that's my interpretation.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#79

Post by toomuchtodo »

patrickaljord wrote: post #37
toomuchtodo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Patreon can't literally be replaced in the legendary "HN denizen claims to be able to replace $X in a weekend", because dealing with taking payments takes longer than that. Stripe literally has an offering just for this use case: https://stripe.com/connect Forum + Stripe Connect + CDN for Video (Cloudfront, Fastly, Whatevs) = Patreon replacement. You could literally replace it with a weekend Hackathon.

You're missing the network effect. With Patreon you can see who your friends are supporting and use the network effect to influence or signal to your friends who you're supporting, kind of like Kickstarter. Conversion rates are higher too because chances are your would be supporters already have an account on Patreon. It's like anyone could write a Facebook clone, the hard part is cloning the community.

Network effect is overrated. I don't look at any of my friends on Patreon. I don't even think I have any Patreon friends. Its just a more simple way for me to Paypal people I want to support.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#80

Post by wongarsu »

EGreg wrote: post #73
wongarsu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currency exchange is too high of a barrier for supporters. A large portion of Patreon is artists asking for support for content they offer for free, with only token benefits for the supporters. Making the act of giving money as simple and convenient as possible is key in that scenario. Using a crypto-currency is pretty much the opposite.

No, I mean one crypto-currency specifically designed for what Patreon does. Instead of paying Patreon with a credit card, you'd pay to buy this crypto currency. And then distribute it micropayment-style to all kinds of things. Isn't anyone doing that? IMHO the hardest part is the Coinbase thing - collecting credit cards and dealing with chargebacks etc. in a compliant way in many countries. The other stuff is easy -…

Ah, yes, you could do that.

But aren't you then stuck with either one platform which does that, offering you no advantage over what Patreon offers today, or loosing a lot of the miscellaneous Patreon features for keeping Patreons and creators in touch in exchange for gaining censorship resistance?

It's certainly doable, but I think it would be a hard sell compared to Patreon or any regular centralized Patreon alternative.

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