Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 277 posts

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#121

Post by ALittleLight »

patrickyeon wrote: post #64

> 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 u…

"In March alone, we onboarded 50,000 new creators to the platform of which the average income was 60% higher than previous months."

It seems like the "60% higher than previous months" figure applies to the new creators rather than all creators. I could easily imagine that income for new creators is very low on average and a 60% bump wouldn't mean much.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#122

Post by manigandham »

asiachick wrote: post #104

I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful. There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content. Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of pos…

Patreon is a rather subpar product that succeeded by using venture capital to buy growth and is now struggling to find sustainability for something that should've been profitable from day 1.

Also a sizeable portion of creators from Twitch to Patreon produce adult content and much of that has now shifted to other niche sites.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#123

Post by cirno »

asiachick wrote: post #104

I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful. There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content. Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of pos…

> In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.

They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content from people that login supports and mirrors it for free. Almost every artist with more than 100 subscribers is illegally shared there. It's really quite sleazy when you consider most of the artists let you see their entire catalog for a $1 or even $5 tier. Cheating someone out of thousands of hours of labor for $1 is particularly low.

I know it's the internet and you can't really stop piracy, but I'd like to see Patreon being proactive against a service that hurts both itself and its creators like that.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#124

Post by nikanj »

manigandham wrote: post #122
asiachick wrote: post #104

I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful. There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content. Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of pos…

Patreon is a rather subpar product that succeeded by using venture capital to buy growth and is now struggling to find sustainability for something that should've been profitable from day 1. Also a sizeable portion of creators from Twitch to Patreon produce adult content and much of that has now shifted to other niche sites.

That's the eternal churn:

1) A new payment platform is started, small enough to be fly under the radar

2) It attracts more and more adult content producers who've been turned away by the bigger players

3) It grows big enough to attract attention

4) The Nazgûl lawyers ride from Mastercard / VISA to shut the adult business down

5) Lather, rince, repeat

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#125

Post by jhwang5 »

appleshore wrote: post #120
asiachick wrote: post #104

I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful. There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content. Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of pos…

The world is bad UX which I tend to think is a conspiracy. For example, the Postmates driver app functions like it was programmed (automated) in a parallel dimension by toddlers in a thousand year future using an analog of Visual Basic. Then ported to iOS and ran via 480 API requests that transverse space, time and logic. Nothing makes sense, everything’s broken.

Goes to prove again (and again) that product success is weakly correlated with engineering effort / quality

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#126

Post by Hydraulix989 »

dannyw wrote: post #117
zerm778 wrote: post #83

Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.

Tumblr v2? Patreon is not an advertising supported platform, so it can't be from advertisers. Onlyfans has no problem accepting credit cards; and Patreon is certainly at the scale where they negotiate with payment facilitators. I'm curious why they made the decision... moral superiority? If it's a brand perspective, then I think the biggest regret of Patreon in the coming years is going to be not spawning off their o…

Patreon has always had its hands dirty in enforcing their definition of "morality" -- while I almost completely agreed with their decisions, banning "anime" was the last straw for me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/fho2ii/patreons_ba...

Each choice they made to ban an "influencer" in the name of morality was a massive hit to their business because by definition, not only was said influencer banned, but also the massive audience that he/she influenced.

Unfortunately, you can only successfully stick to an allow-all policy (with all of the dangerous content and liability/bad PR this entails), or you can haphazardly try to enforce your often-subjective definition of morality with all of its inconsistencies and edge cases, to your own detriment, like Patreon did (I'm a moral relativist).

It's a Faustian bargain because neither is a good business decision.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#127

Post by tempsy »

rtpg wrote: post #111
tempsy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they make more than that. A TC article last year projected $50M in 2019. It also said they were not profitable. Even then that doesn’t exactly cover salary and benefits for 300 employees in SF, let alone everything else.

Wait, how does $50M not cover 300 employees? Is fully loaded cost of employees (I imagine most of those 300 are _not_ super high level engineers, but things like CS and admin) in SF really above $160k/employee?

Salary + benefits + bonus + stock.

Health insurance is expensive. Don’t think many realize how much it costs employers.

Then obviously rent is the other big expense. And cloud computing.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#128

Post by nikanj »

Trasmatta wrote: post #15
Nextgrid wrote: post #9

I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.…

* Product is successful * Hire lots of people because that's what successful companies do * Product development slows way down, because you hired too fast (Mythical Man Month stuff kicks in, where adding more people to a team can slow development down, if not done carefully and thoughtfully) * Notice that development is slow, so you hire even more people to try and speed it up At least that's been my experience at 3…

* Product isn't that complicated at heart, so new hires busy themselves with complicating it, to justify their paychecks

* Your easy to manage monolith is now seventy-three microservices, in case you need to serve Google levels of traffic without any further engineering. You're hopelessly understaffed to keep the monstrosity stable, so now you've got to grow your engineering corps to Google scale.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#129

Post by Mirioron »

nikanj wrote: post #124
manigandham wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon is a rather subpar product that succeeded by using venture capital to buy growth and is now struggling to find sustainability for something that should've been profitable from day 1. Also a sizeable portion of creators from Twitch to Patreon produce adult content and much of that has now shifted to other niche sites.

That's the eternal churn: 1) A new payment platform is started, small enough to be fly under the radar 2) It attracts more and more adult content producers who've been turned away by the bigger players 3) It grows big enough to attract attention 4) The Nazgûl lawyers ride from Mastercard / VISA to shut the adult business down 5) Lather, rince, repeat

Why does it happen though? What's the motivation behind the credit card companies? As in, what's the ultimate reason for this?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#130

Post by asperous »

0zwan wrote: post #113

It seems they still hiring: https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon How is it possible?

Two possible reasons:

- They may have interviewed for those roles internally but not found a fit

Or,

- Those job lists are "continual" in other words fake so they can increase their applicant pool and possibly use it in the future (or they haven't taken them down)

Post reply on HN