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Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

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Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#131

Post by csunbird »

Mirioron wrote: post #129
nikanj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Operation Chokepoint

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#132

Post by davidgerard »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #105

Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot. Like, a lot. A million a month or more. And I c…

Last time Patreon tried fucking over the small-timers, in late 2017, it was the whales who objected and fought them on it - Chapo, Amanda Palmer.

Because the whales remember when they were minnows, and the small timers is where the big timers come from.

Patreon has wanted to dispose of the pain-in-the-backside long tail for ages - this was an explicit business plan by mid-2017.

Because they took VC money and turned a sustainable small-time business into something that MUST GROW, whether it makes sense or not.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#133

Post by helsinkiandrew »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #105

Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot. Like, a lot. A million a month or more. And I c…

I've always wondered if Patreon's core business can ever be big enough to justify the VC and company size.

A generic 'patronage' business will always be expensive to develop and run compared with more targeted discovery and patronage platforms - music, video, podcast, porn. If I can see the 'patron early' videos in my normal youtube feed, or pay podcasters from my podcast app I'd use that. It takes a huge amount of effort to support 'long tail' artists - those that I'm not a mega fan of - on a different site.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#134

Post by paxys »

Mirioron wrote: post #129
nikanj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is a very large amount of chargebacks and fraud happening on adult sites.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#136

Post by andy_ppp »

cirno wrote: post #123
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…

Yes, water marking downloads with account details and charging for this sort of thing would help put a stop to it...

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#137

Post by michaelt »

Mirioron wrote: post #129
nikanj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've heard it said that porn tends to have a large amount of chargebacks.

There would also, presumably, be a fear of censorship targeting your entire company for over a subset of content. Back in 2018 Tumblr was blocked from Apple's app store [1] and responded by banning all adult content on the service [2] - and I'm sure there's a similar risk from school/workplace/ISP NSFW blocking services which are of course famous for over-reach.

Obviously, tumblr could have shifted everything NSFW to nsfwtumblr.com but for various reasons, a lot of sites seem to take a deniable 'turn-a-blind-eye' approach rather than visibly embracing NSFW content.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/3/18123752/tumblr-adult-con...

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#139

Post by ac29 »

Kiro wrote: post #116
doctor_eval wrote: post #88

Friends and I were discussing this last night on jitsi. We think that instead of throwing employees to the wolves at a time when getting a job is going to be difficult, many employees would accept equivalent pay cuts to help weather the storm. In fact I know one company that did just this, with 100 employees. The staff chose a 10% indefinite pay cut over 10% reduction in head count. Sacking people at this time is awf…

In Europe most companies are doing this instead of laying off right now. It's a conventional practice that saved a lot of companies during the 2008 crisis and in many countries it's subsidized by the government.

If its subsidized by the government, how is it a paycut? Similar programs in the US exist, for example states paying a 50% unemployment payment for employees who have their hours cut by 50%. Its a win-win - companies effectively pay nothing to keep their employees at a full time salary for reduced hours, and the government avoids needing to pay out full unemployment benefits to laid off employees.

Edit: see this for an example of the program in California: https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#140

Post by Marazan »

dannyw wrote: post #115
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #105

Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot. Like, a lot. A million a month or more. And I c…

A middleware that can be described as Wordpress with access control and Stripe integration, but worse in terms of performance and UX; somehow takes on $165 million in funding [1] and describes their business model as "not sustainable" [2]. Patreon is a low touch SaaS platform that charges up to 12% PLUS payment processing fees. They do not provide any meaningful level of discoverability: you must build your audience…

Yes, Patreon should be rolling in cashflow.

Them taking venture capital is right up there with GumRoad taking VC money for levels of completely inexplicable for both the VC and the company.

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