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Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

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Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#151

Post by baud147258 »

LargeWu wrote: post #57
0xy wrote: post #31

Given the purging of creators for arbitrary and political reasons, I can't say I feel sympathy for this company's collapse. Ideally it'd go out of business entirely. Creators should be cutting out the middleman anyway.

Discoverability is a huge deal. Looking for new, interesting projects? You know where to go. It's the reason Etsy is very popular. Could sellers open their own Shopify stores in order to have more control over their storefronts? Of course, but they lose out on the search feature that Etsy provides, as well as the trust that buyers associate with these larger platforms.

Is Patreon really set up for discoverability? I mean all the time I ended up on patreon was from links given by various content creators

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#152

Post by imtringued »

warent wrote: post #61
egypturnash wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had “donate” buttons on my work and I have had Patreon and I have gotten several orders of magnitude more money out of Patreon than any other method. Patreon has more than earned their 5% cut of what my fans are willing to give me for drawing weird comics that make no attempt to fit into what corporations are interested in marketing.

For me it somehow feels like my donations are being received in a more meaningful way via Patreon than anywhere else, even if the creator has no rewards set up. Like, a "Donate" button on a creator's website just feels like sending my money into a black hole. But sending it in Patreon makes me feel like a real supporter. It's completely irrational but there it is. And I suspect a lot of people feel the same way too f…

I guess on Patreon you are buying a bigger number on the creator's page. The other reason is that it gives you a consistent "workflow" so it is easy to subscribe and unsubscribe. Meanwhile if you wanted to help a youtuber who was sometimes streaming on twitch your only option would be to subscribe on twitch even though you mostly watch the youtube videos.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#153

Post by detaro »

jariel wrote: post #143
Mirioron wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Aside from the credit issue, nobody wants to be associated with a porn site. Would you launch your new line of e-books on a site that is 95% porn and well known for porn? No. If you're a porn site, then you're pretty much going to be just that, it's its own content vertical, fairly distinguished from everything else.

Patreon is relatively safe in that regard: They don't have much focus on discovery, no ad-placement to worry about, ... People interact with it primarily through deep links to invididual creators pages, so the "neighborhood" is less relevant. They've always been far from being a "porn site".

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#154

Post by Strom »

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…

> Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all.

It has been fixed. The artist can configure an option whether the patron needs to pay up front or after. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291283-How-...

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#155

Post by detaro »

0xy wrote: post #27
icelancer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really wish archive.is and Cloudflare could get over their problems, since I use cloudflare's DNS resolver, none of these links work. Oh well.

Saying this as a Cloudflare investor, CF is in the wrong here and not spec compliant.

How is not supporting an optional extension "not spec compliant"?

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#156

Post by lathiat »

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…

Until only a couple of months ago, the iOS app required you to click through each creator to see their posts only. There was no central news feed like the website and the most obvious way to consume such content.

They -finally- fixed this about two months ago.

Deep linking also often failed for me, i.e. I got a push notificaiton, I click the notification, and I end up on the first creator in my list's news feed rather than what I clicked. That also seems finally fixed now in the same update.

So I'm glad they fixed it but I have no idea what they were doing for the last few years...

I realise they can't/don't want new revenue on iOS due to not being able to use their own billing system for electronic goods and losing a chunk of the revenue but I'm sure they have many people who use the website but want push notifications to work and to read the news there.. it was bonkers.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#158

Post by zhte415 »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #138

Somehow I thought Patreon was just a small service built by like 4 people...

I thought similar. Four developers/full-stack, but then a customer support function that'd roughly 0.X scale with users, then marketing - could double-hat that, then certainly a legal/compliance team after some scale, also finance which probably doesn't need to scale linearly but should be a couple of people at least and no double-hatting on these at their size. So, thinking a bit, perhaps more than four.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#159

Post by pm_me_ur_fullzz »

tehwebguy wrote: post #75
treelovinhippie wrote: post #65

Patreon shouldn't have any more than half a dozen employees. But alas, they joined the VC exit cult.

This always gets said, have you ever looked at all the documentation and helpful materials they’ve put out? If they just wanted to be a payment processing platform they would just be a payment processing platform. Instead it’s guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more.

> Instead it’s guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more.

whoopsie

looks like they should just be a payment processing platform and let youtubers do that work

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#160

Post by markus92 »

jariel wrote: post #143
Mirioron wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Aside from the credit issue, nobody wants to be associated with a porn site. Would you launch your new line of e-books on a site that is 95% porn and well known for porn? No. If you're a porn site, then you're pretty much going to be just that, it's its own content vertical, fairly distinguished from everything else.

There's plenty of adult stuff sold on Amazon yet I still would like to sell my new line of e-books there.
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