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Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

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Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#171

Post by Hoasi »

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.…

> I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees.

Good question, I am curious about how it compares with how Gumroad operates.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#172

Post by [deleted] »

andy_ppp wrote: post #136
cirno wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

[deleted]

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#173

Post by sschueller »

tomp wrote: post #141
cirno wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Piracy has proven to be the best competition for shitty legacy content delivery methods. I wonder if we'd have Netflix without ThePirateBay. Fact is, people want to pay for content (not because it's "not cheating" or whatever, but because they genuinely want to support artists and want them to keep creating) but are unwilling to jump through hoops for that. It's on Patreon & co to improve their game.

Netflix's UI is total shit. It is as if they are purposefully trying to keep it that way to hide the fact that most of the movies they have are garbage and the only way to get people to watch those is to give them some odd "compatibility" with your taste rating.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#174

Post by gberger »

alephnan wrote: post #96
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…

> How do you reconcile the two? This sounds like a riddle / koan. Business analysts pulled these metrics from a data warehouse and the semantics don't line up. I've worked on growth and data science teams, and there ought to be a book "How to lie with data science" as a successor to "How to lie with statistics". There's been situations where I've seen the same metric queried in two different ways with contradictory r…

Nitpick: the expression is 'sleight of hand'

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#175

Post by fareesh »

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.

They also banned Carl Benjamin, leading to a mass exodus. They justified this by citing his use of a racial slur in a YouTube video, although the word was not used in the context of a racial slur.

In the USA there is some kind of Voldemort status given to this word where you cannot even use it out of context - it reminds me of that Jehovah sketch in Monty Python where that parody has now manifested itself into a reality that seemingly changes the course of companies.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#176

Post by albertshin »

sschueller wrote: post #173
tomp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy has proven to be the best competition for shitty legacy content delivery methods. I wonder if we'd have Netflix without ThePirateBay. Fact is, people want to pay for content (not because it's "not cheating" or whatever, but because they genuinely want to support artists and want them to keep creating) but are unwilling to jump through hoops for that. It's on Patreon & co to improve their game.

Netflix's UI is total shit. It is as if they are purposefully trying to keep it that way to hide the fact that most of the movies they have are garbage and the only way to get people to watch those is to give them some odd "compatibility" with your taste rating.

I totally agree that they're anti-user. But they have a dilemma.

Imagine a nicely formatted table of Netflix movies and shows available in your country. New, potential users can quickly find out if it's worth signing up. Existing users can quickly realize that maybe the service is not worth it.

I also have a theory that if you're stuck looking for something to watch and you've already spent enough time on their platform, you might just settle on something.

They're trying to stay as the "first stop" of when you want to watch something, and the only way they can keep that position is purposefully being murky with their offerings because, yes, it's a 90% shitty collection.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#177

Post by hef19898 »

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…

There seem to be a lot of businesses out there, that should be cash positive. Yet, the VC funded ones (also the ones you read about), aren't. No idea why, maybe easy access to VC money, and VCs themselves, cause them toneglect cash flow?

I also saw this effect with Chinese manufaturersofsolar modules, whatever amount of cash they need, they get from Chinese banks. In their day to day operations, cash flow doesn't really play an important role, as long as they are marginally profitable at the end of the year.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#178

Post by hef19898 »

paxys wrote: post #134
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?

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

Which sounds like an opportunity, doesn't it? Fraud free adult patreon.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#179

Post by rcxdude »

michaelt wrote: post #137
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?

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 famo…

Their response wasn't really correlated with the ban. They were moving in that direction for months, despite the fact that the problem with their platform wasn't the ecosystem of properly marked porn posted by creators, but the avalanche of untagged porn (some illegal) posted by bots which they were unable or unwilling to do anything about (the illegal stuff is why Apple banned their app). When they started the ban, their filter was awful and basically just pushed all the creators off the site (even those who weren't posting porn). As far as I know the porn bots are still there, because the false positive and false negative rate of their filter is atrocious.

Re: Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

#180

Post by scott_s »

tomp wrote: post #141
cirno wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Piracy has proven to be the best competition for shitty legacy content delivery methods. I wonder if we'd have Netflix without ThePirateBay. Fact is, people want to pay for content (not because it's "not cheating" or whatever, but because they genuinely want to support artists and want them to keep creating) but are unwilling to jump through hoops for that. It's on Patreon & co to improve their game.

Then pay to support a creator on patreon and consume their content elsewhere. (I don’t think this is ideal, but your summation made it sound like a false dichotomy.)
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