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Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

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Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#51

Post by iseanstevens »

zdragnar wrote: post #25
egypturnash wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make my living off of Patreon and I can confirm that they do jack shit to promote your work unless you are already one of their top earners. “Paying for the reach” is a bullshit excuse for the amount of money they’re sucking off of creators to try and make an immense payout for their VC. My spreadsheet says the total cut of my take that goes to Patreon and payment processing is about 10-15%, but I am an Early Adopt…

> I never got support via the old PayPal donation button like I have via Patreon Sounds like Patreon helped you after all. I'm not saying that they promote or market you, but having the name (much like Apple) seems enough to encourage people to pay you. OTOH, I certainty don't think that their cut sounds like a good deal; rather, it sounds more like your options are a bad deal or no deal at all.

Apple also gives a full suite of developer tools, documentation, example code. Built in debugging, testing, simulation.

If you have a design/image creation software and XCode you could make almost any app.

Patreon doesn’t give any tools to creators to directly create.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#52

Post by noirbot »

bratwurst3000 wrote: post #47

I know patreon only because of youtube. Are there many creators not connected to youtube on patreon? My impression is if youtube would allow donations to creators, patreon would be dead. Am I wrong?

Depends on two things - does Youtube give a better cut? Presumably they would, but Google doesn't have a good track record. Second, do they want to trust Google not to both ban their channel _and_ take all their income away.

If you have a YT page, but get your money from Patreon, you have a fallback if either of them drops you for whatever reason.

That's before you get into podcasts on Patreon, which seems to make up a lot of their userbase, if you look at their most patronized stuff. There's no particularly good podcast monetization platform, rightfully, because of its decentralized protocol.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#53

Post by comboy »

colechristensen wrote: post #18
comboy wrote: post #3

I'm not sure it's that high. They probably have AML regulations in multiple countries on their backs, and they are dealing with tons of tiny payments not a few big ones. For each tiny payment there's some chance of a problem occurring which will require support time.

Banks take care of an enormous amount of small transactions on credit and debit cards and only charge ~3%, some European countries have fees as low as 0.3%. The high fees of patreon have nothing to do with payment support issues.

Most clients are just marketing.

Banks make money with your money. And 99% of stored money comes from 0.1% of their clients.

Leverage coming from fractional-reserve [1] is just a part of it but it gives you some idea.

If you mean just credit cards, it's much different scale than what we're discussing here and a duopoly which is basically a money printing machine. If somebody has any insight how much money Visa/Mastercard make from banks and institutions vs users I'd love to hear it.

But don't forget that apart from a small percentage which goes to CC provider, they also get the most valuable data there is about you as a consumer (and more generally about all consumers worldwide and trends across multitude of dimensions). I'm guessing these companies could easily survive just selling the data.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#54

Post by Pakdef »

jeroenhd wrote: post #36

What I think is something people easily overlook with Patreon and similar platforms is that it's quite hard to make a decent profit on $1 or $5 transactions that most of Patreon's income seems to come from. They're definitely overcharging for more profit, but your margins won't be much lower if you handle payment yourself. Your 3% bank cut to receive money doesn't always work because often there's a minimum fee per t…

> What I think is something people easily overlook with Patreon and similar platforms is that it's quite hard to make a decent profit on $1 or $5 transactions that most of Patreon's income seems to come from.

It's not hard with many cryptos that have basically no fees

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#55

Post by instagary »

tolmasky wrote: post #38

The thing about Patreon is that it sucks for users too (as in, the consumers). Both the website and the app really suck. They look horrible, have few features, and often work poorly. It essentially serves as a notification platform that I then try to bounce out of into YouTube or wherever as soon as possible. It's kind of mind boggling that they seem to leave so much engagement on the table when even a mediocre websi…

Agreed! As a creator I struggle navigating their web app to find/change basic things about my page.

The other side of it isn't great either. The content posted by the creators I follow is often slow to load, gifs & images being huge & slow search.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#56

Post by michaelt »

zippergz wrote: post #39
tolmasky wrote: post #38

The thing about Patreon is that it sucks for users too (as in, the consumers). Both the website and the app really suck. They look horrible, have few features, and often work poorly. It essentially serves as a notification platform that I then try to bounce out of into YouTube or wherever as soon as possible. It's kind of mind boggling that they seem to leave so much engagement on the table when even a mediocre websi…

What features should Patreon have? I'm not paying for website features. I am paying to support creators I like. I'd actually be happier if the platform did even less. Just get the money to the people I want to support in a low-friction manner, and get out of the way.

Your experience with Patreon will depend on what kind of thing you're supporting.

For example, if you support a Youtube channel you might continue watching on Youtube and rarely need to visit Patreon's website at all.

But if you support an author who is releasing a book, three pages per day? And you're paying for early access? You'll notice there's no bookmarking / next page features.

And if that author has three price tiers, depending on how many pages of early access you get? Only the most expensive tier can get new-pages-uploaded e-mails - new pages being unlocked for lower tiers isn't an event that triggers notification e-mails.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#57

Post by plorg »

bratwurst3000 wrote: post #47

I know patreon only because of youtube. Are there many creators not connected to youtube on patreon? My impression is if youtube would allow donations to creators, patreon would be dead. Am I wrong?

I know quite a number of podcasters who use Patreon. It ends up being pretty convenient, because you can enable a podcast-compatible RSS feed that your users can import into their podcatcher.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#58

Post by makeitdouble »

sokoloff wrote: post #13
makeitdouble wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might have been corrected ? it currently reads to me as 14~17, which is not great, but not that high either depending on the exact case. > When considering all factors, including standard payout processing fees, the real cut for a creator on Patreon is often a stark ~14-17% depending on the exact scenario.

If a creator and a platform are splitting a dollar and “the real cut for a creator is ~15%”, I’d expect that to mean the creator gets $0.15 and the platform $0.85.

Reading your answer I get why the wording is ambiguous. I read it as “the real [revenue] cut for a creator”, keeping the same meaning for “cut” as in the page title.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#59

Post by Nextgrid »

jeroenhd wrote: post #36

What I think is something people easily overlook with Patreon and similar platforms is that it's quite hard to make a decent profit on $1 or $5 transactions that most of Patreon's income seems to come from. They're definitely overcharging for more profit, but your margins won't be much lower if you handle payment yourself. Your 3% bank cut to receive money doesn't always work because often there's a minimum fee per t…

On the other hand, Patreon bills supporters as one lump sum and then pays out as a lump sum as well - that should at least offset the flat per-transaction fee, if there is any.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#60

Post by [deleted] »

Nextgrid wrote: post #40
jelling wrote: post #22

TFW when white collar professionals complain about the prices businesses charge in order to pay the white collar salaries necessary to make the products they use. And so many of these companies aren't even profitable, either. It's like carnivores being judgmental of hunters.

Patreon is a CRUD app and something you could build in a few months and consider it done if you wanted to. The core value proposition of Patreon hasn't changed since they launched, and the business problem is still "take $$$ from people, figure out how much to pay each creator, pay out $$$ to creators". > And so many of these companies aren't even profitable, either. It's not profitable because it's an engineering pl…

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