71–80 of 351 posts
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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.
On the billing side, I’d guess it’s unlikely to help. I’ve never paid more than $6/mo total on Patreon and I’d expect this is typical.
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.
Sell "Patreon Tokens". 100 for $100 at a one to one exchange rate. You can then spend in stores (one time redemptions) or subscribe to creators.
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> 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.
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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.
How can they "get out of the way" when you need to use the app to play the content? The player sucks, episode search sucks.
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?
They already have superchats and and memberships(paid, different from subscribing) on Youtube. These are mostly used by streamers. Then again I think you can give superchats on premiers. Not sure if you can limit videos to membership only.
And you can have multiple levels od membership.
> I think you can give superchats on premiers
You can if you enable them on your premieres. However a lot of creators just publish their videos rather than ran run them as premieres. But you can also enable tipping which allows viewers to give a one off tip.
> Not sure if you can limit videos to membership only.
You can, you can also limit live streams and playback of past live streams to members only. However as not to fragment their Patreon supporters, these videos are normally just uploaded as unlisted and the link is shared on Pateron.
As for the cut. On Ad's its typically a 60/40 split with YT taking the 40%. On Superchats, superstickers, superthanks (yt's one off tippings) and memberships its a 70/30 split (yt's cut being 30%).
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According to this article[0], product and engineering was ~150 people at the end of 2021 and they hope to scale to 400. Which...seems like a lot for what the company is? Although the hiring landscape has changed drastically in the last month so who knows how accurate that plan is today. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/21/patreon-cpo-interview-doub...
Yes that's absolutely a lot considering the code to solve Patreon's business problem has been written long ago and works just as well. The core business problem can be boiled down to a set of spreadsheets - based on payments going in and creators subscription timeframes you work out the payout for each creator. If it takes you 150 engineers to do the aforementioned I'd look at you in a funny way or start suspecting u…
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> 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.
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It’s not just (or even primarily) discoverability. I will never type in my credit card to give some random app developer $1.99. I will frequently click buy on an app in the App Store. Same is likely true for Patreon. Even if I found your videos or podcast by some other means, the fact you can mention “Thank to to my patrons” means I can easily find you (not discover you) on Patreon and subscribe.
Let’s assume random website use Stripe checkout or PayPal to process cards. Will you fell better and safe to type in your bank card?
If those are every bit as low friction as the alternatives, I’m willing. (But that includes “I heard a podcast while I was driving mention patron; I should spend 30 seconds and give that creator money.” where I can find and login to Patreon faster than I can find the creator’s random website URL.)
For recurring billing, no, I will not give a random website my CC near as easily as I will Apple or Patreon (or any other platform that stands more to lose by biting my hand than an individual site does).