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Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

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Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#101

Post by shasheene »

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…

Yes, Patreon's WYSIWYG editor is incredibly buggy.

But far worse is Patreon's messaging platform. Write a long message, then accidentally have a window resize event occur and lose your entire message.

Patreon's problem with losing text has burned me more times than other products with similar issues (like creating a Jira issue).

Some platforms like Slack do a much better job of saving a draft.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#102

Post by amelius »

thayne wrote: post #69
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…

The solution for this is to have the donation system pool transactions together. Instead of a single transaction for each creator you donate to, you make a payment into a pool that you can then allocate funds from to various recipients. And instead of individual payments to recipients, you send a single lump sum once a month (or if perhaps less frequently if donations are sparse).

This is how banks should work.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#103

Post by orthoxerox »

Anx2k wrote: post #14
tootie wrote: post #2

Apple take 30%. You have to understand that you're not paying just for the service, but the reach. You can DIY your donation platform and the tech side isn't rocket science, the issue that platforms like Patreon and Apple have access to orders of magnitude more users than you can ever generate on your own.

In the case of Apple you’re really paying for access to the platform, as you don’t have a choice. But in the case of Patreon, I don’t think they offer anything in terms of reach - by this I mean I’ve never made the decision to support a creator because they were on the platform. Typically if I decide to support someone, I just go to whatever they point me to - and I think this was the authors point (especially for ve…

> I mean I’ve never made the decision to support a creator because they were on the platform.

I have. It's nice to have a centralized UI for your donations and I would never enter my payment information just to support a single creator with a dollar or two.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#104

Post by jpeter »

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.

Dark Mode, faster content delivery and a batch download function. Some DRM system for creators would also be interesting.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#105

Post by tpurves »

What many people don't realize is that the operational and customer service costs of payments don't scale with payment amount. Customers will cost almost just as frequently dispute, have questions, have problems, ask for help, attempt to defraud etc with a $1 transaction as they will a $100 or $1000 transaction. This is the real killer with micro payment schemes. Customer service costs scale more with number of payments than payment volume. And these real costs are born by Patreon, by the networks and by the banks which is why min txn costs exist. The crypto bros totally miss the point in understanding this too.

Source: 25yrs experience building payment networks

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#106

Post by latchkey »

weberer wrote: post #92
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…

This is something crypto was supposed to fix. And maybe smaller coins did, but transaction costs for BTC and ETH are even higher.

There is more to 'crypto' than just BTC/ETH. Quite a few of the larger L2 chains have fraction of a penny fees and transactions go through in seconds. They are actually perfect for smaller transactions. We just need more people to build on top of them and make real products like this in order to get more adoption.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#107

Post by latchkey »

sumy23 wrote: post #99
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…

I ran a micro-payments platform and our solution was to have users store money in their "wallets" that they could spend on any content with minimum amounts for wallet additions. Unsurprisingly, people don't like spending more money :)

Depends on the platform I think. I built the one for Kink (NSFW porn) and it did quite well. The stored 'money' was called, Kinks that we held database entries for. People would just buy blocks of $10+ of these tokens (this was long before blockchain) and refresh them as they spent them.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#108

Post by bratwurst3000 »

adamhi wrote: post #100
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'm not sure how much of Patreon is tied to Youtube. Anecdotally, of the ~15 creators I support on that platform, 3 of them are Youtube channels. The rest are podcasts, web comics, and blogs. Non-YT streamers and game developers are also a big segment, I believe. Looking at the top 5 creators on Patreon[1], it seems like two of them are primarily Youtube channels. I could be wrong about that, but that's what a quick…

Thanks. This puts some light into a shadow :)

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#109

Post by egypturnash »

Nextgrid wrote: post #59
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.

They keep on proposing stuff that will break this. Usually it is claimed to be an attempt to solve the problem of someone supporting a creator who uses Patreon to create a paywall, snagging everything they can, and cancelling before the monthly charge ever hits.

Which is a problem but their proposed solutions always seem to involve things like "now everyone pays on the anniversary of when they started supporting a creator" which just completely fucks up the original value proposition of "we merge lots of little transactions into one decent-sized one", as well as fucking things up for people like me who are just using Patreon as a tip jar for stuff they release publicly. Letting individual creators decide this will work for them and opt into it is never mentioned as an option, so Patreon gets to hear a loud, sustained scream from creators who are normally quiet, and walk it back a week later.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#110

Post by tootie »

iseanstevens wrote: post #51
zdragnar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm actually just thinking about content. Part of our business is podcasts and selling premium subscriptions incurs a 30% take and all you get is some consideration in placement in Apple Podcasts. And you lose direct access to your customers.
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