Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

thoughts.jatan.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 351 posts

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#111

Post by monkeybutton »

latchkey wrote: post #107
sumy23 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How well did that go with how anti-adult industry the banking industry is?

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#112

Post by pessimizer »

Patreon shouldn't even exist. They're here because government(s) have failed so badly that they haven't put any effort into the infrastructure to trivialize the transfer of its paper between the people holding it. It's as useful a function as highways and the internet, but government failures (that lobbyists pay individuals in government to continue failing at) create room for deeply entrenched trusts paypal to be established.

There's no moral amount they should charge imo; it's completely arbitrary. If you think it should be less, vote for better people, advocate for better things, make crypto that works and isn't exclusively an attraction for criminals and rent-seekers, or pour money into marketing a competitor. You can switch to another service, but I might not want to give your other service my card info. Well if your other service takes paypal I'll use it, so they'll start 5% behind.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#113

Post by Sebb767 »

arinlen wrote: post #96
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. Nothing forces Patreon to take a cut for each and every donation, let alone such a hefty fee. Plenty of micropayment services charge instead a fee for transactions into and out of their system, and internal tran…

> Nothing forces Patreon to take a cut for each and every donation, let alone such a hefty fee.

Payment processors do. Donorbox [0], which the author switched to, states their pricing. For 1$, you'll pay ~32p (Stripe)/ ~51p (PayPal) for the payment processor, so 32%-51%. For 5$, you'll pay ~40p (Stripe) or 59p (PayPal), so still 8%-12%.

This is without Patreon/Donorbox having made a single dollar yet, but they do need to pay people to set up payment, their platform and support. Also, they want to make profit, since they're not a charity, after all.

[0] https://donorbox.org/pricing

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#114

Post by ajhurliman »

Finnucane wrote: post #81
ajhurliman wrote: post #67

Forex and PayPal’s international payments aren’t free, Patreon doesn’t see those profits.

Sure, though my credit union credit card only charges 1% for forex, so presumably it could be done for less.

That’s a great rate, but Patreon doesn’t have any control over customers’ desire to use PayPal (it’s a thorn in the side of the entire payments industry).

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#115

Post by emptysongglass »

latchkey wrote: post #106
weberer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lightning BTC is absurdly cheap and very fast.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#116

Post by Cu3PO42 »

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…

I don't disagree that the core concept of Patreon is relatively simple and may even be able to be recreated in a few months, but what you definitely can't do in that amount of time is to comply with the breadth of regulations all over the world.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#118

Post by wmf »

vzqx wrote: post #84
thayne wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Patreon already works - they pool both incoming and outgoing donations for the month into a single transaction to reduce fees. But there are a bunch of donors who only donate $1-$3 a month to a single creator, and these incoming transactions don't benefit from pooling.

I guess the next step would be to have a monthly minimum of $10 or more. You could still split it as 10 $1 donations but at least fees would be reasonable.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#119

Post by OrvalWintermute »

pilgrimfff wrote: post #94
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?

Diversification - Google will cut you off with no reason or recourse. Better to distribute your earnings on a 3rd party so if you get banned from one you still have the other.

Patreon likewise; Patreon censorship is the main reason why SubscribeStar exists.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#120

Post by cto_of_antifa »

escapecharacter wrote: post #70
thayne wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Gonna start a PAC for me and my friends’ horny fan art commissions

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN