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Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

thoughts.jatan.space

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Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#171

Post by sokoloff »

makeitdouble wrote: post #58
sokoloff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. It's cut as a verb (to reduce) versus cut as a noun (the share of the total). In this case, I think the sentence structure has it as a noun, even if the author was thinking of the verb sense of the word.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#172

Post by shimiya »

“~14-17%. This is too high for a platform essentially only acting as a middle manager for supporting recurring payments.”

Patreon is not just asking this fee, because it’s middle men for recurring payments. If that was the case, you could use Stripe for your payment. You could easily cut these fees by providing donors a stripe link.

I guess the writer wouldn’t do that, because there is value in the donation platform.

Argumentation is not grounded.

If we compare the case with Between Epic games and Apple, where Apple was forcing high % for literally payments which could be done much cheaper at any other payment provider.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#173

Post by omegalulw »

brendanyounger wrote: post #133
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge backs should also be less of an issue if the purchase is $1. Same with fraud. The stakes are lower the lower the amount. Who cares? It's not worth disputing. Fire the customer if it crosses a threshold.

Having run a B2C business with recurring monthly payments around $15, I assure you that fraud goes UP with lower payment amounts. You preferentially attract the worst possible customers who bank with the lowest common denominator banks and they charge back like crazy. Some choice moments: "Please keep my service on, I only charged back because I needed to make rent this month", "I know that wasn't my card, but that b…

And these systems exist because sellers do fraud too, merchants that don't ship after taking payment, etc. With irreversible payments through crypto you are just pushing all the risk on customers. That will never fly.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#174

Post by thathndude »

busterarm wrote: post #152
tpurves wrote: post #105

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 payme…

Yeah, all of the other payment processors have settled on somewhere between 2-4% fees to handle fraud. See PayPal. So either Patreon has an order of magnitude more fraud going on or is massively wasteful in its business operations. Probably both.

Yes, but that 2-4% works when 90% of the range of charges is 10-1000. But with Patreon the nature of its transactions are that 95% are $30 or less.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#175

Post by chokma »

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?

Royalroad.com also directs a large amount of readers to authors publishing advanced chapters of their webnovels on patreon.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#176

Post by sokoloff »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #163
sokoloff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s about convenience and removing friction more than safety/security. 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 rand…

I use DonorBox for supporters of my indie conference [0] and I have a healthy revenue stream (would be healthier if I had a Patreon.) Is that an OK choice given your preferences? It seems low friction, with the caveat that you have to remember my random website URL. [0] https://handmade-seattle.com/donate

I poked at your site's donation functions. For me personally, if I was doing a one-time donation, that flow seems fine and something that wouldn't block me for a one-time.

For a recurring donation, the hover over "A donor account is created automatically for recurring donations. Account setup info will be emailed to you." would remind me the hassle of using a random extra account that I need to keep track of, trust that it won't get breached, and be able to find and login to when I want to stop the recurring donations [and trust that the site will actually stop the donations without hassle].

That's going to be enough to block me for recurring (but you probably have data on the people it doesn't block, meaning people's preferences vary).

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#177

Post by rag-hav »

tpurves wrote: post #105

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 payme…

> The crypto bros totally miss the point in understanding this too.

I am not sure what you mean by this, but bitcoin transactions do have fees which are determined in an open market fashion.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#178

Post by rglullis »

brendanyounger wrote: post #133
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge backs should also be less of an issue if the purchase is $1. Same with fraud. The stakes are lower the lower the amount. Who cares? It's not worth disputing. Fire the customer if it crosses a threshold.

Having run a B2C business with recurring monthly payments around $15, I assure you that fraud goes UP with lower payment amounts. You preferentially attract the worst possible customers who bank with the lowest common denominator banks and they charge back like crazy. Some choice moments: "Please keep my service on, I only charged back because I needed to make rent this month", "I know that wasn't my card, but that b…

Thank you for your comment, for a moment I thought I was crazy to believe that it can make sense to have a payment system where merchants are protected.

When I say the majority of anti-crypto people are privileged, it's because of this. They never got to experience life in a world where people nickel-and-dime on a 5 dollar purchase. They can not even conceive of a world where "evil" business owners have legitimate reasons to want to protect themselves, and they can't even see that people will do the most stupid stuff over pettiness or because they think they can get away with it.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#179

Post by rglullis »

omegalulw wrote: post #173
brendanyounger wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having run a B2C business with recurring monthly payments around $15, I assure you that fraud goes UP with lower payment amounts. You preferentially attract the worst possible customers who bank with the lowest common denominator banks and they charge back like crazy. Some choice moments: "Please keep my service on, I only charged back because I needed to make rent this month", "I know that wasn't my card, but that b…

And these systems exist because sellers do fraud too, merchants that don't ship after taking payment, etc. With irreversible payments through crypto you are just pushing all the risk on customers. That will never fly.

If the customer does not trust the merchant, they simply don't make the payment with crypto.

Why, oh why is it so hard to understand the concept of multiple alternatives?

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#180

Post by viraptor »

brendanyounger wrote: post #133
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge backs should also be less of an issue if the purchase is $1. Same with fraud. The stakes are lower the lower the amount. Who cares? It's not worth disputing. Fire the customer if it crosses a threshold.

Having run a B2C business with recurring monthly payments around $15, I assure you that fraud goes UP with lower payment amounts. You preferentially attract the worst possible customers who bank with the lowest common denominator banks and they charge back like crazy. Some choice moments: "Please keep my service on, I only charged back because I needed to make rent this month", "I know that wasn't my card, but that b…

There's also the issue of > with 0% low level fraud like this.

It's got its own issues. For example i hope you've got a separate wallet per transaction. Otherwise someone will use their tumbled BTC to pay you and you'll get blacklisted from using it in exchanges.

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