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Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

thoughts.jatan.space

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Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#271

Post by aahortwwy »

Barrin92 wrote: post #148
eterevsky wrote: post #135

YouTube takes 30% for "joining" the channel.

Youtube is also a genuine platform that gets you an audience and discoverability, gets you ad revenue, and hosts your content (which in the case of streaming video is very much non-trivial technically). Patreon is a donation button with a feed. It's effectively a payment processor and in most of the world the margins in that industry are a fraction of a percent. This is Youtube vs Patreon ( https://www.pymnts.com/sub…

Before Patreon people had direct links to donate to them on PayPal. You can still that (or use Stripe, or Ko-Fi, or whatever).

So why do people use Patreon?

The answer to that is why Patreon can charge what they do.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#272

Post by ipaddr »

Jakawao wrote: post #238
tatertots1234 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The crypto bros totally miss the point in understanding this too. The crypto folks are pretty cognizant of it, which is why they built an entire technology that isn’t reliant on intermediaries, banks, and payment processors to manage transactions. A crypto Patreon in stablecoin like DAI on an L2 would basically be able to remove most of the high fees creators see in Patreon.

That doesn’t address the criticism. If I pay for a good or service via crypto and it is not delivered satisfactorily, what is my remedy? Who even decides what “satisfaction” is? Yes, the dispute/chargeback process for cards is cumbersome today, but it is a solution - albeit inefficient. What is the crypto answer? I don’t mean to put you on the spot for this question, but I would love to understand how decentralized s…

What if you pay via cash or debit card or don't want to cut off a company (like Apple or Google or Amazon) completely? What is your remedy..chargebacks are a last resort. How many can you do before you get cutoff?

Normally chargebacks are for scams or fraud not because something came broken from Amazon.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#273

Post by mhh__ »

pessimizer wrote: post #112

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 es…

Even if that infrastructure existed I still think we'd just see more mini-patreon companies rather than some glorious totally asynchronous graph of payments.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#274

Post by markdown »

e-clinton wrote: post #206
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 reason to have fees as a percentage vs a flat fee isn’t because costs scale with payment amounts, it’s because it’s a more fair way to levy fees. I can either charge everyone $3/transaction, even if the transaction itself is less than or equal to $3, or I can structure it as a percentage to encourage smaller transactions. If people think Patreon is making a killing with their fee structure, they should build a co…

Fair would be to charge the lower of $X or X%.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#275

Post by rglullis »

pixl97 wrote: post #245
rglullis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

There are a few million(?) businesses in the world. There are at least 8 billion people in the world. Your average individual isn't going to adopt a payment scheme that protects businesses at the expense of themselves.

> Your average individual

The "average individual" has approx one breast, one ovary and one testicle. Speaking of "average individual" is meaningless.

The important thing is to think of how many business transactions are completed or never initiated due to the existence or absence of an a payment option.

> protects businesses at the expense of themselves

If you browse around this thread, you'll find maybe 7 or 9 other times where I responded to this: of course, for most use cases people will be fine by using the current systems. This does not eliminate the other cases that are not viable with the current systems, such as cases where the risk is negligible to the user on the individual transaction, but the risk to the merchant is too high at scale.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#276

Post by rglullis »

munificent wrote: post #267
rglullis wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are thinking only from the side of a customer, who already has it easy with the existing payment networks. If you are a customer that wants to make a transaction that can be reversed, you go for the credit card. If the value of the transaction is not high enough for you to care (micropayments) or if you rather lose some money but not give away your data, you go for crypto. The problem that crypto can solve is for…

> You are thinking only from the side of a customer, who already has it easy with the existing payment networks. Merchants factor processing fees in when determining pricing which means the cost ultimately gets passed on to the customer. The merchant would of course like lower transaction fees. But legitimate merchants also want to comply with consumer protection laws and have happy customers even when unpleasant thi…

> There is a real value provided to both buyers and sellers when transactions are regulated and reversible.

How is that we can do this with cash without having someone taking 2.9% + 30c per transaction?

> However, your product does not appear to compete with other payment processors, because it offers little of the value that they provide.

Absolutely correct. If you want to use Stripe, go use Stripe. They are great (most of the times). I use it as well. When it suits me.

I am not trying to replace Stripe, or Visa, or Mastercard. I am building an alternative for when these solutions do not work.

> People still get their identity stolen

Crypto payments (like cash!) do not require your identity to make a transaction.

> have their kids grab the phone and buy $10,000 in Robux.

You won't be carrying thousands of dollars in your crypto wallet, just like you don't carry throusands of dollars in cash.

> You have to wonder what kind of merchants would consider that system a significant win.

Can you do micropayments with Stripe? You can not. Then, you might be interested in a system that can.

Do you have a perfectly legal business that is for some reason in Mastercard's blacklist? Then you might be interested in having an alternative.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#277

Post by karpierz »

rglullis wrote: post #203
karpierz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If credentials are stolen, crypto or otherwise, a scammer can then use those stolen credentials to make a payment. All non-reversible transactions do is put the risk of fraud on the consumer. IE, if you buy anything with crypto and it turns out to be defective, or just not arrive, you have no recourse. You're just out the money.

> if you buy anything with crypto and it turns out to be defective, or just not arrive, you have no recourse. If you buy something with cash and it turns out to be defective or it is never delivered, are you left with no recourse? "But online shopping could mean someone from some other part of the world!" yeah, then don't buy with crypto. > All non-reversible transactions do is put the risk of fraud on the consumer.…

> But the point here is that crypto can enable a whole lot of other businesses that don't exist today because of merchant risk.

This doesn't address the primary risk that merchants take on: fraud. Either crypto or credit card, if you end up taking a payment via stolen credentials, you will refund the money.

The risk that the middleman in a two-sided takes on is fraud. The scam is pretty simple: steal credit card/crypto key, set up fake seller account, buy stuff from yourself using stolen credit card/crypto key, cash out. The middleman pays the money out to the scammer, and eventually has to pay back the person that was stolen from, credit card or no.

Micro transactions are a huge merchant risk not because angry customers can chargeback, but because one stolen account can undo 1000/X legitimate transaction (where X is your profit per transaction). If your margin is slim, you've just amplified your fraud risk.

And before you say that it's easier to steal credit cards than crypto keys: 1) wait until crypto becomes common and 2) it doesn't matter. If you secure your keys, then scammer finds some user's account credentials and cleans their account out.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#278

Post by rglullis »

Jakawao wrote: post #238
tatertots1234 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The crypto bros totally miss the point in understanding this too. The crypto folks are pretty cognizant of it, which is why they built an entire technology that isn’t reliant on intermediaries, banks, and payment processors to manage transactions. A crypto Patreon in stablecoin like DAI on an L2 would basically be able to remove most of the high fees creators see in Patreon.

That doesn’t address the criticism. If I pay for a good or service via crypto and it is not delivered satisfactorily, what is my remedy? Who even decides what “satisfaction” is? Yes, the dispute/chargeback process for cards is cumbersome today, but it is a solution - albeit inefficient. What is the crypto answer? I don’t mean to put you on the spot for this question, but I would love to understand how decentralized s…

> If I pay for a good or service via crypto and it is not delivered satisfactorily

If you paid with cash, what is your remedy?

And if the reason you need a third-party is just to resolve disputes, then what's stopping to have other companies that do nothing but the scrow-holding and dispute resolution?

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#279

Post by 1123581321 »

markdown wrote: post #274
e-clinton wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason to have fees as a percentage vs a flat fee isn’t because costs scale with payment amounts, it’s because it’s a more fair way to levy fees. I can either charge everyone $3/transaction, even if the transaction itself is less than or equal to $3, or I can structure it as a percentage to encourage smaller transactions. If people think Patreon is making a killing with their fee structure, they should build a co…

Fair would be to charge the lower of $X or X%.

You would need to increase the percentage in order to make this change.

Re: Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

#280

Post by KallDrexx »

meowkit wrote: post #255
Jakawao wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t address the criticism. If I pay for a good or service via crypto and it is not delivered satisfactorily, what is my remedy? Who even decides what “satisfaction” is? Yes, the dispute/chargeback process for cards is cumbersome today, but it is a solution - albeit inefficient. What is the crypto answer? I don’t mean to put you on the spot for this question, but I would love to understand how decentralized s…

> If I pay for a good or service via crypto and it is not delivered satisfactorily In this vague hypothetical situation, what a lot of crypto folk would tell you is that you should use a smart contract, and not a regular transaction, to pay. Hypothetically the contract/network will act as an escrow agent, and would only complete the transaction when all input parameters are true AKA all parties are "satisfied". The s…

That only works if all "input parameters" involved in the transaction are verifyably on chain. If I'm buying a physical good with crypto there's no way you can write a smart contract that verifies I did indeed get the good I paid for. Oracles don't count because that's just kicking the can to a different level (how do I dispute the oracle saying something happened that didn't).
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