Highly relevant video: The Rise (and Fall) of Patreon - Tom Nicholas
How to compete with Patreon
31–40 of 234 posts
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anonymous artists have made money for years in all sorts of jurisdictions, it’s definitely possible to do. e.g. banksy, the residents, the rubber bandits, TISM
Yes, but these are true artists that make one-off sales. It is not a business for them(not legally). Where you have no legal obligation to become a "business". Author on Patreon on the other hand cannot claim to be "opportunistic" seller. They make repeated sales there, therefore it is taxable income and therefore they must become a legal entity of some sort and abide by the legal and tax laws of the consumer tax law…
With two decades of performance and album sales, an 18 year hiatus and a recent reunion you can hardly accuse TISM of "one-off" sales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TISM
The key here is that neither Humphrey B. Flaubert nor Eugene de la Hot Croix Bun were filing tax returns via their nom de guerre's.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Subscribestar has successfully pivoted from "Patreon but you can post right-wing propaganda" to "Patreon but with less restrictions on horny stuff". Patreon is slowly but surely becoming more hostile to horny stuff; right now I'm in the middle of going around with their support over horny creators having to provide some additional identity verification through a third-party site that isn't working on my computer or m…
The issue is that "less restrictions on horny stuff" means "more restrictions from payment processors" nowadays. Doubly so if you're a Russian platform like Subscribestar is.
hahahhaa Subscribestar is Russian? Well that's gonna be fun for all the furry artists posting super-gay stuff on there once it gets big enough for the Russian government to notice.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think it was equally illegal for publishers and bookstores to sell novels written by Richard Bachman, without revealing that that was actually a pseudonym for Stephen King?
"publishers" is the keyword here. You have answered your own question.
If you can point me to a law that says it's legal to hide a content creator's identity from customers when the content is ink and paper, but illegal when it's distributed over the internet, I'd love to see it.
As others have pointed out, Patreon does exactly this in many different jurisdictions. I find it hard to believe that they're just brazenly violating the law and absolutely nobody cares.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#35I am actually developing a platform to compete with pateon. And the author is quite naive in his complaints. You cannot do business and be anonymous. The tax man would eat you alive. At least outside of USA. You also need a license as sole proprietor or be incorporated as a company in order to make repetitive sales and not one-offs. So again, no anonymity whatsoever. "by works" payment model is illegal. You can recei…
The IRS and Patreon need to know who you are. Patrons don't. The article is pretty specific about the distinction. (Looks like the US is 30% of patreon's business, more than any other single country, so I'm reasonably comfortable acting like my US-specific response matters.) Likewise, are you claiming that the "by works" model that patreon supports today is illegal? As for the "non quid pro quo" case - as a patron I…
> The IRS and Patreon need to know who you are. Patrons don't.
As i commended elsewhere, if Patreon acts as the publisher, then yes. The authors are merely sub-contractors and their relationship with patrons is quite different.
> Likewise, are you claiming that the "by works" model that patreon supports today is illegal?
As I commented elsewhere, I might not have understood what the author has been describing and misinterpreted it.
The API question, based on your take, then needs to be expanded on. Too many variables here. Sound more to me like this is not an API question at all, but rather lack of functionality/forms/pages/lists on the front-end side?
> I'm definitely curious about what you come up with, especially if you get traction with artists - but only about half a dozen of the artists I support through patreon are outside the US anyway, so until you work out US support I'm probably not going to notice. Good luck, though.
It will have no geo-restriction so who ever comes will be welcome. Frankly, I am not looking to get millions of users. I will be satisfied if it pays for itself and people's salaries and author get alternative means of communicating with their fans, or the world, in this modern era of censorship and political correctness. My setup if very different from the one bigtech uses, so I hope that will be what will attract people there. I have been working on this for a year with about 5 month break. It will be out next year.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that "less restrictions on horny stuff" means "more restrictions from payment processors" nowadays. Doubly so if you're a Russian platform like Subscribestar is.
hahahhaa Subscribestar is Russian? Well that's gonna be fun for all the furry artists posting super-gay stuff on there once it gets big enough for the Russian government to notice.
Yes, but they operate from american llc.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#37There are patreon competitors. Just none of them have a pay by work feature. Consumers likely prefer a predictable expense so there isn't that much of a demand to do it that way.
The post mentions Tipeee but it "charges 8%" and has "invasive personal documentation requirements". Seems Tipeee is based in Paris, so the cumbersomeness may be related to EU regulations.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#38I think the real answer may be that patreon is, actually, a bad business; and that nobody has cracked microtransactions. Separately, while Patreon's charging changes seem boneheaded, I'd guess at least a 50% chance that they weren't driven by stupidity but rather by a CFO having a come to jesus conversation with the e-team. Driven by the fact that microtransactions run on a credit card are tough. Their giant raises m…
> nobody has cracked microtransactions
It's hard to agree on this one.
Personal anecdote: In 2010's I worked in a micropayments broker linked with all telecom companies.
The whole thing was: that NSFW creators used a shared SMS shared code (i.e. a SMS number that receives messages for several creators and the code (for instance HNCODE25) was used to move money to a balance account) and for each of the payments that people used to do with them the telecom company got 15% slice, and the rest the telecom moved the money to the broker.
Another point: In Brazil due to the PIX [1] almost all of those payment platforms (Paypal included) are becoming irrelevant because you can generate random tokens that can be hard to trace, and all the payments occur instantaneously giving enough time for withdrawn before any attempt of censorship and or any policy change. [2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867120 ...
About the article itself, it's surprising to me (and I assume some sort of intentional ignorance here) that even in the current state of technology we do not have a "dumb pipe" payment system as before and we're still relying upon those middle man actors or not-so ergonomic alternatives as P2P crypto.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
One note, I don’t think the author is saying that the person should be anonymous but rather the way they talk to their audience should be. In the backend they will be known but for the audience they have a specific name that doesn’t have to be their full government name.
I get that but you cannot be selling anonymously as long as it is a way for you to make a living, fully or partially, and it is not a one time thing(like selling some used items on ebay or similar website). I cannot speak for all countries but I would say most have a law that requires you to get a sole proprietor license or incorporate as company when you are getting income from repeated transactions. Customers have…
I think part of Patreon’s value-add is solving these issues. And it’s not like this is unprecedented. In the music world there are artists who are anonymous but when you buy a record you’re buying it from retailer which is where you go if there are issues and a record label, who presumably knows the legal identity of the artist.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#40I think the real answer may be that patreon is, actually, a bad business; and that nobody has cracked microtransactions. Separately, while Patreon's charging changes seem boneheaded, I'd guess at least a 50% chance that they weren't driven by stupidity but rather by a CFO having a come to jesus conversation with the e-team. Driven by the fact that microtransactions run on a credit card are tough. Their giant raises m…
Patreon took venture money despite being bootstrapped.
That is behind everyone of their dumb decisions.
They had a great model harvesting nickels and then they sold a vision of Taylor Swift being on Patreon to VCs.