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How to compete with Patreon

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81–90 of 234 posts

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#81
post #55
post #54

Discord could eat Patreon’s lunch overnight if they wanted to. Every Patreon I’ve been interested in was just a paywall for a Discord community.

Discord has already started integrating their own payment for content/channels recently. https://discord.com/serversubscriptions

And they desperately need to roll it out to more countries... sad Canadian noises

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#82
post #64
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in that case, maybe i did not properly understood how the author describes that model.

I don't know how to write this without sounding snarky, which is not my intention but: maybe if you are intending to build a Patreon competitor, you should look into how this model works. It's probably not a big source of their profit, and certainly a competitor can live without it. But as both a consumer and creator it's the only model I'm interested in. It really aligns everyone's incentives.

I am not trying to copy Patreon. I am merely implementing the general idea of selling your digital content online. That's all. If people like Patreon and their monetization channels, I am not here to try and steal them away. Not my intention whatsoever. I am doing a lot of things very differently to Patreon.

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like the service that the middle man provides. They may not like the middle man, the fees, etc. but tell someone that "your transactions are not reversible, if you lost your money that sucks I guess, even if we messed up" and they will be happy to pay that transaction fee with another provider instead. Even with the small amounts, you either have to approve each transaction (which leads to another category of…

> People like the service that the middle man provides. They may not like the middle man, the fees, etc. but tell someone that "your transactions are not reversible, if you lost your money that sucks I guess, even if we messed up" and they will be happy to pay that transaction fee with another provider instead. This might not be entirely realistic, but the idea of passing that choice on to the end user seems interest…

You can't give the choice of whether a payment can be disputed to the purchaser. The reason you can't do that is that you have no way to verify that the purchaser is who they claim to be. If you accept payment from a stolen card, it will be reversed, even if the thief checked a box saying "it is impossible to reverse this payment".

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#84
post #71
post #54

Discord could eat Patreon’s lunch overnight if they wanted to. Every Patreon I’ve been interested in was just a paywall for a Discord community.

Funny, none of the Patreons I'm subscribing to or been interested in, has been paywalls for Discord communities.

Same, I only hear about Patreon on YouTube.

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#85
post #5

I 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…

The author starts the article with "take Patreon's lunch money". What lunch? The one VCs fed them? Is Patreon even profitable?

Exactly.

The author also dumped on Patreon’s incredibly low processing fee. Who is going to compete with 5% plus payment processing? And they dumped how this processing fee is unsustainable and that the community was mad about changing it.

What business is going to disrupt margins like that? That’s like saying “I’m going to sell stuff cheaper than Costco.” Good luck with that!

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#86
post #28

Earlier 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.

I don't get the impression Russia's censorship laws are applied outside Russia. You can find tons of gay stuff on Yandex's image and video search without being coy about the search terms.

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#87
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wonder if they will care if it's mostly a foreign audience.

The Russian government will probably subsidise them to further weaken the West.

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People like the service that the middle man provides. They may not like the middle man, the fees, etc. but tell someone that "your transactions are not reversible, if you lost your money that sucks I guess, even if we messed up" and they will be happy to pay that transaction fee with another provider instead. This might not be entirely realistic, but the idea of passing that choice on to the end user seems interest…

You can't give the choice of whether a payment can be disputed to the purchaser. The reason you can't do that is that you have no way to verify that the purchaser is who they claim to be. If you accept payment from a stolen card, it will be reversed, even if the thief checked a box saying "it is impossible to reverse this payment".

I guess some are making that choice for themselves, in the form of using crypto (which then comes with a long list of issues).

Then again, I guess it's also possible to go in the opposite direction and look into additional means of verifying who is making a purchase - over here, we have chips in government issued ID cards which can be used for signing documents, whereas most banks already use a 2FA system with codes (mobile app, not SMS; but also not TOTP, rather issued certs based on a contract with SmartID) for approving access to bank accounts and then another code for confirming orders. It wouldn't be entirely unrealistic to imagine that technology progressing and merging in the decades to come: you can already use the ID cards for signing into everything from government portals, to utility service providers.

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#89
post #71
post #54

Discord could eat Patreon’s lunch overnight if they wanted to. Every Patreon I’ve been interested in was just a paywall for a Discord community.

Funny, none of the Patreons I'm subscribing to or been interested in, has been paywalls for Discord communities.

Half of them provide discord access and 75% a custom rss feed for a subscriber only podcast in my list. And frankly, I only take advantage of a couple of those. Mostly I just do it to throw a few dollars to stuff I like and don't use the perks. I can't be the only one.

Re: How to compete with Patreon

#90
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author starts the article with "take Patreon's lunch money". What lunch? The one VCs fed them? Is Patreon even profitable?

Exactly. The author also dumped on Patreon’s incredibly low processing fee. Who is going to compete with 5% plus payment processing? And they dumped how this processing fee is unsustainable and that the community was mad about changing it. What business is going to disrupt margins like that? That’s like saying “I’m going to sell stuff cheaper than Costco.” Good luck with that!

FYI Patreon does not offer the 5% deal to new creators anymore. Now it's 8%.
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