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The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#91

Post by lewismenelaws »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #3
lewismenelaws wrote: post #2

I’m a full-time content creator. I feel like patreon/newsletters/paid communities are more hassle than anything. When I look at the pros and cons of every single revenue strategy, sponsorships has the highest gain and least cons (for me). Sponsors pay at least 10x what ad revenue pays, I don’t have to ask my community for money and the audience are likely to skip the ad anyway if they didn’t want to watch it. Patreon…

What does the typical sponsorship pay, and what factors does it scale with?

It depends. I have a large following across short form platforms like TikTok and Instagram too. Usually for an integration (basically 1-2 minute ad) it ranges between 8-14k. For a short form video usually around the same.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#92

Post by ahzhou »

electroly wrote: post #7
lewismenelaws wrote: post #2

I’m a full-time content creator. I feel like patreon/newsletters/paid communities are more hassle than anything. When I look at the pros and cons of every single revenue strategy, sponsorships has the highest gain and least cons (for me). Sponsors pay at least 10x what ad revenue pays, I don’t have to ask my community for money and the audience are likely to skip the ad anyway if they didn’t want to watch it. Patreon…

I see the same few sponsorships constantly: Skillshare, Brilliant, Nebula, Hello Fresh, BetterHelp, Raid: Shadow Legends. I like to guess which one it's going to be when the creator starts telling a made-up story that leads into the sponsorship segment. The fact that it's the same ones, over and over again, across a wide spectrum of channels, makes me think that sponsorship is not yet a proven reliable source of inco…

Its a two sided marketplace and companies only care about the conversion they get from different channels. If demand dries up, it will be reflected in more attractive pricing - I don’t think it’s likely that the entire market pulls out.

FWIW - it seems like the campaigns are working. You seem to be familiar with the brands and someone below chimed in on how one particular brand is great. Multiply that by the viewership - that’s definitely a win.

Some quick (unverified) research tells me that YouTuber marketing pays somewhere in the range of 30-70 CPM. You can pretty easily calculate that against google AdWords with reasonable conversion assumptions to decide if it’s worth it.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#93

Post by monkey_monkey »

mdorazio wrote: post #80
tomcam wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you expect it to be?

White dude making coding videos with the usual modern algorithm-inspired cringe thumbnails and titles. It definitely seems to be working, though - over 500k subs is impressive.

500k subs and a very low level of actual views...

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#94

Post by plastic3169 »

kalleboo wrote: post #26

This doesn't sound as dire to me as the author makes it out to be. I think it sounds totally reasonable that you need 20,000 or even 100,000 engaged followers to be able to make it full time off creating content. I don't see how, even with advertising or sponsors, a smaller number of followers could ever pay a livable salary (out of 20,000 people, how many of those mattresses are you really going to sell?). It used t…

> It used to be that a TV show needed viewership numbers of millions of viewers to be profitable, this is still a massive democratization of content.

That is somewhat US pov. Small countries with small populations did and still do domestic content all the time and hitting even 100s of thousands viewers is absolutely massive if your population is in single millions. Sure it’s not game of thrones budget, but if you look something like hit danish tv it’s clearly as professional and high quality.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#95

Post by MomoXenosaga »

lewismenelaws wrote: post #87
_v7gu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much extra work is Patreon if you don't offer any extras to people who sponsor on there? Most sponsored content is either completely orthogonal to the channel and its contents which is quite iffy if the creator is positioning themselves a someone with judgement their audience can trust (non-gaming channels advertising Raid: Shadow Legends, or non-tech channels advertising NordVPN), or actively make me lose respec…

I’m sure none but then I would feel guilt taking money from my audience. I know it might be silly, but sponsors makes everything free for everyone.

Sponsors want something in return. Reminds me of Rembrandt who got into trouble because he didn't beautify his clients enough and went for art instead...

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#96

Post by earthling8118 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #77
twic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean it wasn't profitable, just that the network thought another show in that slot might be more profitable. Talking about audience thresholds for profitability of TV shows is a bit pointless though, because there's so much variation in how much they cost to make. Effects-heavy action shows are ~30 million dollars an episode at the moment. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is ~1.5 million. Gameshows and…

> That doesn't mean it wasn't profitable, just that the network thought another show in that slot might be more profitable. Another show in that slot being more profitable does mean that the show already in there isn't. The time slot is a resource that the show consumes; if it can't afford to pay for that resource, then it's unprofitable.

That doesn't mean that it couldn't pay for the slot. Just that something could turn out more money. Many of us value things beyond pure profit at all cost.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#97

Post by sickofparadox »

ehnto wrote: post #71
Ekaros wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nebula is bit weird on that list as my understanding is that it is somehow creator owned and controlled, but rest yeah... I also wonder how long this model will operate, the advertising spend on these products must be significant and I wonder if it is sustainable in long run. Specially with these interest rates or in possible recession...

I don't exactly know how it works but creators tend to call it "my streaming platform" and that feels a little bit like a marketing angle. For the longest time I thought Adam Neely had literally funded and built Nebula.

It is a marketing angle, Wendover Productions is the actual creator of the service and has a video about how they bootstrapped the service and got it to the size it is currently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alqt6RCEWdM

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#98

Post by Workaccount2 »

pjc50 wrote: post #34
kalleboo wrote: post #26

This doesn't sound as dire to me as the author makes it out to be. I think it sounds totally reasonable that you need 20,000 or even 100,000 engaged followers to be able to make it full time off creating content. I don't see how, even with advertising or sponsors, a smaller number of followers could ever pay a livable salary (out of 20,000 people, how many of those mattresses are you really going to sell?). It used t…

Indeed. People need to look at the numerator and the denominator. How many millions of content creators are there out there? How much disposable income do fans really have? The advantage of Patreon-like systems is they let the creators "whale hunt", by taking much larger amounts of money from a small number of more engaged fans. > Eventually, her viewers were asking for more recipes, more elaborate productions, and f…

>The advantage of Patreon-like systems is they let the creators "whale hunt", by taking much larger amounts of money from a small number of more engaged fans

I don't know, most people it seems block ads nowadays, and if you ask them how they compensate creators, they bend over backwards talking about how much they love Patreon.

So either people are either greedy and lying, or Patreon is actually pretty viable.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#99

Post by karaterobot »

Subscription services like Patreon are the only way I give people money unless they sell a product I want. I'm not going to watch commercials, and I'll skip sponsored videos or segments every time. If the idea is that not enough people use Patreon for you to make money, then go ahead and run advertisements, I'll just move on down the road to someone else. If the idea is that Patreon in particular is bad—that it takes too big of a cut, or doesn't have enough features—then tell me what other service to use. But the model where many fans directly support creators they like via small contributions on a recurring basis, that's the one we need to work if there's going to be a creator or artist economy in the future, so we should probably figure out how to make it work rather than tossing it out. The alternative of just more and more advertisements being shoved into everything is not the world we want to live in, so let's make the better option work.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#100

Post by _fat_santa »

electroly wrote: post #7
lewismenelaws wrote: post #2

I’m a full-time content creator. I feel like patreon/newsletters/paid communities are more hassle than anything. When I look at the pros and cons of every single revenue strategy, sponsorships has the highest gain and least cons (for me). Sponsors pay at least 10x what ad revenue pays, I don’t have to ask my community for money and the audience are likely to skip the ad anyway if they didn’t want to watch it. Patreon…

I see the same few sponsorships constantly: Skillshare, Brilliant, Nebula, Hello Fresh, BetterHelp, Raid: Shadow Legends. I like to guess which one it's going to be when the creator starts telling a made-up story that leads into the sponsorship segment. The fact that it's the same ones, over and over again, across a wide spectrum of channels, makes me think that sponsorship is not yet a proven reliable source of inco…

I think sponsorships work better for more niche products on niche podcasts / YT channels. One great example I can think of are the sponsorships on the Syntax Podcast[1]. IIRC LogRocket was a sponsor a few years ago, I gave it a try based off their ad and I've been a happy customer ever since. Other products they rep are things like Sentry and Sanity and I think those companies are definitely seeing an ROI because they keep coming back.

The problem with the sponsorships you mentioned is they are all broad scale B2C where "everyone" is a potential customer. So you end up with channels that have nothing to do with the product promoting the product and it just comes up as disingenuous. When the hosts of Syntax are telling me that I should try out Sentry, Sanity or any other product in the web dev space, I'm much more confident that it's a legit endorsement based on experience rather than just reading the script.

[1]: https://syntax.fm/

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