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The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

joanwestenberg.com

101–110 of 168 posts

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install SponsorBlock! With YT Premium and that, my video experience is completely ad-free.

Install an ordinary ad blocker and your video experience will be completely ad-free without needing YT Premium.

Sorry, but an ordinary ad blocker will not block the ads embedded in the video.

Apparently "SponsorBlock" actually solves that. Haven't of it before, but the description is promising.

>>> SponsorBlock lets you skip over sponsors, intros, outros, subscription reminders, and other annoying parts of YouTube videos. SponsorBlock is a crowdsourced browser extension that lets anyone submit the start and end times of sponsored segments and other segments of YouTube videos. Once one person submits this information, everyone else with this extension will skip right over the sponsored segment.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install SponsorBlock! With YT Premium and that, my video experience is completely ad-free.

Install an ordinary ad blocker and your video experience will be completely ad-free without needing YT Premium.

With YT Premium the people you watch actually get paid even if you skip the ads.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#103
post #27
post #6

The TL;DR of this is basically there are too many people creating content. Best thing that creators could do is tell other creators to quit. The author doesn't say this part but really that is what it comes down to. Instead she offers a generic advice about diversifying the medium of delivery.

I wonder if monetization with a low subscriber base isn't as hard as we imagine. Afterall, you just need to net like 80K in a non HCOL city to live very comfortably. (assuming no employees, or office rent, or expensive production)

To monetize a small subscriber base you have to pull a sizable $x per active user that almost requires you to become a little scummy at best. I've seen a lot of personal finance influencers (FIRE especially) pull sizeable amounts of money because their niches are pretty favorable, but they end up pushing weird financial products and courses for $Xk on how to make money blogging/real estate/some other business.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#104

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…

Reality is the vast majority of people will absolutely refuse to pay content creators. Even legit newspapers with large staffs can’t get people to subscribe. Most people are ok with ads though. Your best bet is some sort of split where a small niche try’s to go subscription because there’s no chance of a widespread content creator subscription service that can replace ads.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say sponsor do you mean a 1 minute advertisement in a 10 minute video where you say "Today's video is sponsored by ABC Corporation, they make this useful product to do XYZ" or do you mean a video where you got a free product and paid money to do a promotional video about the product? I've seen both and I don't mine the advertisement style but when someone makes an entire video about a product that they got f…

It’s different for everyone, but for me, it’s similar to the 1 minute section like you mentioned. I integrate it within my video. Not sure if this is what you’re referring to, but if someone doesn’t disclaim that something was sent to them or paid to say it. Highly illegal. Reason I say Patreon is a lot more work is because usually you need to build an incentive with Patreon as well (community, BTS, extra content).

The incentive doesn't have to be meaningfully extra work though, many of the creators I follow just have the patreon incentive be stuff like getting access to videos a week early, getting access to a discord to hangout in or if they're streamers, having one of their streams each month limited to supporters.

But on top of that, I have never really thought much about the incentives anyway, I join the patreons/youtube memberships of the creators I really enjoy because I enjoy them. For the vast majority of them I don't even pay attention to if they're delivering on their incentives as long as their regular content continues to be enjoyable.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#108

Patreon knows that Patreon doesn't work - they don't fund themselves by donations on Patreon; instead they take a cut of other people's donations. And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected. Liberapay's model seems much more sustainable - donations only, no rewards; Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because…

Patreon also takes VC funding on a regular basis; if you ask Jack Conte what his plan is for when they come back around looking for profit he will just blow a bunch of sunshine up your ass about how all these investors are just totally great people who believe in supporting the arts.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#109
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are one of today's 10,000. https://sponsor.ajay.app/ And if you have android: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular

Extensions like sponsor block don't help when entire videos are centered around promoting a product. A very popular mountain bike channel I used to follow, GMBN, for example, pretty much only makes videos in order to promote sponsors. The sponsors drive the very content we're here for, it's not just 30 second spots.

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