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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

#111

Post by mandmandam »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #104
karaterobot wrote: post #99

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.

All of your assumptions - and the article's - are rooted in this profoundly unequal society. The very worst of us are making billions on our collective suffering, and will gladly keep murdering millions to keep it that way. That's the context missing from tfa.

Universal basic income, as an example, makes debates like this irrelevant. There may be other ways to run things that also make these arguments look like the anachronism they ought to be.

I believe a world with 99% less advertising is not only possible, but necessary.

And I believe a world where creators can create, without having to sell their souls, is not only possible but necessary.

And we best make that world manifest fast, before our window closes.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#112

Post by no_wizard »

I worked on a creator economy Salesforce-like product for the for businesses wanted to pay creators, run campaigns, interact with creators on a unified platform etc.

I have to say that Sponsorships make much more revenue than Patreon, however sponsors have gotten a bit smarter and not simply relied on view count anymore, they look at things like quality metrics, how the creators voice stands in the community and other aggregate factors (which we would factor for them in the product as a good estimate, we were an organic match making service in a way).

That is all to say that you can get much better sponsorships if you have a Patreon because it a very strong signal to companies about your viability in the community.

Its not required by any means, but it serves a purpose around this. I am 100% certain that most of the creators you might see with sponsorships and Patreons have realized that simply having a good active Patreon lets them up their sponsorship money and thats why many keep it around even when its revenue by comparison is a rounding error

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#113

Post by bombcar »

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…

It's quite informative to look/listen to old videos and podcasts, and see who the sponsors are.

So many of them are now-dead VC-backed startups, but here and there you find a sponsor that still exists (Squarespace, for example).

The food related ones are always the most amusing because you know it's all fake bullshit and the host doesn't actually use the product, because nobody does.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#114

Post by bombcar »

lewismenelaws wrote: post #88
kalleboo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That interesting since several YouTube creators I follow on Patreon (ok, so it's a self-selecting group) say the opposite. They've done sponsors a few times, but the sponsors are so much work to collaborate with (they take too long to approve videos, they want pointless changes done, etc) that they gave up on it and rely on Patreon instead where they can just create the videos they want to on their own schedule witho…

I’ve done sponsorships for a while now, we have contracts specifying that any changes they make is minor at most. Business sense is really important when dealing with this.

Same with all the various things - you have to balance the effort vs the reward.

One trick is to not do too much on Patreon to start, do the bare minimum so that you don't get overwhelmed later. E.g, give early access instead of a custom special show each week/month, etc.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#115

Post by bombcar »

nubinetwork wrote: post #63

Not a content creator, but I tried patreon and gave up after 2 years. It's as if asking for money in FOSS is a bad thing... I could try going commercial but I'm not really getting my hopes up. What are my options really? Try other platforms? Something tells me Kofi isn't going to be much better.

If you do open source, and there's even a chance a business might use it, at least sell something that looks business-related on the invoice generated.

I can expense $100-500 for something business-looking, even books, I can't easily expense $5 for "buy me a coffee"-type support things.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#116

Post by miragecraft »

What happens if the creator just say no?

You don't have to operate like a VC-funded company and look for infinite growth, if you want to stay small with cheap production then just stay small?

There's likely a silent majority that supported the creator because they are authentic and relatable.

Just make it clear to your supporters that's your objective and don't expect more.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#117

Post by grey_earthling »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #39
grey_earthling wrote: post #37

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…

>Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because they actually believe their system works. As in they are also funded by donations, or do the creators themselves pay for entry?

They say they are funded by donations:

> How is Liberapay funded? Are there fees?

> Liberapay does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by the donations to its own account. However there are payment processing fees.

https://liberapay.com/about/faq

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#118

Post by heavenlyblue »

plastic3169 wrote: post #94
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 loo…

Most of the small countries are not Denmark and they indeed do have shit, low-budget TV shows on all the time.

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#119

Post by Damogran6 »

bruceb wrote: 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.

Democratization is the act of empowering so many people that none of them can make a living at it anymore.

Pick a hobby of interest in Youtube and there'll be a top of a pyramid where people have the right mix of attractivenes/message/marketing...and then hundreds to thousands of other people scrounging for scraps. (see Full Time RV)

Re: The creator economy can't rely on Patreon

#120

Post by bombcar »

sct202 wrote: post #103
pompino wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the big problem - let's say you have 50 to 100 viewers who like you, to the point of kicking in about $70 a week (what you need to get to $80k) - that's pretty high. At that point, you have 100 pretty loyal people (more loyal than the average church-goer, for example) and the temptation to milk them could be quite strong.
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