191–200 of 277 posts
1. No free tier
2. Your views determine which artists get your money.
AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most overall views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's Scatman's World then I would have expected his estate to get all my money minus maybe 5% admin fees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you've ever tried to monetize NSFW content in a context that involves credit cards, you know it is an absolute nightmare. If Onlyfans is seriously NSFW, it may have no problems accepting credit cards but its days are numbered and it runs the risk of the credit card processors unilaterally refusing to service them anymore (especially Visa, IIRC) Patreon is at the scale where they would be exceedingly aware of this.…
By your logic, all NSFW online businesses online are vulnerable to their payment processing being taken away from them. Can this possibly be true?
Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.
They also banned Carl Benjamin, leading to a mass exodus. They justified this by citing his use of a racial slur in a YouTube video, although the word was not used in the context of a racial slur. In the USA there is some kind of Voldemort status given to this word where you cannot even use it out of context - it reminds me of that Jehovah sketch in Monty Python where that parody has now manifested itself into a real…
They're not consistent with this though, Jim Sterling is in their top 50 earners and said the same racial slur in a podcast
https://archive.org/details/Podtoid/Podtoid189.mp3 @ 4:30
Not defending Benjamin, because he's said some disgusting things but they obviously only have a problem with it when it suits them.
Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot. Like, a lot. A million a month or more. And I c…
I've never been in the position of taking VC funding, and I don't expect to be in my life, but if I were, I don't think I would. It seems to be a recipe for destroying your company ~5 years down the line. Perhaps the early founders get out with a bunch of money, and maybe that's the point, but I just don't think I'd want to do that to my employees and the people who came to depend on my company. If you don't have a s…
The returns are the VC’s problem. You can always start another company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A middleware that can be described as Wordpress with access control and Stripe integration, but worse in terms of performance and UX; somehow takes on $165 million in funding [1] and describes their business model as "not sustainable" [2]. Patreon is a low touch SaaS platform that charges up to 12% PLUS payment processing fees. They do not provide any meaningful level of discoverability: you must build your audience…
There seem to be a lot of businesses out there, that should be cash positive. Yet, the VC funded ones (also the ones you read about), aren't. No idea why, maybe easy access to VC money, and VCs themselves, cause them toneglect cash flow? I also saw this effect with Chinese manufaturersofsolar modules, whatever amount of cash they need, they get from Chinese banks. In their day to day operations, cash flow doesn't rea…
I feel I need to expand that because that's going to read to a lot of people as "Patreon shouldn't need more than 20 or 50 people." But it actually makes sense to me that Patreon could have 250 people. There's plenty of ways for VC-fueled growth to indeed take over this market and become the household name as VC-style growth intends to do. The problem is that what I see from them doesn't seem to justify that. The complaints that people are posting in other comments have been like that for years. Discoverability of artists is awful. Obvious places to list patron-only media are missing, let alone any sort of hosting. Community features are very perfunctory. Their outreach seems to be stalled out; the top of the patron chart seems to gas out weirdly, where I think there ought to many dozens of people making $10K/month by now by the way the economics of this should work. Patreon today hardly seems any different than it was three or four years ago. As a startup with a couple hundred people, I'd expect to see it moving fast and breaking things and rolling out new features every couple of months, if not weeks, not being so stagnant.
I mean, I've worked for a "startup" [1] that had ~200 employees. It had several products, each of which pushed significant updates around once every two months, sales staff, support staff, physical manufacturing staff... it moved fast and sometimes broke things. In any six month period you could take any of the products it had and there were clear changes and improvements, probably a new model, probably starting up a new product since then. Totally different business, my experience is not entirely applicable of course, but Patreon from the outside feels like a business that is already running a bare bones staff as it treads water while the business winds down, not an exciting startup getting things done. Where's the features? Where's the improvements? I don't just mean techical, either, I mean business improvements too (better deals for the users over time, better business partnerships for the aforementioned content hosting, etc.) Why is it still possible to effectively set up a feature-parity competitor to Patreon in a few months with just a few people? Shouldn't they have both technical and business features that make that harder by now? Where's the output of all those people's work? I dunno. I don't expect to be able to see all of it anyhow... but I don't see much at all.
If that ~200 person startup had suddenly been switched to working on Patreon, in a year we'd have a good forum (even if we had to write it from scratch), we'd have some sort of custom content hosting, we'd have listened to our customers and built what they wanted more... & I'm judging it against what we could have done 15 years ago at the time. Today a decent prototype of some of what I'm talking about is 10 minutes with CloudFormation or equivalent, and then you can tune from there (since you may not be able to afford to directly ship that).
[1]: I can understand if you don't want to call that a startup any more.
I think there should be a music service that works exactly like Spotify / Apple Music / Google Music but with these differences: 1. No free tier 2. Your views determine which artists get your money. AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most overall views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's Scatman's World then I would have expected his estate to get a…
>This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones >Still, it’s peculiar timing for Patreon, given the company touted an increase in new memberships during the first three weeks of March. Peculiar indeed. So what is a factor not yet mentioned? 69 days ago, I was net downvoted after pointing out specifically what trouble was coming for Patreon. https://news.ycombinator…
Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.
Do you have any numbers to back this up with ? I think you are likely right but if there is any data on this then I would love to see it.
I remember seeing an article where the Patreon CEO said it wasn't sustainable a year or so ago, was this after they started banning nudes ?
Also I recall that Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and others left the platform due to censorship, which I believe happened around the same time as the CEO statement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Netflix's UI is total shit. It is as if they are purposefully trying to keep it that way to hide the fact that most of the movies they have are garbage and the only way to get people to watch those is to give them some odd "compatibility" with your taste rating.
I totally agree that they're anti-user. But they have a dilemma. Imagine a nicely formatted table of Netflix movies and shows available in your country. New, potential users can quickly find out if it's worth signing up. Existing users can quickly realize that maybe the service is not worth it. I also have a theory that if you're stuck looking for something to watch and you've already spent enough time on their platf…
Search is a binary proposition. Netflix either has the content you're searching for, or it does not. Because Netflix is optimizing for total time spent on platform, this is a bad proposition, from their perspective.
That's why the Netflix home screen has become a circus of autoplaying videos, "recommended for you" queues, and "watch it again." The goal, from a UX perspective, is to stimulate you into watching something you didn't come there wanting to watch.