I wonder if you could make headway by requiring a minimum $15/month from patrons, to make it profitable after processing fees (assuming the $14.29 hypothesis is correct). Aside from the folks you want to directly patronize, the rest would go into a long-tail slush fund. I guess that would chase away the vast majority of the people that really do only want to donate $3/month or whatever though...
How to compete with Patreon
191–200 of 234 posts
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#192There's a lot of talk about tipping, consumers, etc. Being a Patron (which is what Patreon was trying to do) traditionally meant supporting someone, no matter what their output. If your tortured genius put out one work a year, so be it. If they popped out Sunflowers then even better! There doesn't have to be any quid pro quo at all. It's what we now call Basic Income financed by someone's surplus. Don't overthink it.…
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Re: How to compete with Patreon
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost all succesful creators on Patreon give you benefits for subscribing (early access to content, behind the scenes, etc.), so I don't see how you could possibly convince the IRS that it's a gift.
At EU there is a tax issue so you pay money + 23% VAT. It isn't consider a gift as you a gaining something (access to page) so you need to pay tax on that. This is one thing that bothers me with patronite and other platforms. I wish I could simply send a gift (without acces to anything) and not to pay another tax on already taxed money.
The flipside of that is that Patreon handles the ugly details of making sure the right amount of VAT / sales tax is paid on transactions - and from a creator's point of view this is a big part of their value proposition.
If creators had to administer that stuff on an individual basis they'd have no time left for creating.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#194There's a lot of talk about tipping, consumers, etc. Being a Patron (which is what Patreon was trying to do) traditionally meant supporting someone, no matter what their output. If your tortured genius put out one work a year, so be it. If they popped out Sunflowers then even better! There doesn't have to be any quid pro quo at all. It's what we now call Basic Income financed by someone's surplus. Don't overthink it.…
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Re: How to compete with Patreon
#195Re: How to compete with Patreon
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do smaller creators manage payments in the adult space? I thought it was impossible.
PayPal. All the risque stuff is behind the paywall. Home page of the website gives no indication of what's within.
When I was running $1m+ through PayPal a year for my TV torrent site they always wanted a working username and password for the site because competitors would email them claiming we were actually selling CSAM behind our login. They wanted to know exactly what was going on behind the wall. They also did not care in the least it was a torrent site (!).
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#197Earlier 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!
Exactly. Race to the bottom
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#198I'm not convinced by the arguments. Do the majority of creators want anonymity? I don't think so. They can set up a company and hide behind it if they do. Being an anonymous platform invites tax evasion and money laundering. Do you really want to deal with that? Why would I open up an API so that competitors can swoop in? What benefit that would provide to me? No one will use API over UI. The author clearly wants a d…
How would the API described help competitors? If I, as a creator, want to set up "Patrons of level X have access to this section of my website", and I build against the Patreon API to achieve that, surely that embeds me more in the Patreon ecosystem, not less?
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except these are not at all the same, and most users cannot fork or participate in PayPal/VISA protocols.
What difference does it make if they can fork or participate? The important decisions are made by Vitalik and a small group of insiders. Do users get any input on anything actually important like the Ethereum fork that bailed out the DAO investors?
Protocol and client development spans hundreds of contributors and independent researchers. The discussions and development is public; just look at the EIPs, or even submit one yourself.
Users (non-devs) have agency through the software they choose to run. If mainnet was seriously affected by some attack, users could choose to migrate to a healthier network run by honest nodes. This agency happens with every hard fork: the DAO, but also the PoS merge.
Re: How to compete with Patreon
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
CEX fees tend to be very low, much lower than payment processor fees that most Patreon users are paying right now. Coinbase and Kraken have no USDC withdrawal fees with ACH in the US, and nominal bank fees in many other countries. There is no fee exchanging USDC to USD on Coinbase, and Kraken’s trading fees are something like 0.26%.
so many of my frens (note the spelling) have had their coinbase accounts frozen or investigated when used as a pass through i’ve personally never had a problem with them or circle but my transaction volume is low. the normie can’t and won’t figure out the metamask to coinbase to fait part. it’s painful for those deep in crypto let alone the average patron supporter stop painting a rosy picture of shitty crypto ux
Nobody is claiming that crypto UX is currently superior to Patreon or Stripe.