Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things to know before starting a Patreon page

pencerw.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 67 posts

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#51

Post by krageon »

baud147258 wrote: post #47
majewsky wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always hilarious how broken the American banking system is that you need to pay over $1000/year worth of tooling to receive recurring payments from patrons. In the EU, you would just open a deposit-only checking account and paste its IBAN (International Bank Account Number) on your website, telling people to setup a recurring payment through their online banking and put their e-mail address or some other ID numb…

Are you sure the bank would accept something like this? Wouldn't they change the account to a business account, to deal with things like taxes?

A business account is 10 euros a month. They don't have anything to do with taxes.

You can have as many deposits as you want as an actual person. Banks do not "change your account" without your intervention and definitely not to a business account, which (legally) needs different information than a personal account would.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#52

Post by Traster »

I'm not really sure what Patreon is to be honest. It's not payment processing - they're literally passing those costs to you. It's not a community, there's no cross-patron promotion or discoverability. It seems like it's essentially just a bad version of square space that wants to charge you a percentage of your revenue instead of $20 a month. It had this exciting opportunity to build a platform, but I think that time has passed, they've chosen not to do it, so all they have left is some rather poor CMS with an exploitative pricing model.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#53

Post by Traster »

egypturnash wrote: post #25

Works fine for me, when I'm not struggling to make progress on my work due to waves vaguely at 2020 , Patreon lets me pay my rent by drawing comics about robot ladies with reality problems and cartoon animal space operas. YMMV obviously. I don't use any of its integrations, I just go to the web UI and upload a new page and type some stuff about it now and then, and also hit up my gloriously-unfashionable Wordpress-ba…

You're completely right that the paypal "Donate" button was a complete dead end. I suspect though, that Patreon has actually just changed the audience expectations around how they're going to support creators, and if you went to the trouble of throwing up a simple patreon style page on your own using one of those cheap template websites, that's probably much closer to the success of Patreon than the paypal button. I'm not actually saying you should do that - obviously for most small creators a small percentage of a small amount is totally reasonable. But Patreon have a real problem if anyone successful naturally grows out of their platform.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#54

Post by gadders »

jtbayly wrote: post #49
gadders wrote: post #43

4. If you are slightly more right wing than Mitt Romney, you will get banned.

I must have missed a story or two. Can you point me in the right direction for further research?

https://unherd.com/2019/01/the-politics-of-the-patreon-purge...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvqeev/crowdfunding-site-...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/the-alt...

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#55

Post by kalleboo »

I'm curious about the fee structure. I was under the impression that the vast majority of patronships were $1/mo. Maybe it's varies among media, since I only subscribe to YouTubers.

I pay $1/mo to like 15 different YouTubers. This adds up to $15/mo which to me is a reasonable price for entertainment. With patreon, I get billed once a month and their fees end up being like the article writes around 12%. If all these YouTubers switched to something like PayPal, now they'd be paying 30% fees on $1 payments instead.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#57

Post by deostroll »

I would add that Patreon is not built for creators from India. The most important thing for a creator like me is that money gets directly transferred to my bank account; not my credit card or my paypal account. It's a psychological thing. And I think it is a significant thing because that is our middle class culture. Here a significant portion of the population don't spend money on their credit cards like people in other countries do.

The only two options on patreon are a credit card and paypal. The latter is also not that much in vogue.

These are just my thoughts.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#58

Post by eythian »

Traster wrote: post #52

I'm not really sure what Patreon is to be honest. It's not payment processing - they're literally passing those costs to you. It's not a community, there's no cross-patron promotion or discoverability. It seems like it's essentially just a bad version of square space that wants to charge you a percentage of your revenue instead of $20 a month. It had this exciting opportunity to build a platform, but I think that tim…

It's a centralised (not great) publishing platform where the main feature is that it supports "micro" payments.

As a user (rather than a creator) I like it because I don't have to faff around with separate payments across multiple sites, just once a month my credit card is billed the sum of all the sponsorships I want to make and I get an email to tell me where it all went to. I will tend to think twice before setting up a recurring donation to something that's not on patreon, simply because it's something new for me to keep track of.

TBH I almost never use it to get to the actual content, it's usually for sponsoring podcasts etc. that I was already listening to.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#59

Post by cactus2093 »

stickfigure wrote: post #13

I would add - as a patron, the UI is horrible. The one thing I'd like, when I subscribe to someone, is a list of patron-only content so that I can slowly go back and watch/listen to/read past material. Instead the only option is an infinite-scroll style blog roll, which makes it extremely hard to go back and pick up where you left off. It's also impossible to navigate in anything other than inverse chronological orde…

I don’t follow what you mean by wanting a list of this content, then you go onto describe the list that they give you.

If it was just paginated and let you sort forward or reverse chronologically, is that all you’re asking for?

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#60

Post by vczf »

cactus2093 wrote: post #59
stickfigure wrote: post #13

I would add - as a patron, the UI is horrible. The one thing I'd like, when I subscribe to someone, is a list of patron-only content so that I can slowly go back and watch/listen to/read past material. Instead the only option is an infinite-scroll style blog roll, which makes it extremely hard to go back and pick up where you left off. It's also impossible to navigate in anything other than inverse chronological orde…

I don’t follow what you mean by wanting a list of this content, then you go onto describe the list that they give you. If it was just paginated and let you sort forward or reverse chronologically, is that all you’re asking for?

Not GP, but the web interface is bog slow at loading posts and scrolling the page (once enough posts are loaded). Also, basic navigation is broken by the infinite scroll, so it's easy to lose your place in the stream and have to waste time looking for it again.

As a workaround, there's an option to filter posts by month and year. I work my way backwards a month at a time.

Post reply on HN