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Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

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Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#91

Post by spike021 »

crescentfresh wrote: post #90

I'm not too up-to-speed with Patreon, is it like twitch but for any type of creative content?

Not so much like Twitch, IMO.

Patreon is purely for gathering a fanbase with open communication between fans and creators and the ability to share content in exchange for support of the creators.

So a musician might link to private music videos on youtube with the financial supporters on Patreon first. Or they might provide a special .mp3 that is only available there.

As far as I know, Patreon doesn't actually have the capability to host videos itself (I could be wrong since I haven't looked at it in a while).

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#94

Post by wonderwonder »

jerf wrote: post #64
toomuchtodo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Patreon can't literally be replaced in the legendary "HN denizen claims to be able to replace $X in a weekend", because dealing with taking payments takes longer than that. Stripe literally has an offering just for this use case: https://stripe.com/connect Forum + Stripe Connect + CDN for Video (Cloudfront, Fastly, Whatevs) = Patreon replacement. You could literally replace it with a weekend Hackathon.

I observe that "Stripe Connect" does not have a "click here to purchase" button but a "Contact Sales" button. I think if you dedicated an entire weekend to the task of being ready to accept credit cards through your website on a subscription basis that you would not be accepting cash on Monday. I seriously doubt that this is just a click-through exercise. I seriously hope this is not just a click-through exercise.

I have used connect a number of years ago. I think it may take a week or so to get approved. (relatively painless process) Once approved it took me maybe a week to get the payment functionality working. I was a much lesser developer then as it was essentially one of my first forays into api's and web development.

After approval a skilled developer could absolutely bang out the core functionality in a weekend.

Using regular stripe for direct payments is even easier and you can have a fully functional payment system / shopping cart in a few hours.

My above statements though in no way reduces what Patreon has done, they excelled at execution and driving traffic to their service as well as excellent usability. No small feat and not easily reproducible. Much the same as the way Facebook succeeded and myspace and friendster failed. Vision and incredible execution.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#95

Post by H1Supreme »

nobodyorother wrote: post #62
pc86 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so they should make a profit but not too much.

It's the Tiger Woods problem, also known as Focus on Your Core: TW gets video game endorsements and makes ungodly piles of money because he's a great golfer. When he focuses on making new games and supermodels instead of golfing, his game suffers and all the perks that came because of the good golf game go away. ...Like how he hasn't had his name on a golf video game in years. Essentially: pursuit of profit when it u…

What? Tiger Woods got paid money for them to use his name on those games. He didn't work on them. lol.

Furthermore, he played his best golf when he was out whoring around.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#96

Post by hobofan »

arikr wrote: post #86

Based on https://patreonhq.com/creators-have-made-100m-on-patreon-ddf... , seems like they are growing at about 2.4x/year. They will do $7.5 million in net revenue in 2017. Then assuming the growth rate doesn't slow (remember, growth rates usually get slower over time), $18 million in net revenue in 2018, and $43 million in net revenue in 2019. Net revenue, not net income. $450mm seems overvalued.

I'd not be surprised if their growth this year is even bigger than last year. 2017 is the year of the Youtube Adpocalypse and more and more creators are looking for alternate, more stable, revenue streams.

There is still a lot of potential of revenue coming in from existing big content creators switching to the platform. When Philip DeFrance started his Patreon a few months ago he became the #2 most sponsored creator in Patreon in a few days, and his channel is "only" ranked ~350th by number of subscribers.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#97

Post by notahacker »

otalp wrote: post #72
tomp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "Nazis" you mean Jordan Peterson? Because it's the likes of him that are getting banned - in his case temporarily, thank god, but non-ultra-leftists without large social following are doomed.

>but non-ultra-leftists without large social following are doomed Completely false, "left" YouTube channels I know of: like Philosophy Tube and Contrapoints are having serious problems with their videos being demonetised and removed. Videos which even mildly critisize capitalism are being demonetised, it's pretty much impossible to run a left wing YouTube channel without Patreon. Virtually all political videos are de…

It's perfectly possible to run the channel. You're just not going to make any money from it.

Can't really blame advertisers for not wanting to associate their brands with political content, especially if it's as toxic as a Jordan Peterson rant on gender, and can question the motives of anyone whose decision on whether to critique capitalism or not is based on whether they can get enough juicy ad dollars for doing so.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#99

Post by j_s »

robk wrote: post #93

Is there a porn angle here? Seems like from Googling there's a decent amount of sexual content. I wonder if this is like Tumblr with a seedy underside of adult oriented growth.

I think it's reasonable to classify it as "don't ask, don't tell".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14927517

I've never seen anything more effective at enabling content that is routinely censored by credit card companies. [...] Patreon is a layer of abstraction that has enabled a startling opening up of opportunity for censored content, and that's shown in the NSFW side of Patreon.

Re: Patreon raises big round at $450M valuation

#100

Post by 3pt14159 »

payne92 wrote: post #82

I'm still wondering why Youtube isn't ALL OVER this model. Given that many are getting paid for publishing videos of what they do, it would be a great feature.

The answer is that Google is terrible at getting non-advertising revenue sources online.
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