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Sibylla Bostoniensis
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How to Compete with Patreon [New Media, Tech, Patreon]
Sep. 28th, 2023 04:00 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html
Another post that started as a rant on Mastodon. This has been
adapted and expanded further.
-----------------
It is incredibly frustrating that the only thing more stupid than
Patreon is all the alleged Patreon substitutes that clearly don't
even understand what Patreon does.
Pro tip: Patreon has no meaningful competitors, and also it sucks, so
there's a huge opportunity for somebody to kick sand in its face and
take its lunch money. But to do that you would have to understand
what actually Patreon does that is worth it to creators to allow
Patreon to take 5% of their proceeds (and then pass on to them a
second 5% in payment processing fees).
Because I want there to be Patreon competitors, I will explain what
Patreon actually does, so if somebody would like to actually compete
with Patreon they will know what they have to actually accomplish.
Brace yourself. Some of this is a little complicated to explain.
And before explaining it, allow me to observe: these are the sorts of
features you get when somebody who actually really understands the
usage case designs the platform. Patreon was founded by and designed
by an actual goddamn artist - a musician and music video maker - who
understood what artists and other creators actually need out of a
platform.
1) Pseudonym support.
Attention dumbasses: stage names and pen names have been realities of
the business of being an artist for over 2,000 years.
Creators are not shoe salesmen.
The most basic functionality of any platform that intends to support
creators earning money online - the basic, rock-bottom, sine qua non
affordance - is people doing business using pseudonyms.
What that actually means is the platform has to allow creators (the
people who charge money) to be pseudonymous (to use their stage name
or pen names) in all of their interactions with their patrons (the
people paying the money), and the platform, which is legally required
to know the legal identity of the creator and have on file their
relevant tax ID numbers (e.g. SSN in the US), needs to keep that
legal identity confidential.
Relatedly, it is not enough for your creator patronization platform
to have fully supported pseudonyms. You must make that abundantly
specific and clear, and a commitment that you make to your creators,
up front. Ideally, it's part of your elevator pitch to perspective
creators.
Patreon falls short of the standard but comes closer than any other
payment accepting platform - as far as I know at all, of any type.
If you want to pull business away from Patreon, you will not do it if
your platform, like umpteen zillion other idiot platforms, assumes
that the creator is going to use their wallet name, and does not
treat that wallet name as confidential information.
Listen, if all we wanted was a subscription platform that exposed our
wallet names, we could have been using PayPal subscriptions all this
time. What would we need you for?
Speaking of subscriptions....
2) By-works funding model support.
Patreon had two foundational funding models it supported, and while
Patreon has introduced a variety of complexities and alternatives,
these remain its core offerings.
One of these is trivial: monthly subscriptions. Like I said, creators
can get that from PayPal if they don't care about pseudonyms. Every
supposed Patreon substitute is just a monthly subscription service.
But Patreon's much more interesting funding model is not by-month,
it's by-work.
This is where things get very hard for outsiders to understand. For
emotional reasons.
People have trouble believing that this is actually so, but it is.
This is the funding model I use.
The by-work funding model is where patrons pledge their support not
by the month, but by the instance of whatever it is that the creator
makes. If the creator makes stories, it's per story; if the creator
makes music videos, it's per music video. The patrons pledge a
certain amount of money for each work the creator makes.
If you're thinking, "but how many works does a creator ship each
month?": no, that's the whole point of by-works. It can be any
number. The creator makes no particular commitment to their patrons
as to how many creations they're going to ship. They may ship no
creations in a month, so in that month their patrons are charged
nothing. Or they may ship one thing. Or 10 things. Or a 100 things.
(My best month was 10 things.)
You might reasonably be thinking, "Migod, what protects patrons from
getting socked with an enormous bill because a creator ships many
more things then they expected?"
Yeah, Patreon has a solution for that too: patrons can set a monthly
upper limit for how much they're willing to support a given creator.
If the creator exceeds that limit, that's fine, that patron is not
charged in excess of that amount.
(Personally, I warn all of my patrons to set that limit, because
every once in a while I go off on a productivity tear.)
This is where things get challenging. If you imagine this system, if
you try to walk through in your mind how this would work, it will
probably occur to you to ask the question, "Okay, but... How does the
system know that you shipped something?"
Yeah about that. I log into Patreon, and I basically make a little
blog post that says "Look! I made the thing you pledged to pay me
for!" with the associated ticky box for "Pay me for this" ticked, and
click submit.
That's it.
Patreon and no way, shape, or form attempts to validate that I
actually shipped the thing. That is between me and my patrons. And,
personally, I'm smart enough not to use Patreon as my delivery
mechanism, so delivery of what I am paid for happens through a
completely other channel.
There will be more on that subsequently (probably item three on this
list of Patreon competition sine qua nons).
So you might be wondering, "but that's basically just a 'pay me'
button, more or less directly connected to the patrons' credit cards!
"
Yes. Precisely. I mean, it doesn't charge them until the end of the
month, but yes.
"But what's to keep a creator from just hammering the 'pay me'
button?"
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Like I said previously, individual patrons can set their own monthly
maximums. But really the only thing that prohibits the creator from
doing that is that it will piss off their patrons, and if the patrons
don't feel that they're getting their money's worth, they can cancel
their patronage. Which they will do.
And that's totally sufficient.
It helps to get over the emotional hump if you realize that it's not
actually any different than invoicing somebody through PayPal. If
somebody hires you to landscape their yard, and you send them an
itemized invoice through PayPal's invoice system, PayPal isn't going
to check to make sure that you actually edged the lawn and planted
the begonias like agreed.
To my knowledge - and, boy, would I like to be wrong about this -
there is not a single other platform in the world that supports the
by-works model that Patreon offers. [Edit: Found one! Tipeee.com. It
charges 8% instead of 5%, and has some breathtakingly invasive
personal documentation requirements, but it's there.]
To be crystal clear, it entails:
* Patrons pledge to pay $n per work, on an ongoing basis, in advance
of the work being done.
* The creator then generates works on an ad hoc basis, not to any set
schedule, and each time they do, they check in with the UI to bill
their patrons.
* The platform aggregates these bills, and submits them to the
patrons' credit cards monthly.
Part of the reason this is hard to understand is that people who are
not creators (and even some who are) think of what Patreon affords as
"selling stuff". Which is incorrect.
There are two problems with the selling stuff paradigm: the selling
and the stuff.
First and foremost, Patreon does not require you to sell anything. I
mean, you can use it for that. Lots of creators do.
I don't.
I use Patreon for patronage instead. Kind of like it says on the tin.
So this is the next item on the list.
3) Non quid pro quo patronage
Patreon is not a platform for selling things, even though you can use
it that way, and Patreon seems to prefer it be used that way.
But Patreon can also be used to collect support that is not tied to
directly providing the person who pays the money with something just
for themselves.
There is an entire little universe of people using Patreon to be
funded to do good works in the world. These may be open source
contributors. They may be activists. They may be journalists or
bloggers. They do not make things that they exchange for money with
the people who pledge them on Patreon.
Their patrons do not pay these creators to give things to them. Their
patrons pay these creators to give things to the world: to release
code for anyone to use, to engage in activism that changes the world
for the better, or to write things that anyone can read.
I'm one of them. The number one reason I signed up for Patreon as my
funding platform nine years ago, was because it was literally the
only way of funding my writing that did not entail my selling it: my
withholding it only for those people who paid me for it.
People get confused here. I'm not talking about my intellectual
property rights. I'm not worried somebody is going to steal my
copyright in my writing. (I mean it's a legitimate concern but that's
not what I'm talking about here.)
I'm talking about the very basic nature of what it means to sell a
work of writing, as a book or a magazine or a stand-alone article in
a PDF.
If I put my writing into documents that then I sell on Amazon or
Kajabi, then the only people who get to see it are the people who pay
me for them.
That is the antithesis of what I want to do. What I want to do is
write openly on the internet where anyone can read what I write.
Where what I write can be cited by anyone who wants to refer to it in
any internet discussion.
The audience of my writing is not my patrons, and it is not just the
people who pay me for it. It's the whole world.
And that, quite explicitly, is what my patrons pay me to do.
Most would-be competitors to Patreon think it's some sort of DRM
system. There are definitely people who try to use Patreon that way,
and it works about as well as any DRM system does.
We have lots of other "pay us to access this document" platforms,
starting with the 800 lb gorilla, Amazon. If you think there is some
benefit to wedding a membership system to a document storefront, I
think you're probably wrong. I could be convinced otherwise - since
I'm not actually in that business, I assume there's a lot I don't
know about it - but my guess is having to join a club just for the
privilege of buying a PDF introduces friction that reduces revenue.
Heaven knows I resent it as a customer.
(All that said, I reserve the right to go off and write books that I
will sell for money, something I absolutely someday intend to do. But
that is a very different project.)
And this brings us to number four....
4) An audience relationship management system, ideally one with an
API one can build against.
Here's where you can really kick Patreon's ass in the market for
alternatives, because Patreon's game has been slipping very badly in
this area.
I just invented the term "audience relationship management" system,
by analogy to "customer relationship management" system. Like I said
patrons are not the same thing as customers. But if you're a creator
you do need to keep track of them, and you do need to keep track of
their payments, and you do need to be able to communicate with them.
Also you would probably like to be able to tell what's going on with
your money: with the amounts pledged, the amounts received, the fees
deducted, the credit cards declined, stuff like that. You might also
appreciate some analytics.
Patreon's infrastructure for doing all of this is kind of falling
apart. In some places they've just taken things down rather than fix
bugs.
The really big example of this, I'm not wholly familiar with, because
I don't really use it, and I was hearing about it and its problems
from other people on the creator forums that then patreon took down.
I'm talking about Patreon's API.
So here's what I think I know, and my information is kind of old, and
the pandemic happened, and I wasn't directly involved myself, so I
might be misremembering.
But as I understand it, it goes something like this:
Patreon has the affordance of allowing creators to establish "tiers",
where the creator associates certain dollar amounts of pledges with
certain package deals they put together. Patreon has - had - has - an
API that creators can have their own software query, so that the
creator's other systems can tell in real time whether one of their
users is a paid up patron over on Patreon, and if so at what tier
level.
So for instance, if you (a creator) wanted to run a private
discussion forum on the web somewhere just for your patrons, and
you're willing to do some programming, you could implement a system
whereby your discussion forum software checked in with Patreon.com
when someone logged in, comparing their email address with the one on
file for patrons, to see whether or not they should be let in in the
first place, and if so which forum features they should have access
to, based on their tier.
Well, you could.
They were creators whose entire business models were based on this. I
gather there were also a third party integrations, companies that
actually developed against the Patreon API so that their own services
could be integrated with creators' campaigns on Patreon - that is to
say there were companies that made products that they sold to
creators, that relied on the API.
Well Patreon decided that they're not supporting the API anymore.
Apparently, from the screaming on the (now long defunct) creator
forums, for a while there it looked like Patreon was going to turn it
off. The Patreon walked that back and said that they wouldn't turn
the API off, but they wouldn't be supporting it anymore, and they
wouldn't be doing any further development on it.
So in a really important sense, these creators (and these companies
that had third party integrations) were (are) using Patreon.com as an
identity server. But not just an identity server. It doesn't just
serve the identity of patrons, but their status as patrons. That's
part of what makes it "audience relationship management".
If your supposed Patreon competitor does not support doing that,
well, you're certainly not going to seduce all of the creators
clinging to the sinking wreck of Patreon's API into abandoning ship
on your account, are you?
Patreon also has removed key functionality from within the web
interface that creators used to tell what's going on - particularly
if their campaign is by-works, as discussed previously.
More generally, Patreon's UI for creators is really kind of terrible.
I could itemize why but we'd be here for a while. A company could go
far that offered the same services as Patreon, but let creators
actually see what was happening to their money.
For instance, the creator UI used to have a page that listed all of
the works a by-works creator had submitted, that listed, for each
work, how much money was pledged in the first place, how much revenue
was actually collected (declined credit card charges are a thing),
how much Patreon's cut was, how much Patreon took out to pass on to
the payment processor, and how much you, the creator, would actually
net.
They took that away.
Build one of those, especially in conjunction with supporting the
by-work funding model, and you will be very attractive to a whole
bunch of bitter Patreon refugees.
So there you go: four crucial aspects of what Patreon is ACTUALLY up
to - what its value proposition is to the creators that choose to use
it - that you're not going to be able to compete with Patreon unless
you implement, and ideally improve upon.
-----------------
P.S. I would be remiss if I didn't also mention a fifth thing that
Patreon did which was part of its secret sauce, the feature nobody
realized Patreon was giving us until they tried to take it away and
broke everything: charge bundling.
In December 2017, Patreon announced that they were changing the rules
of the game, in a way they tried to pass off as advantageous to
creators, but was something very else under the hood. What that was,
well, nobody's quite sure because of how much lying Patreon did and
because of how they swore parties they told things to to secrecy.
What Patreon had been doing up to that point was if a patron pledged
more than one creator, then Patreon would submit a single charge to
the payment processor for the total amount that patron owed all of
the creators they had pledged for that month.
What they proposed to do instead was run a charge for each creator a
patron supported. A patron who pledged three creators would be
charged three times in a month.
That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is. Because the fee
structure of the payment processors includes, in addition to a
percentage rate, a per transaction flat fee of $0.30.
And because the average patron pledge across Patreon is less than $2.
So where previously a patron who pledged three creators each a dollar
a month would have had a total of 39 cents deducted in payment
processor fees, leaving the creators to split $2.61 three ways, under
the new system there would be a total of 99 cents deducted, leaving
the creators to split $2.01 three ways.
Put another way, for a patron who supports three creators each for a
dollar, the payment processing fee is 13%. Patreon was proposing
making it 33%.
Only, no, what they actually proposed to do was even worse than that.
Patreon tried to play a shell game with how fees were charged. The
system they had deducted fees out of whatever patrons pledged, as I
described in the above example: if a patron pledges a dollar, the
payment processor fee would be deducted from that dollar, along with
Patreon own fee, with the creator receiving the difference.
In addition to unbundling the charges, such that there would be
dramatically higher payment processor fees, Patreon explains that
their plan was not to deduct it from what was pledged, but to add it.
No longer would the amount that a patron pledged be the amount that
their credit card would be charged. The amount a patron will be
charged would be the amount they pledged plus the payment processor
fee. If you pledged a dollar, you would be charged a $1.33 - the
dollar you pledged plus 2.9% (3C/) plus the 30C/ flat fee.
(Corrigendum: Ooops, I left out Patreon's own fee, the 5% they take.
So if you pledged a dollar, they were proposing that they'd charge
you $1.38: the dollar you pledged plus 2.9% (3C/) plus the 30C/ flat
fee plus their 5% cut (5C/).)
The internet, understandably, lost its goddamn mind.
Now, Patreon did back down - temporarily. They ultimately
grandfathered all of the extant creators as continuing to enjoy
payment bundling, but I understand that after a certain flag day, new
creator accounts work in the new unbundled way they wanted to roll
out all along.
But the important thing to realize here, as a whole lot of us
suddenly realized back in 2017, was that the numbers didn't work
without bundling.
Part of what made Patreon explosively successful, in the first place,
was that Patreon had apparently cracked the code on one of the
hardest problems on the internet: micropayments.
By the time Patreon had come along people had been discussing the
problem of micropayments on the internet for at least two decades.
The problem with micropayments was that there was a huge amount of
things that people buy for very small amounts of money, and a huge
amount of what people wanted to buy on the internet were things that
could not reasonably be priced more than a few bucks - one track on
an album, for instance - but the transaction costs for very small
purchases were such a large percentage of such purchases that they
weren't economical. The payment processing fees put so much friction
on small purchases that they pretty much killed them dead.
Then Patreon came along, and this was the deal they offered: you can
do your thing and accept pledges of any amount, even tiny amounts,
even amounts of less than $1, and we will charge you 5% for ourselves
and approximately 5% for payment processing.
It was the right price point. Micropayments worked at that price
point.
Nobody knows how Patreon made that work.
There's two major hypotheses.
PayPal, which is one of Patreon's payment processors, was offering a
deal there for a while - and while all this was going down in
December of 2017, I got on the phone with PayPal and asked if the
deal was still available and it was - where one could opt into an
alternative fee structure, with only a 5C/ flat fee, but a 5% fee
rate.
So one hypothesis is that that was what Patreon was using, either
through PayPal or through another processor that offered equivalent
terms.
The other hypothesis is that, well. There was an old joke about
Amazon, "We're losing money on every sale, but will make it up in
volume". It may be that Patreon actually did that, for real. They may
have assumed that they could subsidize the processing fees for small
value pledges out of their own fees that they charged for high value
pledges.
Only that math doesn't quite work.
I sat down with a spreadsheet and figured it out back in December
2017. If my math was correct, the point at which the 5% they said
would cover payment processing actually did was for pledges of $14.29
and above. (See "The Fourteen Twenty-Nine Hypothesis".)
This meant that if they weren't getting a special deal on payment
processing, if they had tried to keep to 5%, they would have been
losing money on any pledge less than $14.29.
Now they weren't trying to keep to 5% - they did in fact charge
larger amounts for smaller pledges.
But the amounts they charged didn't seem remotely as large as they
would have had to be to cover those payment processor fees if they
were 2.9% plus $0.30.
But notice how bundling made this more plausible.
If a patron pledges one creator $1 a month, a huge amount of that
would be lost to processing charges - either Patreon cuts deep into
the creator's share, or they lose money. But - with charge bundling -
if a patron pledges 15 creators each $1 a month, the fee stops being
so bad, because the $0.30 is only charged once. The fee works out to
2.9% (3C/) plus 2C/ per creator, so each creator's fee on their $1 is
only $0.05.
Fundamentally, charge bundling is what made Patreon able - insofar as
it was able, and it's not actually clear they were able - to offer
what really was the first functional micropayment system on the
internet.
But even then, you only get to a sweet spot if a given patron pledges
enough across different creators. That $14.29 is even with bundling.
From my back of the envelope calculations it looked like Patreon was
either losing money on every patron who pledged a total of less than
$14.29 a month, or was otherwise struggling financially with low
value patrons at some other threshold.
This is actually a horrendous problem, in light of that datum that
the average pledge was less than $2.
And it's a horrendous problem for pretty much any business remotely
shaped like Patreon. This is "the long tail".
That term was [S:coined and:S] popularized by Chris Anderson of Wired
here https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/ which is behind a paywall.
Investopedia explains it: "The long tail is a business strategy that
allows companies to realize significant profits by selling low
volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only
selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The term
was first coined [Incorrect, h/t @KevinMarks@xoxo.zone - S.] in 2004
by Chris Anderson, who argued that products in low demand or with low
sales volume can collectively make up market share that rivals or
exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters but
only if the store or distribution channel is large enough."
The long tail was a revelation as an idea and a revolution in
commerce. Part of what made commerce on the internet different was
that on the internet you could leverage the long tail. Whole types of
businesses came into existence or rose to prominence by realizing
many tiny transactions could dwarf blockbusters.
Fundamentally, Patreon is a long tail business. It doesn't sell a
million of something at $100 a pop; it doesn't sell 10 million of
something at $10 a pop. It sells ("sells") millions upon millions of
different things at $1 a pop.
The problem with the long tail was, and apparently still remains,
micropayments. Transaction costs are what causes friction in the long
tail. This is why long tail businesses have to find ways to batch
transactions.
It's why Amazon really, really, really wants you to order at least $n
of goods at a time, and incents you with free shipping at that
number.
So it turns out one of Patreon's biggest features was the fact that
it was a vast marketplace of patronage, where one patron might find
very many of the different creators they wanted to support - allowing
Patreon to bundle their pledges when it came time to charge their
credit card.
Now, to be clear... No I can't be clear, because I have no idea what
Patreon actually did, or why. Patreon has now moved away from this
apparently? And I guess no longer bundles for newer campaigns?
Clearly there's some difficulty here. If you want to compete with
Patreon, you're probably going to have to figure out how to make the
funding work at least as well as Patreon did. If you can do better,
that would be amazing.
-----------------
When I think about how breathtakingly complicated Patreon's
underlying bookkeeping must be - two major funding models, by month
and by work, plus various variations like annual memberships and pay
at the start of the month versus pay at the end of the month, needing
to keep track of when during a month a patron pledges or changes
their pledge for reckoning by work pledges, plus they now somehow
support merch payments? and also apparently they have two different
approaches to handling payment processing depending on the age of the
creator's campaign, one that deducts and bundles, one that adds and
is unbundled - this is one of the things I'm thinking about, when, as
I said to a commenter over on the Mioscene, I think maybe Patreon bit
off more than it could chew, technologically speaking.
I look at the complexity of logic necessary to just reckon how much
they should charge whose credit cards and deposit in which bank
accounts, and I look at the difficulty they seem to be having these
days both managing credit card charges and presenting creators with
an informative UI that tells them what is happening to their money,
and it makes me wonder whether these things are indicative of
Patreon's core bookkeeping system being the software development
equivalent of a train with no brakes, headed down a steep hill, fast
and getting faster.
The thing is, a bunch of those various funding model options for
creators arose well after I began to surmise that Patreon was
struggling with the implementation necessary for the by-work model.
Patreon had done a number of things that seem to be deprecating the
by-work model, most obviously their tearing out the part of the UI
that by-works creators relied on, which suggested to me they repented
of the decision to ever have it in the first place, given its
complexity and difficulty to support in the code.
So on one hand, I was getting the impression that Patreon was
struggling with the complexity of its bookkeeping already at that
point, and then on the other hand, Patreon was forging ahead with new
variations on payment models, multiplying the complexity further.
This is one of the things that inclines me to suspect that Patreon,
as an organization, suffers from an especially acute case of
neophilia. It looks from the outside like simultaneously Patreon is
trying to reduce complexity in its code and in its bookkeeping, while
it's rolling out new features and new options that add even more
complexity. And the new features and options don't look like things
that are mission critical, or fixes for terrible problems: they just
look like somebody's Cool New Idea(tm).
This suggests that a crucial way a competitor could whup Patreon is
just by the old adage KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
It feels to me that Patreon embraces unnecessary complexity, which is
absolutely terrible in a line of business that has its own abundant
authentic, emergent, organic, locally sourced, government enforced
complexity.
For instance let's talk about the tech stack of its website. I don't
know anything about the back end, 'cause I'm not privy to that. But
the front end is right there. For some reason Patreon felt the need
to make an extremely highly abstract DHTML/Ajaxy UI, presumably on
top of some set of frameworks. (It certainly smells like JavaScript
frameworks are involved; the alternative, horrifying to contemplate,
is they did that from scratch.) All for a user interface that has
affordances that best I can tell can mostly have been implemented in
Netscape 4.7, without even breaking the sweat.
This had three bad consequences: it made their site undebuggable,
inaccessible, and classist.
Undebuggable: Because the site client side software architecture was
so abstract, that just made it harder to debug when there were bugs.
And there were bugs. And to reiterate: this was completely
unnecessary. Most of the pages being rendered in this JavaScript
confection were basically static pages.
Inaccessible: The heavy gratuitous use of JavaScript for page
presentation rendered it largely inaccessible to people using screen
readers, and almost got them sued under the ADA. Disability activists
railed at Patreon for years about this. It wasn't until 2020 that
Patreon came to the table with blind users and the American Council
of the Blind, and agreed to mend their ways.
Classist: JavaScript is processor-intensive in the browser. This
means it takes more computing power to load and render one of these
JavaScript confection pages than a static page. This means it's slow
and difficult to open the various pages of Patreon's UI in older
computers. Who has older computers? Well a lot of starving artists,
that's who. This was just such an incredible own goal. The very
population of creators they were courting included large numbers of
people who couldn't afford computers - yet - necessary to access
Patreon's website.
I speak from bitter experience here: it was watching me try to
actually get a Patreon post out that caused my SO to rather firmly
suggest I needed to do something about upgrading my hardware.
By the way, I actually explained to that to Patreon. I wound up
getting contacted at some point and invited to participate in some
sort of marketing study, for which they were interviewing creators.
It was being done by video call. I took the occasion to point out to
the person coordinating this that there were plenty of creators -
this would have been back in like 2015, well before the pandemic -
who, being poor starving artists, would not have access to a platform
on which they could do a video call. She seemed very struck by this
novel idea. Not that mentioning it to her made any difference, of
course.
I surmise that Patreon staff assumed that all of its creators,
because they were creators and used the internet, must be
technophiles with the latest and greatest hardware, doing the kind of
processor-intensive arts - video, sound production, video games -
that required a beefy rig. They never seemed to imagine their users
to be bloggers, fanfic writers, novelists, journalists, stick figure
cartoonists, visual artists who worked in physical media and just
scanned their work in, composers who published score, activists, or
people who shipped physical items. (I am literally writing this on a
phone.)
So if you want to compete with Patreon, one thing you could do to
that end is just not be stupid about your user base in making your
technological choices. If your value proposition is a platform for
starving artists to earn money, maybe make your platform accessible
from very low value hardware, fucking duh. Maybe - and I appreciate
this is way less obvious to the temporarily able-bodied - make it
accessible by people with disabilities, since one of the ways people
wind up wanting to recourse to things like Patreon and other
crowdfunding is because they are the modern equivalent of the
legendary blind harpers and organists of yore: too disabled to hold a
more conventional job.
And in doing so, save yourself the headache of having extra layers of
code where there doesn't need to actually be any, so when you have to
debug something - and I promise, you will have to debug something -
you're not sitting on a mountain of technical debt before you've even
started.
Relatedly, think really hard about adding new affordances, new
features, new bells and whistles to the funding model or to the site
itself. I think I can assure you that supporting the basic model is
hard enough, and will deliver enough challenges all on its own, that
you will not want for stress. Don't make your own life harder
unnecessarily in pursuit of novelty.
Also relatedly, if you have a choice between slick but flaky vs
reliable but boring, go with reliable but boring. When it comes to
money, it's okay if the UI does not seem particularly glamorous or
flashy or modern. Stolid is a very acceptable aesthetic value in
financial UIs. Comforting, even.
Speaking of UIs, spending some professional attention on one would
also put you ahead of Patreon in that domain. I don't know if they
just don't have UX people or whether they just don't listen to them.
It would be super cool if in your UI, things were named what they
actually are, and also the navigation was well organized. But, as I
said, if I start itemizing all the things I think are wrong with
Patreon's UI we're going to be here a long time.
I think I'm going to stop here, not because I am done saying things
about Patreon - indeed I can think of many other things I want to
explain about Patreon - but because I need to stop somewhere. This
seems like a good first pass to hopefully inspire some competitors to
come take a bite out of Patreon's market share.
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Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-28 08:07 am (UTC)
siderea: (Default)
From: [personal profile] siderea
Comment catcher comment for catching comments.
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-28 10:04 am (UTC)
chess: (Default)
From: [personal profile] chess
I believe what went wrong with bundling for Patreon was taxation - US
states started taxing digital products in a way that stopped them
bundling payments that eventually went to creators from different
states.
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-28 11:33 am (UTC)
hudebnik: (Default)
From: [personal profile] hudebnik
But... now that we've got some market share, the investors say we
could be much more valuable if we made ourselves a social network, so
we could monetize contact lists and [personal profile] mentions and
stuff like that! We could be the next Facebook; none of our
competitors has thought of that angle!
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-28 12:48 pm (UTC)
dianec42: Joshua tree against a blue sky (Default)
From: [personal profile] dianec42
Editorial: "perspective creators" -> "prospective"
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-28 02:18 pm (UTC)
mindways: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mindways
Given where Patreon has ended up (pre-charging cards, trouble with
transaction fees from many small transactions adding up) I've often
wondered why they didn't shift to a 'virtual not-actually-currency'
model, the way Twitch uses bits - each 'bit' is a virtual cent to be
paid, but buying 1000 bits costs $12 or something, with improving
economy of scale when you buy more (due to efficiency on transaction
fees).[1]
In my experience users aren't thrilled by the fact that buying $10
worth of bits costs more than $10, but the fact that it's two
separate "currencies" seems to change the psychology of it to make it
more palatable than literally paying $12 to donate $10, despite it
being exactly the same outcome.
(And maybe it avoids some of the "if you are holding people's money
for them you are a bank and must be regulated as such" problem since
it's limited-purpose funny-money? Though it does convert to cash, so
it's not exactly a gift certificate, and if you have a binding
agreement over how much each $not-money is worth, and your ability to
transfer $not-money to other people, then I could imagine governments
might conclude that the business quacks like a bank and should be
regulated as such, despite the large differences in business model &
user expectations.)
[1] = My impression is that Twitch charges a rather higher surcharge
than needed to cover transaction fees, which is part of what makes
people not-thrilled.
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-30 06:56 pm (UTC)
illariy: uhura smiles (uhura: smile)
From: [personal profile] illariy
Oooh, the Twitch part makes a lot of sense. DW doesn't have as much
of a monthly model but doesn't DW also use its own digital currency
for paid accounts and other paid features?
Hm, the bank regulations necessary for Patreon but maybe not for
Twitch would also make sense. I have heard that there are some
videogames where people can pay to use some extra stuff and then gift
that and the gifted person can convert the fun money back into
regular cash. I don't know what videogames those are and how they
work but maybe however they do it could also work for Patreon.
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-28 04:37 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] gbear605
Something I realized recently is that if you're not giving dozens of
dollars per month, Patreon doesn't want you using their site. Because
of those fixed transaction fees, Patreon wants whales, and whales
only. Relatedly, my guess is that people are much more willing to be
whales on a per-time basis, rather than a per-work basis, so Patreon
doesn't want creators to use per-work payments.
And on the per-work side of things, they seem to have accomplished
that. I currently have memberships with twenty creators, and of those
only four use per-work and three of those publish less than once per
month - all four of those have been using Patreon for over five
years. I wasn't trying to avoid per-work creators, this is just the
random selection that I've been interested in following. So based on
my limited sample size, only 5% of creators use Patreon like you.
That's unfortunate, since it seems like a better model, but either
creators don't like it (it's hard to pay the bills if your income
varies each month?), users don't like it (expenses vary per month?),
or Patreon doesn't like it and tries to discourage it. All of the
above?
I wish there was something that they could do to make it nicer for
everyone, but I'm not really sure what. The maximum per month limit
partially solves it, so maybe it would be helpful if that was more
prominent?
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-28 08:48 pm (UTC)
elusis: (Default)
From: [personal profile] elusis
Ironically, one reason I subscribe to multiple Patreons and exactly
one Substack is that there are a lot of people whose work I will
support for $1 or $2 a month, but almost zero whom I will support for
$5 a month, and almost everyone on Substack seems to have that as
their entry price (I assume it's a platform default?)
There is precisely one Patreon I support at more than $2 a month: the
Maintenance Phase podcast, to whom I pay $30 a year.
There is precisely one Substack I pay to subscribe to at all: A.R.
Moxon's "The Reframe," who offers subscriptions at $1 a month or $10
a year.
Even writers I like a lot, even writers with whom I am friends - I am
not going to pay $60 a year for your newsletter. That is 3 times what
I paid to get a year of Newsweek, a weekly magazine, back in the day.
That is $12 more than I pay for the Washington Post annually.
So Patreon gets a good bit more of my money than Substack does, even
if it is in small pledges to many creators (and I subscribe to
several who are "per work.")
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-30 10:11 pm (UTC)
selenite0: (anvil)
From: [personal profile] selenite0
Yes, Substack has $5/month as the minimum subscription price. There's
occasional discounts, but the nominal sub has to be at least $5/mo.
IIRC annual subscriptions have a minimum of $50/yr.
Moxon is currently asking $10/mo, $100/yr.
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-28 08:23 pm (UTC)
lefty: (Default)
From: [personal profile] lefty
I know that stage names and pen names have been around for a long
time, but I would not have guessed 2000 years. What's the
2000-year-old example?
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-30 10:34 pm (UTC)
siderea: (Default)
From: [personal profile] siderea
I am trying to find the thing I was reading that mentioned stage
names among performers IIRC during the reign of Caligula. (I also
seem to recall something about prostitutes using pseudonyms for
obvious reasons in antiquity.)
But "Caligula" himself is an interesting example of something in the
pseudonym space.
Normally we think of synonyms of something people adopt for
themselves for their own purposes. "Caligula" was an ascribed name,
given to him by others. I understand he grew to hate it himself, but
it was the name he was known by.
The ancient Romans were really big on those kinds of ascribed names,
which show up as what they called the "agnomen". When such come down
to us, they're usually tacked on the end of a famous Roman's formal
three-part name, or take the place of the last of the three parts
(the cognomen). Where we would write a name like Marcus "The Crow"
Valerius, they would write Marcus Valerius Corvus, due to a
battlefield incident with a crow (corvus) (actual example).
Older than that, there's apparently some sort of tradition of
pseudonym usage, or so people who are concerned with ancient
literature keep saying. For example: https://www.encyclopedia.com/
religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/
anonymity-and-pseudonymity
Though I'll be the first to note, there are no examples given, and as
one reads on it becomes clear (confirmed at the very last line of the
page) that this entire article is in the context of biblical studies,
and the question of the authorship of parts of the Bible.
Ascribed names also show up in ancient literature, often to hide the
identities of people being criticized, or to protect the identities
of the guilty. Catallus, in his famous poetry,
refers to the object of his affections as "Lesbia", and everyone is
pretty sure that is not her actual name. Meanwhile, there's been
about 2,000 years of speculation as to who "Diotima of Mantinea" in
Plato's Symposium actually was.
In any event, the next oldest examples I know about seem to be that
of the bardic tradition of Wales, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki
/Bardic_name which proposes that a bunch of names of bards recorded
in histories from the 6th century are pseudonyms in the bardic
tradition documented to the 12th century and later, which leapfrogs
over the example from what is now Spain of Ziryab, the most famous
person you've never heard of, at the turn of the 9th century. (There
may be earlier examples from al-Andalus, but I read that book a long
time ago and don't have it handy.)
Edited Date: 2023-09-30 10:36 pm (UTC)
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-10-06 11:03 am (UTC)
kyrias: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kyrias
If we're talking ascribed names and self-chosen names... the literati
of China have a long history of having a handful of different names.
There's your given name. Then often you'd have your Zi ,which is a
name used by your intimates and often gifted to you by your parents/
teacher, as a sort of wish/correction. Like, if your name was
"proud", your Zi might be "humble" to balance it out so you weren't
too much one or the other. Then you would have Hao , which is the
ascribed name thing, which you mostly don't get to choose. Then
people would have pen names they'd choose. Then sometimes you'd put
about that you wanted to be called "the one who lives on Sunyang
River", and people would go along with it.
And if I am doing my searches correctly, Caligula was alive around
the Han dynasty? I think the Chinese were doing "don't call me by
this, call me something else" for a while at that point.
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-29 07:49 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] bibulb
The notes about Patreon's code stack being classist because it kinda
forces one to have a faster/more-powerful computer is true for the
patron as well, to the point of indirectly harming creators again.
It's kind of astounding the number of times where, as a patron, I've
needed to do something on the site and gotten frustrated and just not
bothered because I don't know if my browser's just
ITHINKICANITHINKICANing on their code, or if their server's actually
not responding.
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-30 07:01 pm (UTC)
illariy: a woman sits and leans against a giant white question mark
(question mark in my head)
From: [personal profile] illariy
This entry was fascinating to read.
It surprises me that the Patreon lady who reached out to you for that
marketing study was surprised that many creators on Patreon use old
hardware. I mean, yeah, there are some techy creators e. g. Youtubers
or gamers, who have an up to date tech stack but the old stereotype
of the starving artist is a stereotype for a reason.
Reading this post makes me understand why Patreon has not many
competitors and very few for the by-work model. That model, while
appealing to the artist, seems much more complicated on a tech and
taxation front.
This post and all the changes and problems mentioned therein makes me
wonder if Patreon might go under in the mid term future. Hm. I hope
not!
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-09-30 09:48 pm (UTC)
siderea: (Default)
From: [personal profile] siderea
One of my favorite sayings is "Ignorance is the mother of adventure."
I am very concerned that the reason there is not actually a
meaningful Patreon competitor is that Patreon was the only company
foolish enough to try to do what Patreon is doing, or at least trying
to do.
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-10-03 03:12 pm (UTC)
illariy: a woman sits and leans against a giant white question mark
(question mark in my head)
From: [personal profile] illariy
Re: your last paragraph, after this entry and the hint in it that
there are more points in a similar vein, I do believe this might be
true. Which would be unfortunate, especially if it should turn out
that even Patreon can't make it work long-term. Hm.
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Re: Comment catcher: How to Compete with Patreon
Date: 2023-10-05 04:19 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] philologus
Re: neophilia, Patreon owe a lot of money to one of the Kushners,
they are based in the SF Bay Area, and they don't seem competent at
software project management. The usual way to keep venture
capitalists happy is to keep changing and throw around buzzwords, and
I suspect they have some developers who figure "this place is a zoo
but I can get trendy skills building a full-stack monstrosity rather
than a simple stable database that serves markedup text files which
get turned into HTML and served" and no managers who grok enough to
push back.
I have no idea how splitting up payments is viable given the fixed
cost in the tens of cents per transaction.
See also the memoir from the man who cleaned up after TSR's
bankruptcy and found no evidence that they had studied their market
beyond attending cons.
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(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-28 12:43 pm (UTC)
wingedcatgirl: Sylvi, a pink-haired catgirl with a black facemask.
(Default)
From: [personal profile] wingedcatgirl
Back when we read The Fourteen Twenty-Nine Hypothesis, our thought
was "well maybe Patreon should invent Patreon Silver for any patron
who pledges more than $15 total (or whatever the number actually is)
and (somehow?) incentivize creators to give additional tiny bonuses
to Silver members". The second half of that thought is still a
mystery to us but it's sort of moot now that it's completely
incomprehensible what Patreon is trying to do at all.
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