
Things to know before starting a Patreon page - colebowl
http://pencerw.com/feed/2020/6/24/three-things-all-creators-should-know-about-patreon?mc_cid=cb178f4bd4&mc_eid=5ac3a20371
======
stickfigure
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 order. Atrocious.

~~~
cactus2093
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?

~~~
stickfigure
Ok, I'll go into detail.

I recently subscribed to (patronized?) Hand Tool Rescue. His patron-only
content is narrated versions of his restoration videos, which typically run
20+ minutes long. I have time to watch one maybe every few days.

To go back and watch all of his old stuff:

1) Visit patreon.com. I'm logged in, so it takes me to /creator-home. It looks
like this:
[https://monosnap.com/file/PtG4Robbscnt7fns0omVO9a2D3IQul](https://monosnap.com/file/PtG4Robbscnt7fns0omVO9a2D3IQul)
There are no links to who I'm following or content to consume.

2) After scratching my head a few minutes, click on my tiny persona icon top
right, then click on "Posts from my creators". Now I'm looking at a blog roll
of all my creators. There's a tantalizing "Patron Only Content" filter here,
but that's for "all creators". There's a list of my creators on the left
though, so...

3) Click on "Hand Tool Rescue" on the left side. Finally I'm looking at posts
from HTR. But now there's no filter for Patron Only Content! WTF?

4) Let's see, where what was the last video I watched? Scroll down. And
scroll. And scroll. Click the "More..." button. Scroll more. And scroll.
"More..." again. Oh, here's where I left off. I think.

5) Oh, this is a 3-part series. Scroll down some more to the first part.

6) Open video in a new tab, watch the first couple minutes. Oh wait, I did
already watch this part. Thankfully I didn't close the tab in #4 (learned that
the hard way). Scroll back to the next part and watch it.

This is a trainwreck of UX. It's also pretty nearly my only interaction with
patreon.com. I discover content on youtube and through friends, and rarely
add/remove creators anyway.

All I want is to see is a dense easily navigable list of patron only content!
Youtube is excellent for this - just a list of thumbnails. I really wish I
could just pay HTR through Youtube.

BTW - before someone posts "You can sort inverse chronologically" \- yes, I
now see that you can do that. It still doesn't reduce the total scrolling. It
actually makes it somewhat worse, because HTR's first couple years of videos
weren't narrated. Ugh.

------
egypturnash
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-based site and add the same file to
the secret-patrons-only whole-chapter-WIP page. Which does not bother doing
any authentication because it's all ultimately gonna be free on the public
pages of my site anyway.

I might get a bigger percentage if I fucked around with some other way to
create recurring payments, sure. But my experience is that people now know
what is up with Patreon, and are _much_ more likely to say "okay sure I'm in,
I'll give you a few bucks per page of your weird-ass comics for a while" than
to sign up for anything else I've ever done. Like I think I got all of fifty
bucks, once, out of the Paypal donation button I used to have on my old
comics. I've gotten several years of paying my rent out of Patreon and that
lower signup friction is _well_ worth their cut IMHO.

(I will note that I do kinda feel like Patreon's sort of abandoned the per-
creation model, it's not uncommon to see them roll out new features that only
work on the monthly model. Which _really_ doesn't work for someone like me who
can go silent for months at a time due to depression.)

~~~
Traster
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.

------
sitkack
PSA: If you are in the USA (and 32 other locales), setup a github page and use
github's sponsor functionality. They take no cut.

[https://github.com/sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors)

~~~
sebazzz
Patreon is recurring so you can get income from sleeper subscriptions.

~~~
tellarin
GitHub sponsorship can also do that.

------
akling
I'm currently using Patreon and GitHub Sponsors to accept donations. If you
are doing anything software related, I would definitely encourage you to set
up GitHub Sponsors right away.

GitHub Sponsors: \- Zero fees (compared to the ~10% Patreon takes) (!) \- They
match all donations (up to a limit of $5000) for the first year (!!) \- Great
exposure. Tons of people have found me through GitHub. (I don't think anyone
ever found me through Patreon.)

It's still worth it for me to use both services, as some people have strong
feelings about one or the other. And in fact, I also have a PayPal for people
who don't trust either one. :)

------
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.

~~~
eythian
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.

~~~
Traster
What throws me off about it being a platform is that ther'es basically no
discoverability - you search for what you want, but it's never going to say
"Hey, yo liked X, what do you think of Y"

~~~
eythian
Yeah. Kickstarter, for example, is good at that. I've backed a number of
things because their recommendation system thought they might be interesting,
and they were.

------
ehutch79
I'd love to know what the other options are out there, as mentioned in the
article.

Right now, patreon is well known, and I'd be concerned with an unknown site
turning supporters off.

~~~
quadrangle
Here's a thorough summary: [https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-
crowdfundi...](https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding)

(at the wiki of still-not-launched different type of patronage platform that
is sharing its own research)

~~~
mirimir
Looking through that, I see some Bitcoin-driven services. What I don't see are
any that accept payments and pay out via a wide range of channels, from PayPal
to Bitcoin. And for Bitcoin, I don't mean Coinbase or exchange accounts that
enforce KYC rules. Stripe used to work with Bitcoin, but no longer.

~~~
smichel17
We don't proactively search for new services or re-review those listed to make
sure the information is still up to date[1].. but we do update the page if we
hear about new ot changed services through other channels. So, if you or
anyone else are aware of particular services that are notable for their
flexibility in payment providers, please let me know and I'll add them to the
page.

That said, I would not be surprised if none exist. The more payment processors
you support, the harder it is to avoid handling the money directly, which
means more legal hurdles (regulations, liability); the simpler alternative
(that snowdrift.coop is currently pursuing, for those practical reasons,
although it is limiting in some respects) is to coordinate donations though
other platforms.

[1]: Aside, I was trying to write this sentence in the form "re-review the
information for [up-to-date-ness]", but couldn't think of the right word.
"Accuracy" is close, but doesn't capture the element of time. Any ideas?

~~~
mirimir
up-to-date-ness = currency

It's not the usual meaning, and so confusing, although arguably the meanings
are fundamentally consistent.

------
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.

------
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.

------
zzzeek
Patreon does not seem very spectacular but I don't exactly see what the reason
_not_ to have a patreon page is. I have one and it is one of several different
income sources for my open source work. it's 100 bucks a month I wouldn't have
otherwise.

~~~
pencerw
(Author of the post here)

I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn
enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for
big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their
overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create
a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work.

I totally appreciated Patreon when I was starting out; it just really sucked
to scale on, and switching to a more legit system was somewhat painful.

~~~
sillysaurusx
Which system did you switch to?

~~~
executesorder66
It's mentioned in the middle of the post:

> I moved to a combination of Quickbooks Online ($645/year; note that Intuit
> is a terrible company) and Squarespace’s ($480/year) recurring products
> feature.

But the squarespace's recurring products feature seems focused more toward
physical products than digital creative artifacts which I mainly associate
Patreon with.

~~~
majewsky
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 number in the message field so you can link it back
to their account. All that for the price of a checking account, which wouldn't
be much more than 10€/month. It's a bit of a barebones system; you wouldn't
use it to handle 1000+ subscribers because the linking-back-to-their-account
step would be manual. If you're on the scale of 10-100 subscribers with
monthly or yearly payments, it works great. Several podcasts I listen to take
donations like this.

~~~
baud147258
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?

~~~
krageon
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.

------
vaibhavthevedi
This is a detailed analysis. I was thinking to start Patreon but I tried
Buymeacoffee page and turns out, it is slowly becoming like Patreon only. But
better.

------
thomas
Regarding most of this: I think this is why they built (bought?) Memberful.

~~~
figgyc
Memberful was indeed an acquisition: [https://memberful.com/blog/joining-
patreon/](https://memberful.com/blog/joining-patreon/)

------
WhyNotHugo
> If your intention is to build a meaningful income, there are much better
> options out there than Patreon.

Naming at least one in the article wouldn't been helpful.

------
torartc
Didn't they also have a large data breach?

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

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

~~~
gadders
[https://unherd.com/2019/01/the-politics-of-the-patreon-
purge...](https://unherd.com/2019/01/the-politics-of-the-patreon-purge/)

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvqeev/crowdfunding-
site-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvqeev/crowdfunding-site-patreon-
is-purging-far-right-figures)

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/the-
alt...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/the-alt-right-
has-a-payment-processor-problem)

~~~
jtbayly
Thank you. That's helpful.

------
Tomte
> If your intention is to build a meaningful income, there are much better
> options out there than Patreon.

I would have liked the author to expand on that (bolded) sentence. If he knows
better options, please tell us!

------
redis_mlc
The article is complaining that Patreon is not a full banking app.

Well, duh.

Patrons and small-time creators are very happy with what it does, and don't
care about what it doesn't do - Patreon pays the monthly rent of a lot of
artists who have no other short-term options until their career is in full-
swing. By contrast, Youtube is notorious for being unreliable as a revenue
source.

My only complaints about Patreon are:

\- the app is one of the slowest web apps today. Actually, I lied - it's the
slowest. Shame on the programming team behind this. Get your shit together.

\- they just started charging sales tax on donations if the creator offers
rewards content (almost all do so.) That doesn't make sense for posting a
video link a day early, foreign artists, etc.

\- I think a VC bought Patreon. We know how that always ends.

My suggestions are:

\- profile the app performance and fix it.

\- maybe ask the article author what he's expecting for discoverability on a
payment app. Perhaps adding a couple pieces of metadata alone might help?

Source: I used it daily as a Patron from July, 2019 through June, 2020 while
providing feedback to a creator.

~~~
pencerw
(Author of the blog post here)

Point taken, though I'm not sure that's _exactly_ what I said. My complaint
re: accounting is that Patreon integrates _horribly_ with QBO. If they cared,
they would have a webhook that rolled up all collected pledges, payment
processing fees, sales taxes and platform fees into a single sales receipt so
that QBO et al could ingest and record it as a sale (or a list of sales).

Also, the thing about "revenue" vs "earnings" on their creator side analytics
is just straight up deceptive. They don't need to be accounting software, but
that doesn't mean that they can throw around accounting terms however they
want.

~~~
redis_mlc
I don't know any artists who use QuickBooks, so I'm not sure where you're
coming from. You're in some kind of parallel universe to the people happily
using Patreon to collect from their followers.

And they don't care about "revenue" vs "earnings" since they went to Berklee
College of Music, and just want to pay their rent this month.

To be constructive:

\- explain your use case in your blog. Perhaps you have an advanced use case
that would be a good roadmap for future features

\- or go use Stripe or Paypal payments for payment processing. Patreon is
community funding software.

~~~
fxtentacle
I work with many freelance photographers who use QBO, so it is common in some
industries.

BTW, your example sounds a bit like those people have a complete disregard for
tax law. That sounds like the end of the year is going to be very shocking
when they figure out that the patreon money which they used for rent wasn't
actually theirs to use.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
it's been my experience that if you have to pay rent or keep the money for
taxes you will pay rent and then later get punished for not paying the taxes,
because if you don't pay the rent now later is going to suck anyway.

------
jes5199
you know that feeling when you worked at a company, and you tried to push it
in a certain direction, but the powers that be made it impossible to really
get to the core issues? yeah.

------
billpg
If you send money with the expectation of a perk or reward, (other than the
continued production of the video/podcast/etc) than you're not really a patron
any more. You're a customer.

