Patreon Donation Charge Salt - Patreon Changes TOS; Lolcows Apoplectic

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Okay, I can sum this up in two very small sentences.

1. Patreon is shifting the processor service fee unto the Donor.
2. Patreon is removing incest donations.

Stripe is Patreon's payment processor and their fee structure is the one listed before: 2.9% + $0.30 per Transaction. Someone mentioned PayPal before; they're wrong.

Patreon had a hard time showing people their actual takehome from the donations because it varied based on the (((payment processor's))) whims, basically. If Stripe decided to charge more, the takehome of thousands of people would be adjusted. Now, the takehome is static, and the fees become additional burden on the donor. If you're donating $1, you now pay $1.329 (round up to nearest hundreth), and the takehome for the creator is $0.95, because Patreon removes their 5% flat rate service fee from the take-home. I received an email about this before the change.

Dear creator,

In order to continue our mission of funding the creative class, we’re always looking for ways to do what’s best for you - creators.

With that, we’re writing to tell you of a change we’re making so that all Patreon creators take home exactly 95% of every pledge, with no additional fees.

Aside from Patreon’s existing 5% fee, you may notice that your income on Patreon varies because of processing fees every month. Your patrons may not even be aware that you actually take home a lower percentage of their intended pledges because of it. Our goal is to make your paycheck as predictable as possible, so we’re restructuring how these fees are paid.

A new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 will be paid by patrons for each individual pledge starting on December 18th. This streamlines fees for both creators and patrons to ensure that you pay no more than 5%.


Here’s what you can expect:

  • On December 18th, we’ll apply the fee for patrons and notify them of this change.
  • We’re also sending an email to all patrons tomorrow, December 7th, to share the information about this upcoming change.
  • We ran experiments to understand patrons’ potential reactions and we found that many patrons were happy knowing that this change will send more money to creators.
  • If you’d like to chat about this change with your patrons, we’ve provided verbiage in our FAQ here.
We want you to know that we approach every change with a creator-first mindset, aiming to help you grow your business and grow with your patrons. By standardizing Patreon’s fees, we’re ensuring that creators like you can get paid to continue creating high quality content.

Your patrons will have an email in their inbox with all of this information tomorrow. In the meantime, if you want to learn more or have any questions for us, please don’t hesitate to reach out here or visit our FAQ.

See you on the internet,
The Patreon team
(This email says the fee is + 35c, not +30c, so chances are Stripe have told Patreon to pay more and are jewing them an additional amount. Now you understand what I mean about the whims of the company. Patreon has no say in this and if they argue about it, Stripe can just ax them and destroy their entire company. People surviving off many $1 donations are paying a substantial amount of their donation amount directly to (((Stripe))) as it stands and should be ecstatic about this change.)

So even if you lose supporters over this, you have to lose more than the service fee to not break even. If you have 100 donors donating $1 each, your takehome right now is $62. With the new schedule, your takehome is $95. You must lose ~35 supporters to even return to where you are, and if those people are going to drop you over a 38 cent surcharge, you really need to improve your content and make donating more worthwhile. 38 cents should not be make or break.


But that's not all! What people like Zoe Quinn are mad about is they are changing the way incest donations work. Before, if I donated $100 to someone and they donated $100 back to me, it'd look like we were both $100/1 support, and the only cost to us to inflate this would be the $5/5% service fee Patreon takes (since no money is actually changing hands over the banking system). Now, the onus of the service fee is put on the donor, so that $5 advertisement tax becomes $5 + $3.25 for $100 incest. And they now require all transactions actually change hands over the (((banking system))) so these become real income / real expenses for tax purposes that appear on your bank statement. And your Zoe Quinns and Brianna Wus are paying more for the privilege to artificially inflate their income to the IRS. Remember, supporting creators isn't a tax write-off and Patreon is taxable income.


So expect to see mad people. Very mad people. Expect to see shitty, "how do they make that much money" Patreons with substantially lower pots and good creators like Red Letter Media and The Dick Show with more takehome and the same number of donors. Their tweets will be about the end user and how bothered their supporters are, but those people don't exist. The only one being negatively affected is them.
 
Most of the salt I've seen on my end is from artists I follow and people who support them. Their main complaint that I've seen is that if you pledge say, $1 to 10 different artists, you end up paying way more in fees than if you were pledging $10 to one artist. So, fairly rational arguments, but then again, those posts are coming from decently rational people and not batshit insane troons circlejerking each other with an every decreasing roundabout of money each time Patreon takes their cut every go-round.
 
It really blows seeing a number of people I usually respect tard out so hard over this. It'll probably be good in the long run to burn off the copious amount of deadwood that fills patreon.

It really is interesting to see how conceptions like this one with patreon are formed and perpetuated so quickly to the point where reasonable discussion is thrown out the window.
 
Most of the salt I've seen on my end is from artists I follow and people who support them. Their main complaint that I've seen is that if you pledge say, $1 to 10 different artists, you end up paying way more in fees than if you were pledging $10 to one artist. So, fairly rational arguments, but then again, those posts are coming from decently rational people and not batshit insane troons circlejerking each other with an every decreasing roundabout of money each time Patreon takes their cut every go-round.
They were always paying those fees. Blame the International Banking Industry.
 
The big reason Patreon did this, near as I've been able to tell, was that Paypal (and Patreon's managing services) were not getting their cuts, and more specifically, it not getting these cuts due to mass small donations and circular donations.

What would happen is that most of the asshats who got a barrage of tiny donations would then, in turn, donate to other patreons in tiny amounts, directly from their own Patreon earnings. This resulted in, essentially, a system in which not only are Patreons getting artificially inflated to a hilarious degree (Nora's Patreon consists of about 99% such donations) but wherein they aren't paying anything on the transaction, allowing them, in essence, to bypass the normal sales taxes and similar flimflammery one would encounter if doing things like donating normally directly from their checking accounts.

There are four groups this change is hitting harder than anyone else:

1. The pitybux brigade (Nora, Boyd, SGG, etc). These are people whose borderline nonexistant patreon donations came almost entirely from tiny donors and they in turn used this to bolster the tugboats of other speds.

2. The professional victims unit (Quinn, Wu, etc). These people also circular donate to shore up their patreon earnings (something we know from Based Blue).

3. Legitimate money-laundering schemes. Apparently, this has become a thing with patreon the last few years and this would, according to some reports, make the practice much less profitable.

4. Tiny accounts still getting set up.

So of these four, roughly 75% are ones that Patreon has a vested fucking interest in cracking down on.

Looking at Brianna Wu's Patreon,he's dropped a good amount of money. Down to $950, though that's only a $25 drop for him (he's been dropping steadily over the past few months). Nora has seen a near $20 drop. The biggest drop is Zoe Quinn at $147
 
Considering incest donations are primarily to make the person look popular and fool someone into donating, a lot of cons are going to be revealed.

Here's hoping there are some spectacular chimpouts over it in the new year!
 
Considering incest donations are primarily to make the person look popular and fool someone into donating, a lot of cons are going to be revealed.

Here's hoping there are some spectacular chimpouts over it in the new year!

Zoe has already lost 34 Patrons and I expect more to leave. It's looking like an early Christmas for us.
 
Just get a job, if your entire patreon is literally just a online welfare then you deserve to lose patrons until you actually do something creative that anybody can find worth donating for.

Brianna Wu has her own patreon and she claims to be creating video games, but only has 4 posts and hasn't done anything, but she still got $948 donation money for doing absolutely nothing.

But seriously, there's a reason why Patreon exists, it's for content creators who need to be supported because of their hard work, not for lazy people with no hobby nor skills.
 
Just get a job, if your entire patreon is literally just a online welfare then you deserve to lose patrons until you actually do something creative that anybody can find worth donating for.

Brianna Wu has her own patreon and she claims to be creating video games, but only has 4 posts and hasn't done anything, but she still got $948 donation money for doing absolutely nothing.

But seriously, there's a reason why Patreon exists, it's for content creators who need to be supported because of their hard work, not for lazy people with no hobby nor skills.
It’s a shame reporting her account does absolutely nothing...
 
Phil is going to be so lost by this he’ll probably keep up the circular donation, even as he loses money everytime.
 
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I don't think this has anything to do with circular donations, Patreon couldn't give a shit about those.

Paypal is taking 2.9% plus $0.30 out of the money you receive through their service (this varies per country, it's 1,9% plus 0,35€ in Europe), and it would surprise me, if Patreon had ever negotiated a better deal with Paypal - even if they did, you can be pretty sure this deal has ended or is ending soon.

Feeing the patrons themselves with 2.9% plus $0.35 exactly reflects the fee Paypal charges. It's a move that makes Patreons finances a lot easier. The circular donations are just removed by accident here, nearly everyone who pledges (especially those who are pledging a lot of money) will probably cancel some of their pledges, so they keep spending the same amount as in the months before.

This means that people making a lot of 1$ pledges will probably cancel ~35% of those.
I think we can assume that most Patreon tugboats will lose ~35% of $1 pledges, 17% of all $2 pledges and so on.
 
I don't think this has anything to do with circular donations, Patreon couldn't give a shit about those.

Paypal is taking 2.9% plus $0.30 out of the money you receive through their service (this varies per country, it's 1,9% plus 0,35€ in Europe), and it would surprise me, if Patreon had ever negotiated a better deal with Paypal - even if they did, you can be pretty sure this deal has ended or is ending soon.

Feeing the patrons themselves with 2.9% plus $0.35 exactly reflects the fee Paypal charges. It's a move that makes Patreons finances a lot easier. The circular donations are just removed by accident here, nearly everyone who pledges (especially those who are pledging a lot of money) will probably cancel some of their pledges, so they keep spending the same amount as in the months before.

This means that people making a lot of 1$ pledges will probably cancel ~35% of those.
I think we can assume that most Patreon tugboats will lose ~35% of $1 pledges, 17% of all $2 pledges and so on.

Paypal was the source, of this, as I said in my second or third post here.

The reason it's hitting the lolcows more often than the others is because of their circular donation habits being specifically nipped in the bud. Hence Nora and friends REEEEEEEEEEEE-ing especially hard.
 
I've already been pretty upset with them by the site/app redesigns that wrecked UX and left the site just as buggy as before, but this may be the nail in the coffin.

This undermines the entire point of Patreon.

It's easy to give larger amounts to a handful of creators, that was never difficult in the first place. What Patreon made simple was allowing larger numbers of people to contribute smaller amounts as they were able, which in turn meant many people could actually create full time where they couldn't before.

38 cents on a dollar donation is *not* a small increase.

Anyone paying for $1 donations is going to suddenly be charged $1.379


That is not an acceptable way to do business, it's a crafty move and I've switched all my pledges off until other means are available.

This is nothing more than a money grab. They know that the majority of their pledges are $1 a month, so they want to capitalize on that and the AdApocalypse over at YouTube (creators moving to Patreon).

I am thinking about:
  • Writing to their support mail
  • Checking my supported creators and choose the ones I would have to sort out and write them: I am sorry but due to Patreons policy changes I can no longer support you, feel free to contact me if you find a better alternative. Maybe you can reach out to Patreon and change their mind.
  • Your ideas?
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Just get a job, if your entire patreon is literally just a online welfare then you deserve to lose patrons until you actually do something creative that anybody can find worth donating for.

Brianna Wu has her own patreon and she claims to be creating video games, but only has 4 posts and hasn't done anything, but she still got $948 donation money for doing absolutely nothing.

But seriously, there's a reason why Patreon exists, it's for content creators who need to be supported because of their hard work, not for lazy people with no hobby nor skills.

Absolutely. My god, people like Brianna are such a massive bugbear for me, making fuck all on a place you're supposed to work hard to get successful at and getting money anyway because REEE I'm a victim of something or other (money that she doesn't even bloody need).

Such is the nature of the beast, mind. One thiug that will please me from all of this is the thinning out of such people, if that's how it goes down. Depends on how long the initial rush lasts though.
 
So, let me summarise various kinds people affected by this:

* e-beggers – those will either be fine, or they'll switch donation methods. Fuck them.

* circular donating to boost self-importance – culled. Good.

* big donations – lower fees. Okay.

* small donations, without paywalled content – just send a fiver over Paypal thrice a year, it will be cheaper. Maybe Patreon introduces donations over periods longer than a month (but I wouldn't expect it).

* small donations, with paywalled content – there are alternative ways doing it, but I guess this will be the only group heavily affected and it's kinda them Patreon was made for. Which means it's time for the magic of capitalism to work and an alternative to appear. Especially if this whole affair manages to kill Patreon.

Patreon is a big, festering pile of shit, and while there are some worthwhile gems hidden in it, it has required a shakeup for quite a while.

And of course Patreon themselves couldn't do it, it took the greed of payment processors to do so.

EDIT: Lol even /r/KotakuInAction is salty: https://np.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAct...atreon_is_raising_its_fees_29_035_per_pledge/
 
Without intending to powerlevel much, I'm a 3rd-worldfag and even I think paying an extra $0.38 to a creator I truly like isn't such a big deal. And yet here are actual 1st-worlders whining how that same $0.38 (per month, natch) is such a big fucking deal.

I guess that's the problem when you're relying on virtue-signallers for your daily bread - they're not sincere enough to stick by you when shit goes down, or in this case, when a very gentle breeze blows.
 
Yes, because Patreon wants to tangle with multi-billion dollar juggernaut PayPal that is a bank but operates by no rules of a bank and is shady as shit and is know for fucking everyone over and not giving a shit. Nobody fucks with PayPal for this reason. They are extremely powerful, operate with little regulation and will pound your ass into the ground.
Paypal is the Iron Bank of Braavos.
 
To be fair, if your content only warrants a measly dollar a month, then you should be going out to get a real job instead.

Edit: I should also add that if someone is using Patreon as supplementary income, that's cool. Using Patreon as a main source of income sounds retarded, especially if you're relying on troons and other professional victims/ narcissists as a means to live.
 
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(((Patreon)))

But seriously, if you can't afford a ¢35 service fee, maybe you shouldn't donate to patreon
 
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