Patreon isnt making enough money - When 5% of a billion for being a middle man won't do

TowinKarz · Feb 6, 2019

@Coccxys

It's the accumulation of a number of cultural trends that produces millennial unwarranted self-importance - MUST

- Everyone gets a trophy inclusiveness - The idea that something they produce could be sub par doesn't register.
- Political Correctness - They can't recall a time when someone told a joke about another ethnicity that was just that, and not a "dog whistle" for a lynching mob.
- Helicopter parenting - No need to self-police your behavior when Mommy and Daddy fly in to excuse it for you.
- The Social Media Generation - Distorts the reach of your own voice, making you have an inflated sense of importance, and combined with the above, believe any criticism is a "troll" out to get you and you alone for your own personal qualities, not any think you objectively did.
- Identitarian politics - Anyone not part of your group is the enemy, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. Couples with the above to actively seek out and antagonize these outlier groups as they "deserve it" for attacking YOU for no good reason!
- Upper-middle class upbringing - Born to a prosperous class at a prosperous time, their baseline for what constitutes hardship and sacrifice is hopelessly out-of-touch, as is their work ethic.

It's no one thing, but when you hit 4 or 5 of them, you get the kind of person who thinks they're totally entitled to a corner apartment in a fashionable part of a major city with no obligation in life other than running their own vanity website.

Coccxys · Feb 6, 2019

Patreon is basically failing to make money from a legal Ponzi scheme. I knew someone who did art on the side and had about £500 a month coming in. I commented that is was a nice side gig and they said they were losing money. Confused I asked how and it turned out they were paying out about £600 a month to other artists. I suggested maybe dropping the outgoings to at least the same as the income and they said if they did that people would stop paying to them... Turns out they were donating to each other in one big web and no one other than patreon was making any money. I get the feeling that is the case for a lot of people on there.

Cosmug · Feb 6, 2019

Coccxys said:
Patreon is basically failing to make money from a legal Ponzi scheme. I knew someone who did art on the side and had about £500 a month coming in. I commented that is was a nice side gig and they said they were losing money. Confused I asked how and it turned out they were paying out about £600 a month to other artists. I suggested maybe dropping the outgoings to at least the same as the income and they said if they did that people would stop paying to them... Turns out they were donating to each other in one big web and no one other than patreon was making any money. I get the feeling that is the case for a lot of people on there.

What the shit? How much of Patreon’s cash flow is just webs of 10-20 people swapping saliva over the same 10 bucks a month? How where they able to keep going for years? Is there some cartel laundering drug money by being an angel donor to some tranny comic sperg? Where’s that DSP emote

xX_rAcE_wAr_420_Xx · Feb 6, 2019

Cosmug said:
How much of Patreon’s cash flow is just webs of 10-20 people swapping saliva over the same 10 bucks a month?

A fucking lot, have you looked at the Rat King? All of those niggers have like $250 in Patreon bucks for doing nothing except existing as a beautiful transwoman on Twitter, and it turns out they just hand the cash around and Patreon gets to take a 5% chip out of it like 10 times.

Seriously, look at every person like Jake Alley who contributes nothing to society, and notice they have at least like a hundred bucks a month on Patreon. If it weren't a big virtue circlejerk of cash, they wouldn't get a dime.

Corbin Dallas Multipass · Feb 6, 2019

Cosmug said:
What the shit? How much of Patreon’s cash flow is just webs of 10-20 people swapping saliva over the same 10 bucks a month? How where they able to keep going for years? Is there some cartel laundering drug money by being an angel donor to some tranny comic sperg? Where’s that DSP emote

This is a good point. A lot of people pass patreon donations around to inflate their incoming donation numbers. That makes Patreon losing money that much more baffling.

Grotesque Bushes · Feb 6, 2019

Sam Losco said:
Holy shit, that bitch is getting over 100k a month?! Have you ever heard her talk?

You might be the first person interested in how she talks.

RJ MacReady · Feb 6, 2019

Patreon isn't innovative and does nothing anyone else can't besides interface with payment processors and handle tax legwork. The fact that so many small-scale alternatives are cropping up proves this, and all it takes is a tech giant like Google deciding that a crowdfunding platform would be easy pocket money for them and Patreon is screwed.

It's all about cost management. This isn't a business model that magically yields gargantuan returns if enough VC is injected into it, but it's sustainable with some wisdom.

QI 541 · Feb 6, 2019

TowinKarz said:
@Coccxys

It's the accumulation of a number of cultural trends that produces millennial unwarranted self-importance - MUST

- Everyone gets a trophy inclusiveness - The idea that something they produce could be sub par doesn't register.
- Political Correctness - They can't recall a time when someone told a joke about another ethnicity that was just that, and not a "dog whistle" for a lynching mob.
- Helicopter parenting - No need to self-police your behavior when Mommy and Daddy fly in to excuse it for you.
- The Social Media Generation - Distorts the reach of your own voice, making you have an inflated sense of importance, and combined with the above, believe any criticism is a "troll" out to get you and you alone for your own personal qualities, not any think you objectively did.
- Identitarian politics - Anyone not part of your group is the enemy, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. Couples with the above to actively seek out and antagonize these outlier groups as they "deserve it" for attacking YOU for no good reason!
- Upper-middle class upbringing - Born to a prosperous class at a prosperous time, their baseline for what constitutes hardship and sacrifice is hopelessly out-of-touch, as is their work ethic.

It's no one thing, but when you hit 4 or 5 of them, you get the kind of person who thinks they're totally entitled to a corner apartment in a fashionable part of a major city with no obligation in life other than running their own vanity website.

The economy has been getting worse for most fields that aren't tech or corporate management, the value of a college degree is being devalued while both the cost of the degree and the pressure to saddle students with crippling debt has gone up drastically, the price of housing and healthcare has been going up much faster than both inflation and wages, both corporations and the government are actively trying to cultivate a market of cheap shoddy labor, you can't really get a good interest rate from your bank anymore, and you can't really survive on minimum wage like in the past, and most people require both spouses working just to pay the rent.

On the other hand, millennials have been gullible idiots who easily fall for propaganda, go out of their way to devalue their own college degrees, promote open borders to crash their own labor market, and getting retarded degrees in retarded fields, so I'm not sure whether to feel sorry for them or not.

2 litre soda · Feb 6, 2019

raymond said:
So I'm curious if anyone in this thread actually understands how business and corporations work.

Yeah. I own one. It's a pain in the ass, especially when customers tell me what to stock, vs. what I see them buy, but it's better than working for someone else.

Let's talk about Venture Capitalists for a little bit. This, much like my other post, is sarcastic, broad, and opinionated. Don't treat it as gospel.

VCs are rich people looking to get richer. They have enough money that they can gamble on many companies, and if even one of them pays off big, they'll have a good return, and they can then proceed to gut/ruin/sell-off the others.

There is nothing wrong with this. This is how capitalism works. People invest in your company, you pay them back. The problem comes when there's a clash between short term returns vs. long term investments.

So, let's say our aforementioned hipster doofuses come up with some ideas for an apps like, I don't know, turn your phone into a neck massager. This is a shit app because it's easily replicable by anyone with access to the phone's vibrate feature. He won't get funding. Another guy has the idea for an app that lets you upload a picture of a girl and find single girls in your area that look just like her. There's a money maker, in theory, because it has a demographic, it has a subscription model, and it can't be easily reproduced.

So the doofus gives a presentation to the VCs, who tell the rich guys who own them about it, the rich guys give the nod, and RapiDate becomes a thing with financial backing. The doofus now has money behind his app, so the quality of the fake woman bots who respond to the desperate men becomes better, the pictures become more HD, the ads that play during the Super Bowl to assure you that yes, they are very real and actual women out there who want to have sex with you, if only you pay for this app, feature more than just the doofus' girlfriend in cheap lingerie from TJ Maxx...

The bots quickly become unsustainable, so the doofus has to hire people to chat with the clients. You can pay people in Thailand $0.02 a message to do that, plus the transaction fees, plus the billing processors, plus the international taxes, plus the initial cost of setting up the chat client and tying it to the app. Security becomes a major issue as it scales, because they don't want anyone to find out that there aren't any women on the app, so the doofus has to hire some more IT guys to do that. There's more stuff: MySQL databases, network maintenance, server costs, payment processors... all this shit that feels like actual work, when, the doofus wrote an app, and it was supposed to just do it's thing and then he could lay back and let the money roll in. Why is he still having to work? So, work has to be fun. Hence, Margaret and Simone and the ball pit. He is not his dad, and he is not the VC guys that socialists like him despise.

Now, VC guys, they like to play a game called "Who has the bigger number?" It's essentially a dick measuring contest where they get together, drink, snort coke, and brag about who made the biggest return on investment during that quarter. So the one guy says, as he does a line off a hooker's ass, "My portfolio is worth a million billion dollars!" Another, forcing a different hooker eat as many cocktail napkins as he can force into her mouth, says "Well, my portfolio is worth a million billion trillion dollars!" and it just goes on like this. Accountants are involved to make these brags seem realistic, with things like "intangible assets" being cited to make up any difference. Soon, RapiDate is worth way more than anyone thought possible.

Eventually, one of the rich guys whose money the VCs are playing with notice something that they want to buy, like, a yacht owned by Jefferson Davis or a solid gold house or something, and calls up his boys to ask how his money is doing. They assure him that his money is doing fine, and that he has a lot of it. "Good, because I'm buying the skull of Hubert Humphrey to use as an ashtray," he replies. "So I might need some liquid capital." (What can also happen is a rich person has a bad dream and decides to put all his money into gold to save up against the coming apocalypse, or give it to the church, or something, but this is less common.)

The VC guys panic, because all the money they've "made" is literally made up. RapiDate doesn't really bring in a million billion trillion dollars. It's just what they think it should be worth if they tried to sell it, if they could find a buyer that would give them what they wanted for it. It's actually losing money. Those monthly subscription fees don't pay for all the employees, the servers, the security, the sanitation for the ball pit, the dialation stations, and the generous salaries that the doofus and his friend are paying themselves.

So, the VCs have a few options: Admit that they fucked up and made a bad investment, trim the fat, or do an IPO.

The first one will never happen, because it would be career suicide. The second is easy. Hire Alec Baldwin to walk in with a package of steak knives and start firing people. The third is a little more difficult, because there are laws involved. Roughly, an IPO involves selling just enough stock to people stupid enough to buy it, in the hopes that this intangible "ownership" of a small part of the company will eventually be worth something to someone stupider than them. It's an easy way to raise money without exerting much effort, because you simply divide the stock into multiple classes, give yourself at least 51% of it, designate the majority of the sold stock as "non-voting", and then trust that, as always, people will buy lotto tickets. This also helps add credence to the idea that RapiDate is worth what the guys say it's worth.

But you can only do an IPO once. And once you're a publicly traded company, there are all sorts of laws you have to comply with, like having a board of directors and keeping minutes, and, god damn it, this was supposed to be a dating app, not a business! Why isn't it fun?

And then the VCs guys put the company up for sale, where the same morons who bought CompuServe and Yahoo and AOL buy it, because there's a sucker born every minute.

Now, you might be thinking, what's going on here? If it were me, I'd just do like we were talking, and set up a smaller office, not waste money on overhead, and work towards making a steady profit each year, then expanding and diversifying the business into different areas that could be explored and utilized as I see fit. And you'd be correct, this is one way of doing things.

But, not in the world of venture capital.

You, the reader, are thinking like an old Lord from the 1600s, where you'd just reap a steady profit from the serfs at tax time. They, however, are winners, and are going to hit the big lotto and become rich right now. Slow and steady is for suckers.

They get a business, build it up, prep it for sale, and they turn it out to market so they can have their return real quick. There's never any intention of holding onto it long term. If it's a failure? Well, load it up with debt and have the owners declare bankruptcy (or, better yet, sell it to a firm that specializes in that). They get paid either way. Big risks, big rewards. They aren't stupid; they know what they're doing. But if you want to provide a long term service that people will actually use and you might pass on to your kids? These are not your people. They are unicorn hunters.

So yeah, the VCs keep the doofuses close, because men in suits are scary and fear is motivating, and it can be fun to have a pet to show off if the rich guys show up to see what their money is doing. They might also own part of the building that they lease to the doofuses.

Education Lottery · Feb 6, 2019

Sissy Galvez said:
You would think that but many of these ebeggars are scraping by because getting a 9-5 job would crush their spirit. They’re just all completely worthless and incapable of functioning in normal society.

Here’s an idiot whining about Patreon paying for her rent and whining about how she loses patrons at the start of every month yet getting a steady job is not even considered/out of the picture. They want to succeed and be successful at their chosen profession.

View attachment 658603 View attachment 658604 View attachment 658605 View attachment 658606

Maybe don’t choose ebegging as your sole source of income or a way of life????

Is she joking?

90% is incredibly generous. When a creator is using a middleman service, it's almost unheard of. By comparison, licensing payouts only give you 5-10%, which is still a shitload depending on the company and your earnings because they're doing so many different things with your work that would eat up your time and finances if you tried to do the same. I had to keep reading over that and making sure the person wasn't joking or had misunderstood.

If you're hurt by a 10% loss, either get some stable work, do some budgeting, or put more irons in your fire that don't involve you begging.

Patreon should have held their ground when they did the fee hike. It would have weeded out the circlejerk donators and people like this.

Haramburger · Feb 6, 2019

Coccxys said:
Patreon is basically failing to make money from a legal Ponzi scheme. I knew someone who did art on the side and had about £500 a month coming in. I commented that is was a nice side gig and they said they were losing money. Confused I asked how and it turned out they were paying out about £600 a month to other artists. I suggested maybe dropping the outgoings to at least the same as the income and they said if they did that people would stop paying to them... Turns out they were donating to each other in one big web and no one other than patreon was making any money. I get the feeling that is the case for a lot of people on there.

Cosmug said:
What the shit? How much of Patreon’s cash flow is just webs of 10-20 people swapping saliva over the same 10 bucks a month? How where they able to keep going for years? Is there some cartel laundering drug money by being an angel donor to some tranny comic sperg? Where’s that DSP emote

Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
This is a good point. A lot of people pass patreon donations around to inflate their incoming donation numbers. That makes Patreon losing money that much more baffling.

This was a big GamerGate reveal, because inflating the activity was supposed to bring in the real normies to support and then they were going to w e a n off each other's accounts so that they wouldn't need to pay each other, the public would be doing it 100%. Turns out not everyone can be sakimi-chan and the real way to make Patreon money is to actually produce worthwhile content twice a month. Meanwhile if Patreon were to shut down tomorrow sakimi-chan is big enough that they could switch to straight paypal or any other service and the fans would follow, cash in hand.

moocow · Feb 6, 2019

Coccxys said:
Turns out they were donating to each other in one big web and no one other than patreon was making any money. I get the feeling that is the case for a lot of people on there.

Cosmug said:
What the shit? How much of Patreon’s cash flow is just webs of 10-20 people swapping saliva over the same 10 bucks a month?

xX_rAcE_wAr_420_Xx said:
A fucking lot, have you looked at the Rat King? All of those niggers have like $250 in Patreon bucks for doing nothing except existing as a beautiful transwoman on Twitter, and it turns out they just hand the cash around and Patreon gets to take a 5% chip out of it like 10 times.

Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
A lot of people pass patreon donations around to inflate their incoming donation numbers. That makes Patreon losing money that much more baffling.

This isn't how it works. Patreon tried to change their fee structure to make it work this way, but the user revolt it triggered (heh) last year was an amazing dose of salt. As it stands, Patreon lets its users slide their chips around on the table for free. They only impose their fees when someone cashes out their chips.

If someone pays you $50, and you pay someone else $50, and they pay someone else $50, then that person pays you $50 again (all via Patreon), nobody pays any fees and you've still got the original $50. But now everyone involved has inflated numbers because each donation counts (and donations you make don't get deducted from the total displayed on your public page).

These Patreon circlejerks are free to the participants. That's why so many rat king members display surprising levels of "support" on their Patreon accounts -- they're just sliding chips around among their fellow circlejerkers.

Patreon are fucking idiots for backing down on that fee schedule change. They quite possibly wouldn't be in this boat right now if they'd implemented it.

Corbin Dallas Multipass · Feb 6, 2019

moocow said:
This isn't how it works. Patreon tried to change their fee structure to make it work this way, but the user revolt it triggered (heh) last year was an amazing dose of salt. As it stands, Patreon lets its users slide their chips around on the table for free. They only impose their fees when someone cashes out their chips.

If someone pays you $50, and you pay someone else $50, and they pay someone else $50, then that person pays you $50 again (all via Patreon), nobody pays any fees and you've still got the original $50. But now everyone involved has inflated numbers because each donation counts (and donations you make don't get deducted from the total displayed on your public page).

These Patreon circlejerks are free to the participants. That's why so many rat king members display surprising levels of "support" on their Patreon accounts -- they're just sliding chips around among their fellow circlejerkers.

Patreon are fucking idiots for backing down on that fee schedule change. They quite possibly wouldn't be in this boat right now if they'd implemented it.

Oh. So that's how you lose money, you do business at a loss. Fucking morons. Actually, if they were knowingly going along with inflating the apparent use of their platform... does that constitute fraud?

Cosmug · Feb 6, 2019

2 litre soda said:
Yeah. I own one. It's a pain in the ass, especially when customers tell me what to stock, vs. what I see them buy, but it's better than working for someone else.

Let's talk about Venture Capitalists for a little bit. This, much like my other post, is sarcastic, broad, and opinionated. Don't treat it as gospel.

VCs are rich people looking to get richer. They have enough money that they can gamble on many companies, and if even one of them pays off big, they'll have a good return, and they can then proceed to gut/ruin/sell-off the others.

There is nothing wrong with this. This is how capitalism works. People invest in your company, you pay them back. The problem comes when there's a clash between short term returns vs. long term investments.

So, let's say our aforementioned hipster doofuses come up with some ideas for an apps like, I don't know, turn your phone into a neck massager. This is a shit app because it's easily replicable by anyone with access to the phone's vibrate feature. He won't get funding. Another guy has the idea for an app that lets you upload a picture of a girl and find single girls in your area that look just like her. There's a money maker, in theory, because it has a demographic, it has a subscription model, and it can't be easily reproduced.

So the doofus gives a presentation to the VCs, who tell the rich guys who own them about it, the rich guys give the nod, and RapiDate becomes a thing with financial backing. The doofus now has money behind his app, so the quality of the fake woman bots who respond to the desperate men becomes better, the pictures become more HD, the ads that play during the Super Bowl to assure you that yes, they are very real and actual women out there who want to have sex with you, if only you pay for this app, feature more than just the doofus' girlfriend in cheap lingerie from TJ Maxx...

The bots quickly become unsustainable, so the doofus has to hire people to chat with the clients. You can pay people in Thailand $0.02 a message to do that, plus the transaction fees, plus the billing processors, plus the international taxes, plus the initial cost of setting up the chat client and tying it to the app. Security becomes a major issue as it scales, because they don't want anyone to find out that there aren't any women on the app, so the doofus has to hire some more IT guys to do that. There's more stuff: MySQL databases, network maintenance, server costs, payment processors... all this shit that feels like actual work, when, the doofus wrote an app, and it was supposed to just do it's thing and then he could lay back and let the money roll in. Why is he still having to work? So, work has to be fun. Hence, Margaret and Simone and the ball pit. He is not his dad, and he is not the VC guys that socialists like him despise.

Now, VC guys, they like to play a game called "Who has the bigger number?" It's essentially a dick measuring contest where they get together, drink, snort coke, and brag about who made the biggest return on investment during that quarter. So the one guy says, as he does a line off a hooker's ass, "My portfolio is worth a million billion dollars!" Another, forcing a different hooker eat as many cocktail napkins as he can force into her mouth, says "Well, my portfolio is worth a million billion trillion dollars!" and it just goes on like this. Accountants are involved to make these brags seem realistic, with things like "intangible assets" being cited to make up any difference. Soon, RapiDate is worth way more than anyone thought possible.

Eventually, one of the rich guys whose money the VCs are playing with notice something that they want to buy, like, a yacht owned by Jefferson Davis or a solid gold house or something, and calls up his boys to ask how his money is doing. They assure him that his money is doing fine, and that he has a lot of it. "Good, because I'm buying the skull of Hubert Humphrey to use as an ashtray," he replies. "So I might need some liquid capital." (What can also happen is a rich person has a bad dream and decides to put all his money into gold to save up against the coming apocalypse, or give it to the church, or something, but this is less common.)

The VC guys panic, because all the money they've "made" is literally made up. RapiDate doesn't really bring in a million billion trillion dollars. It's just what they think it should be worth if they tried to sell it, if they could find a buyer that would give them what they wanted for it. It's actually losing money. Those monthly subscription fees don't pay for all the employees, the servers, the security, the sanitation for the ball pit, the dialation stations, and the generous salaries that the doofus and his friend are paying themselves.

So, the VCs have a few options: Admit that they fucked up and made a bad investment, trim the fat, or do an IPO.

The first one will never happen, because it would be career suicide. The second is easy. Hire Alec Baldwin to walk in with a package of steak knives and start firing people. The third is a little more difficult, because there are laws involved. Roughly, an IPO involves selling just enough stock to people stupid enough to buy it, in the hopes that this intangible "ownership" of a small part of the company will eventually be worth something to someone stupider than them. It's an easy way to raise money without exerting much effort, because you simply divide the stock into multiple classes, give yourself at least 51% of it, designate the majority of the sold stock as "non-voting", and then trust that, as always, people will buy lotto tickets. This also helps add credence to the idea that RapiDate is worth what the guys say it's worth.

But you can only do an IPO once. And once you're a publicly traded company, there are all sorts of laws you have to comply with, like having a board of directors and keeping minutes, and, god damn it, this was supposed to be a dating app, not a business! Why isn't it fun?

And then the VCs guys put the company up for sale, where the same morons who bought CompuServe and Yahoo and AOL buy it, because there's a sucker born every minute.

Now, you might be thinking, what's going on here? If it were me, I'd just do like we were talking, and set up a smaller office, not waste money on overhead, and work towards making a steady profit each year, then expanding and diversifying the business into different areas that could be explored and utilized as I see fit. And you'd be correct, this is one way of doing things.

But, not in the world of venture capital.

You, the reader, are thinking like an old Lord from the 1600s, where you'd just reap a steady profit from the serfs at tax time. They, however, are winners, and are going to hit the big lotto and become rich right now. Slow and steady is for suckers.

They get a business, build it up, prep it for sale, and they turn it out to market so they can have their return real quick. There's never any intention of holding onto it long term. If it's a failure? Well, load it up with debt and have the owners declare bankruptcy (or, better yet, sell it to a firm that specializes in that). They get paid either way. Big risks, big rewards. They aren't stupid; they know what they're doing. But if you want to provide a long term service that people will actually use and you might pass on to your kids? These are not your people. They are unicorn hunters.

So yeah, the VCs keep the doofuses close, because men in suits are scary and fear is motivating, and it can be fun to have a pet to show off if the rich guys show up to see what their money is doing. They might also own part of the building that they lease to the doofuses.

This is probably the most informative post I’ve read on this entire forum. This pump-hype-dump strategy makes a whole lot of dumb internet businesses decisions make a lot more sense.

moocow · Feb 6, 2019

Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
Oh. So that's how you lose money, you do business at a loss. Fucking morons. Actually, if they were knowingly going along with inflating the apparent use of their platform... does that constitute fraud?

Maybe it counts as fraud against the investors or something, but I doubt it's anything approaching fraud towards John Q. Public. Everybody (hopefully) knows the trick by now that you should put a couple bucks into the tip jar before you set it on the counter since people are more likely to donate if there's already a bit of cash in it.

If just inflating the apparent use of a platform was a crime, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit and lots of others would be long gone by now.

Done · Feb 6, 2019

You have to be crazy to think this is the end for them, not when they're managing a billion-dollar-userbase already.

IMO, this is a prelude to raising their cut of the pie, which produced glorious REEing the last time they tried it.

One Man Bland · Feb 6, 2019

vertexwindi said:
Just increase your rates you cucks. People will bitch but do you think they'll actually use a competitor? Even if there were one, most Patrons are too fucking lazy to make the switch.

The problem is that patrons don’t so much as leave to a competitor as they don’t come back at all.

A major flaw in Patreon’s business model is that it operates under the assumption that its content creators will continually put out high-quality content and perks that will draw in loyal consumers of that content. The problem with that being that creators worth their weight in salt typically don’t need a patreon because they’re either self-sustaining on their own merit or have have actual jobs inside the industry. (Or in many cases work in relative obscurity because they get buried under all the garbage) Which leaves the majority of Patreons creators being mostly people like this:

I know this video is directed at Kickstarter, but the principle is the same

So with a large userbase that consists mostly of useless :tugboat:

hipsters, Patreon has found themselves in a precarious position in recent years where patrons are fickle sorts who on average make low donations with no brand loyalty, which makes trying to make changes for the sake of profitability difficult. The few times they’ve tried to increase fees or implement new ones they’ve run into the same issues: users pull their $1-$5 donations for bunch of mediocre creators to save money, said creators REEE at Patreon about how they’re killing one gorillian minorities until Patreon eventually caves, but then by that point the damage is done because the patrons who pulled out find that they like having the extra bit of cash to spend on actual shit instead of creators who give perks like “for $1 I will grace you with a modicum of gratitude when I remember you exist” or “see my crappy videos a whole 10 minutes in advance for the low price of $25 a month!” and never re-invest it into another Patreon.

It’s why whenever Patreon backtracks on a fee policy you tend to see a lot of responses like this following it:

Patreon’s a lot like YouTube in that regard since a lot of the money sinkhole is caused by having a lot of deadweight creators they’re either losing money on or lack long-term sustainability, but don’t actually target those people out of fear of potential bad PR.

1Tonka_Truck · Feb 6, 2019

Discobiscuits said:
Patreon should have held their ground when they did the fee hike.

It probably would have been alright if they hadn't tried a regressive fee structure. They wanted to take a something like 20% of the $1-5 donations.

Kerr Avon · Feb 6, 2019

Good riddance to all the niggo and groom tugboats

pwnest injun · Feb 6, 2019

Cosmug said:
This is probably the most informative post I’ve read on this entire forum. This pump-hype-dump strategy makes a whole lot of dumb internet businesses decisions make a lot more sense.

Reading it reminded me of Steve Albini talking about how the music industry eats new talent.

Just replace A&R with VC and it's same shit different day.

Patreon isnt making enough money - When 5% of a billion for being a middle man won't do

TowinKarz

Unclaimed Freight

Coccxys

Cosmug

Did you just call me Krammit

xX_rAcE_wAr_420_Xx

LGBT, the Four Pests of the Communist Party

Corbin Dallas Multipass

Grotesque Bushes

Null yeeted my spaghetti dog avatar

RJ MacReady

cheating bitch

QI 541

Guest

2 litre soda

For what we do, we have to grovel?

Education Lottery

Haramburger

Gilded Donor II Turbo HD Remix

moocow

Moo.

Corbin Dallas Multipass

Cosmug

Did you just call me Krammit

moocow

Moo.

Done

One Man Bland

1Tonka_Truck

Loaded Like A Boxcar Moving Like A Racecar

Kerr Avon

>tfw finding your bfs smegma in the folds and eat

pwnest injun

Order is a gift