Patreon fee structure changes

[artsyhonker]

I wrote a thing about Patreon fee structure changes, please do add comments there.

I did wonder if 5% was going to be enough, long-term, to keep Patreon going, or whether they were going to encounter scale problems. Turns out it's the latter.

Comments

[siderea]

3% should have been enough, to say nothing of 5%. I don't believe for a moment the problem was scale. It was greed and mismanagement. They were paying developers to do things that had no value-add for the platform, and that's always a terrible sign, often that management hasn't figured out which side their bread is buttered on. When management can't figure out how they actually make money, Bad Things happen to a company.

[artsyhonker]

Maybe! But other platforms I've used, which do seem much more focused, charge more.

Bandcamp is 15%, for example. (And for that they also handle VATMOSS, a huge pain over here, and absorb payment processing fees from payments made by customers/patrons/subscribers.)

[artsyhonker]

This Github request may be of interest to you.

[siderea]

Thanks, and good luck! Is my impression right that Liberapay is only for Creative Commons licensed works?

[artsyhonker]

So, in my head I thought it was explicitly GPL or Creative Commons, but the about page seems to be rather more vague than that: "People who contribute to the commons need you to support their work. Building free software, spreading free knowledge, these things take time and cost money, not only to do the initial work, but also to maintain it over time."

To me, that sounds like as long as people can access your work, you'd be good. But the platform itself is open, and funded through its own Liberapay account that people can donate to just like any other individual, organisation or team on the site (yeah... one of the things I thought about a bit when I first started on Patreon was setting up some kind of collective/cooperative/group effort, but all the ways I could think of doing it worked out as far too messy. Liberapay already has that, so if I wanted to find a group of, say, hymn writers to work with and share donations among, so that we have four times the marketing ability? I could do that.)

Also: Liberapay allows you to pledge to donate to people who haven't joined the site yet. The donation will automatically start if they sign up to receive it. We'll send you a notification when that happens. I have no idea how this might work for people who want pay-per-work but there is a pledge set up for them which is weekly pay, but it's verrrry interesting. Not for me -- I've already joined, I'm just not sure how much I'll use it -- but for anyone who wanted to test whether enough of their existing patrons could be convinced to switch to that platform for it to be worthwhile, well, there's a fairly practical way to gather some data.

It looks like they do actual discovery better than Patreon too, though I don't know how well that will scale, and it doesn't interest me much.

[siderea]

I would prefer a site that does no discovery, ideally swearing a mighty oath never to be involved in discovery.

Creators having misguided ideas about what Patreon's role in things is, is how we got in this boat, and one of those ideas is "Well, Patreon advertises for us, right? Patreon gets us patrons, right?" Nobody complains PayPal doesn't provide them customers; if Patreon had never done discovery, that entire class of problem would have fallen off their tech support queue.

[artsyhonker]

I'm not sure that's the root of the problem at all; I think it's the paywall thing. Sure, there are people who whinge about Patreon not magically providing them with patrons, but they aren't the people who are going to be helped by Patreon abandoning a perfectly sensible batching scheme in order to prevent someone pledging, gaining access to paywalled content, and then scarpering.

The initial attraction of discovery, I think, is that in encouraging patrons to (literally) buy into a site one can say "and here are some other cool people making cool stuff and getting funding through this site!" which is a good way to make signing up seem worth the bother.