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No One Makes a Living on Crowdfunding Website Patreon (theoutline.com)
Brent Knepper, writing for The Outline (condensed): Patreon is basically a payments processor designed like a social network. Every creator sets up a profile where they fill out a prompt about what they're making: "Oliver Babish is creating cooking videos," or "Hannah Alexander is creating Art and Costume Designs inspired by pop culture and Art Nouveau." Patreon encourages creators to provide a description of themselves and their work and strongly suggests uploading a video. [...] Today, successful Patreon creators include Chapo Trap House, a lefty podcast with 19,837 patrons at the time of writing paying $88,074 a month; the new commentator and YouTuber Philip DeFranco (13,823 patrons paying an amount that is undisclosed, but is enough to put him in the top 20 creators on the site); and the gaming YouTuber Nerd (4,494 patrons, $8,003 per month). But despite the revolutionary rhetoric, the success stories, and the goodwill that Patreon has generated, the numbers tell a different story. Patreon now has 79,420 creators, according to Tom Boruta, a developer who tracks Patreon statistics under the name Graphtreon. Patreon lets creators hide the amount of money they are actually making, although the number of patrons is still public. Boruta's numbers are based on the roughly 80 percent of creators who publicly share what they earn. Of those creators, only 1,393 -- 2 percent -- make the equivalent of federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, or $1,160 a month, in October 2017. Worse, if we change it to $15 per hour, a minimum wage slowly being adopted by states, that's only .8 percent of all creators. In this small network designed to save struggling creatives, the money has still concentrated at the top.
The story blurb makes it sound like Patreon is a scam or scamish because only a few people using it are making bank. But I think this is a pretty normal distribution for folks involved in earning money this way, and any "creative" endeavor where margins are thin and success stories few. There are acres of people YouTubing and Podcasting, and only a few make any substantial part of their income from them. The same is true for selling products on eBay, Amazon, Listia, whomever. Individuals - people not companies - can make a living that way, and some do - but very few. Is Patreon "overselling" what you can do with their platform? Perhaps, but it's up to *YOU* to create something people want to give you money for, not Patreon.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Most people on Patreon have multiple things going on at the same time, and that adds up to a full wage.
Plus, they can monetize in other ways the stuff they create with the Patreon money; for example, a musician can get funded to create a music album, and then use the songs they created to tour and sell merchandise.
Article is knowingly deceptive.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Hey everyone, what does "No-One" mean to you. Would it mean a number that is zero instead of non-zero? Because the headline says "no-one" but the summary even says something like 0.8% of some non-zero number.
The reality is that there are also a lot of people who just want extra cash for something they work on part time or some base of fixed revenue they can work on top of through other funding means. Even just $1500 a month is enough to live in a lot of places and it would let you have plenty of time to work on other revenue streams, so you cannot really say who is or is not making minimum wage from what they do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yep, for the many patrons who do lots of small pledges it amounts to a new 37.9% processing fee. The creators get slightly more money, but the bulk of these fees are going straight to Patreon since they already batch the small transactions together.
Except $1 pledges are apparently quite common - Patreon is basically increasing the price to those people by 37.9%.
Odds are someone who currently makes a bunch of $1 pledges will simply end 40% of them now.
#DeleteChrome
Usually if you're using "no one" as a figure of speech, you don't turn around and immediately give at least two examples to the contrary.
No one makes a living off Patreon. This guy makes $88,000 a week.
Frankly, their fees are far better than any other site, even with the recent changes. You keep 95%? that's the fairest site of them all.
With the new 2.9% + $0.35 per pledge fees they're rolling out for donors, it's more like you keep ~69% of each nominally-$1 pledge. (Actual cost payed by donor $1.37, of which you receive $0.95.) Larger pledges result in a better ratio, naturally, up to about 92.3% in the best case.
Those fees might be reasonable on a per-transfer basis, where a transfer is $15 or more and can be used to fund multiple pledges, but not for each individual pledge. Especially since the only difference in the cost to Patreon between one $40 pledge and 40 $1 pledges is some entries in a database.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat