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.

Comments

hardly surprising

[lorinc]

It's the same for music, painting, sculpture, film, etc. The art creation economy has always been that way, because it comes from an intrinsic property: When you need 100 000 people to give you money in exchange of something in order to survive, there is absolutely zero chance that more than a handful can live that way.

Why should it be different on the internet?

What is the point of this story?

[silverkniveshotmail.]

Who thinks these people are making a bunch of money? This isn't Uber.

I pitch in $2 per episode for Philosophize This! and I know the guy isn't getting rich, I just feel better about it this way and I enjoy the lack of ads.

Re:FAR worse that that..

[dabadab]

It does show that smaller donations cost more in processing than larger donations

Except they don't - that's the whole point of the uproar.

Being an independent artist is nearly impossible

[Angst Badger]

There are extremely few people who make a living as independent artists. The few who manage to do so -- like my daughter -- make most of their money from commissions, do so full time, and still don't make anything close to a middle class living from it. Almost no one is getting paid to just follow their bliss. In any case, there are three reasons why this is unlikely to change, and Patreon can't do much about either of them.

First, there are vastly more excellent artists than there are people willing to pay for their art. The few who manage to be picked up by one of the marketing behemoths of the entertainment industry and maintain a following are mainly just lucky. Anyone who follows independent artists in any medium knows that there are more fantastic artists out there working shitty day jobs right now than there are in all the world's museums. Even if the general public routinely sought out and supported unknown artists, the balance wouldn't change significantly.

Second, the general public isn't routinely seeking out unknown artists. Most of them are simply adopting the preferences of their peer groups. As a result, most of the money flows to an infinitesimal fraction of the working artists in the world, often without regard to actual quality. See also, television and pop music.

Third, artists who are getting by do so through a large number of venues. They end up selling in a bunch of online outlets, as well as local venues -- clubs, art galleries, etc., in addition to conventions, regional shows, and every last commissioned private sale they can get. And they're always networking and on the lookout for new markets. It's hard, but it can be done, and even then, you'll probably still have a day job.

Patreon can't change the economic fundamentals or human nature. I don't know if there's anything that can, but if there is, it's probably not a retail website.

Re:Raising prices

[Kierthos]

Except that if you do a bunch of small pledges, you're being hit repeatedly with this.

Let's say, under this new plan, I make a $1 pledge a month to an artist whose work I like. Well, I don't get charged $1. I get charged $1 + ($1 * 0.029) + $0.35, for a total of $1.379 (rounded up to $1.38).

Now, let's expand on that. Let's say that there's 20 artists on Patreon I like. I do the same $1 a month pledge to each of them. That's that $1.38 times 20, or $27.60.

Before this change to the fee scale goes live (I don't believe it goes into effect until later this month), if I did 20 $1 pledges, it cost me $20.

Now, that's a bit of a difference there.... $20.00 vs $27.60. It's not much to me, but it can mean the difference between supporting certain artists or not.

Now, in neither case (either before these fee changes or after), was the artist I was supporting getting the full $1. Patreon was taking a minor cut out of that as well.

With this fee change, they're charging donors a fee for pledging money, and charging recipients a fee for receiving money.

More to the point, when they run my (from the example above) 20 separate $1 charges, they're not doing it as 20 separate transactions to the credit card companies. Because then they (Patreon) would be hit for 20 transaction charges. They're running it as one transaction.

Now, I get it, Patreon is a business. They need money to stay afloat so they can continue to offer this service. But they're basically screwing everyone involved in using Patreon and trying to float it like it's oh so fucking amazing.

Hell, I've already seen multiple creators ask if there's a way to take on the fees themselves instead of the people donating the money, because that way, the donators aren't the ones being hit for the extra charge.