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

Re:Slow news day?

[Gavagai80]

No. What you have now are left leaning "social justice warriors" calling *all* conservatives and anybody who has voted Republican "alt-right". Not just the Nazi's and the KKK racists.

No. What you have now are left leaning people being derisively accused by conservatives of favoring social justice, who suddenly find themselves loving and missing George W. Bush because the American political conversation has slid so far right that Bush looks like a commie liberal now. And then you have right wingers who have by and large jumped off the deep end into a dreamland alternate reality where they happily and unquestioningly eat up whatever obvious lies support their 'team' and dismiss science as political.