Slashdot Mirror
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
They just slid the knofe in between the ribs of Jeph Jacques, the cartoonist who does "Questionable Content", http://questionablecontent.net...
See his article at https://www.patreon.com/posts/...
Assuming it stays up!
davecb@spamcop.net
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?
Video of some good progressive thrash music
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.
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
Many of these people are using Patreon to SUPPLEMENT what they make from another platform like Twitch or Youtube.
Also, a lot of people bringing in the truly large amounts are hiding the total amount of their pledges out of the belief that if potential donors saw what they were already making they'd be less likely to donate thinking that already had "enough" support (ie, why should I "donate" to someone already bringing in $15k+ per month?).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'll echo what Slashdot user Frosty Piss said above, that's actually a pretty normal distribution of money for these types of endeavors, and Patreon is not going to magically change those numbers. It is simply another tool that works well for some people and not so well for others. 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.
On YouTube for example your share of the ad revenue is about 45%, or $1 per 1000 views on average. And that's way better than if you are a musician signed to a label. RIck Astley says he's made $12 total off of YouTube through his label. Someone has kept tens of thousands of dollars of revenue from the videos claimed by his copyright assigns. (the video used in Rickrolling memes has probably generated about $75,000, looking at the 75 million hits on it.)
Patreon, if you can make it work, has done a very good job of putting all the revenue you do make in your pocket. It's all up to you.
In the article there is a quote: Indeed, the creators Patreon seems to value most are those who not only make stuff people like, but are also good at marketing their stuff and themselves.
That's the definition of most successful artists. Even if you're good you still have to elevate yourself above the noise with self promotion, until it hits a snowball effect. There are a few exceptional artists, who are so good that they attract the attention of movers and shakers right away, but most people have to work for it.
This is a timely article as I have been looking into it as a way of augmenting and feeding off of my YouTube channel, which has actually been quite successful. I've been evaluating if it can be done without taking up so much time that the added income is not proportionate, as the author of the article intimated is often the case. It's either going to be a net positive or a net negative. If it doesn't work out, no one is forcing me to continue with it.
FTA:
YouTuber Amanda Lee, who makes over $4,000 a month, said, âoeChannel your creativity into something youâ(TM)re passionate about â" donâ(TM)t just create something to please others or to gain views.â
Sometimes that can work, but often you are tailoring what you make to what works and what people want. If that happens to be what you like to make, then it's all good. If not, there is a creative balance in there somewhere. For example, I know that if I post a certain kinds of videos, it gets crazy hits. So I focus on that to make money, while still making other videos that I also like to make but I know won't get those hits. YouTube is a numbers game. The cumulative total of a lot of videos, some successful, some less successful, are what provide a good income. But once you have that content there, the income is passive. It's great. With Patreon, it's never really passive except in the sense that when new patrons sign up for your thing, they tyically get access to all your past content. Which makes early adopters receive less value, so there's that to overcome as well on Patreon.
FTA:
I posted a gif of my dog and included a $69 tier to pay for his food. No one has done it yet. When I first signed up, I thought I was the perfect match for Patreonâ(TM)s model. But now Iâ(TM)m realizing that as a struggling photographer without a massive social media following, Iâ(TM)m probably not Patreonâ(TM)s Target Creator.
Now that's just stupid. Just like GoFundMe, don't ask for people to directly pay for your basic living expenses or your "I need to find myself" trip around the world. No one's going to do it. You have to focus on what you're creating and not your basic living needs when marketing to people.
Also, I don't know why the author of the article expects that most people should be able to make a living solely on Patreon, he seems dissapointed that it's not the case, and expects it should be the case.
Patreon is a tip jar, not a replacement for a living wage. Sounds like maybe people are misinformed. Ah well, maybe not everyone can make a living through online media. Big surprise there...
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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
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.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
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.
The part that is causing outrage is "patrons will pay for each individual pledge". If you pledge $40/mo. to one artist you'll pay $1.50/mo. in fees (not unreasonable), but if you make 40 $1 pledges then you'll pay $15.16/mo in fees. In the latter case, combined with their 5% cut on the recipient's side, Patreon is keeping almost 40% of the amount payed by donors. This change effectively makes small pledges unworkable, which is a problem for those Patreon users who rely on small pledges from many different patrons. As for the costs, Patreon doesn't do a separate transaction per pledge; they combine all the pledges together into a single transaction. Their processing costs are thus the same whether the donations go to one pledge or many.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
So I have 30k subs on youtube, 12 million views, and also a Patreon that hovers around $500/mo. Youtube has come in around $1000-1500 per month in ad revenues lately. That's just barely enough to get by after I also make a not so predictable amount of money on T-shirt sales and also why I started a fairly successful 2nd channel. You need to diversify and Patreon wasn't meant to 100% prop up someone's income. I've heard of cosplayers and artists and web comic creators use it almost exclusively but even they sell shirts and have adsense ads on their websites. I don't think anyone legitimately intends to use it as their sole income in the first place.