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

Slow news day?

[Frosty Piss]

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.

Re:Slow news day?

[cayenne8]

Yep..and again....EVERY job is NOT a job one makes their sole livelihood from....

And with stuff like Patreon, most all it takes is your extra time doing something you likely would be doing for free as that you like it.

I am curious, however, how much the gun channels are making on Patreon. YouTube has apparently de-monetized most all of them (I guess YT has a political slant)...and it appears most of the larger ones are now using Patreon to try to regain some of that lost YT revenue.

But really....most people doing stuff online are not making a living from it, it is a hobby that is generating some income.

I'd rather get paid for doing what I like that I'd do anyway, than get no $$ at all, if given the choice.

Who wouldn't?

Re:Slow news day?

[eclectro]

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.

Thus, they truly believe that any conservative talk is therefore "hate speech" and needs to be censored if at all possible. Many believe that violence is justified in order to silence the so called hate speech, and why antifa has in the past on both youtube and Patreon websites.

Youtube has evolved itself into a socialist/feminist monoculture internally which will demonetize or put in limited state anything that it disagrees with politically. It's what resulted in James Damore's firing.

I find it interesting that when Youtube started the "limited state" censorship, they censored a Nazi video, then they censored political videos from youtube user Black Pidgeon Speaks that was critical of Islam before they censored a bunch more Nazi videos. Do your research.

FAR worse that that..

[davecb]

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!

Definitions

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Raising prices

[JesseMcDonald]

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.