Things to know before starting a Patreon page

209 点作者 colebowl将近 5 年前

18 条评论

I would add - as a patron, the UI is horrible.The one thing I'd like, when I subscribe to someone, is a list of patron-only content so that I can slowly go back and watch/listen to/read past material. Instead the only option is an infinite-scroll style blog roll, which makes it extremely hard to go back and pick up where you left off. It's also impossible to navigate in anything other than inverse chronological order. Atrocious.

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egypturnash将近 5 年前

Works fine for me, when I'm not struggling to make progress on my work due to waves vaguely at 2020, Patreon lets me pay my rent by drawing comics about robot ladies with reality problems and cartoon animal space operas.YMMV obviously. I don't use any of its integrations, I just go to the web UI and upload a new page and type some stuff about it now and then, and also hit up my gloriously-unfashionable Wordpress-based site and add the same file to the secret-patrons-only whole-chapter-WIP page. Which does not bother doing any authentication because it's all ultimately gonna be free on the public pages of my site anyway.I might get a bigger percentage if I fucked around with some other way to create recurring payments, sure. But my experience is that people now know what is up with Patreon, and are much more likely to say "okay sure I'm in, I'll give you a few bucks per page of your weird-ass comics for a while" than to sign up for anything else I've ever done. Like I think I got all of fifty bucks, once, out of the Paypal donation button I used to have on my old comics. I've gotten several years of paying my rent out of Patreon and that lower signup friction is well worth their cut IMHO.(I will note that I do kinda feel like Patreon's sort of abandoned the per-creation model, it's not uncommon to see them roll out new features that only work on the monthly model. Which really doesn't work for someone like me who can go silent for months at a time due to depression.)

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sitkack将近 5 年前

PSA: If you are in the USA (and 32 other locales), setup a github page and use github's sponsor functionality. They take no cut.<a href="https://github.com/sponsors" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sponsors</a>

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akling将近 5 年前

I'm currently using Patreon and GitHub Sponsors to accept donations. If you are doing anything software related, I would definitely encourage you to set up GitHub Sponsors right away.GitHub Sponsors: - Zero fees (compared to the ~10% Patreon takes) (!) - They match all donations (up to a limit of $5000) for the first year (!!) - Great exposure. Tons of people have found me through GitHub. (I don't think anyone ever found me through Patreon.)It's still worth it for me to use both services, as some people have strong feelings about one or the other. And in fact, I also have a PayPal for people who don't trust either one. :)

Traster将近 5 年前

I'm not really sure what Patreon is to be honest. It's not payment processing - they're literally passing those costs to you. It's not a community, there's no cross-patron promotion or discoverability. It seems like it's essentially just a bad version of square space that wants to charge you a percentage of your revenue instead of $20 a month. It had this exciting opportunity to build a platform, but I think that time has passed, they've chosen not to do it, so all they have left is some rather poor CMS with an exploitative pricing model.

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ehutch79将近 5 年前

I'd love to know what the other options are out there, as mentioned in the article.Right now, patreon is well known, and I'd be concerned with an unknown site turning supporters off.

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kalleboo将近 5 年前

I'm curious about the fee structure. I was under the impression that the vast majority of patronships were $1/mo. Maybe it's varies among media, since I only subscribe to YouTubers.I pay $1/mo to like 15 different YouTubers. This adds up to $15/mo which to me is a reasonable price for entertainment. With patreon, I get billed once a month and their fees end up being like the article writes around 12%. If all these YouTubers switched to something like PayPal, now they'd be paying 30% fees on $1 payments instead.

deostroll将近 5 年前

I would add that Patreon is not built for creators from India. The most important thing for a creator like me is that money gets directly transferred to my bank account; not my credit card or my paypal account. It's a psychological thing. And I think it is a significant thing because that is our middle class culture. Here a significant portion of the population don't spend money on their credit cards like people in other countries do.The only two options on patreon are a credit card and paypal. The latter is also not that much in vogue.These are just my thoughts.

zzzeek将近 5 年前

Patreon does not seem very spectacular but I don't exactly see what the reason not to have a patreon page is. I have one and it is one of several different income sources for my open source work. it's 100 bucks a month I wouldn't have otherwise.

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vaibhavthevedi将近 5 年前

This is a detailed analysis. I was thinking to start Patreon but I tried Buymeacoffee page and turns out, it is slowly becoming like Patreon only. But better.

thomas将近 5 年前

Regarding most of this: I think this is why they built (bought?) Memberful.

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WhyNotHugo将近 5 年前

> If your intention is to build a meaningful income, there are much better options out there than Patreon.Naming at least one in the article wouldn't been helpful.

torartc将近 5 年前

Didn't they also have a large data breach?

gadders将近 5 年前

4. If you are slightly more right wing than Mitt Romney, you will get banned.

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Tomte将近 5 年前

> If your intention is to build a meaningful income, there are much better options out there than Patreon.I would have liked the author to expand on that (bolded) sentence. If he knows better options, please tell us!

redis_mlc将近 5 年前

The article is complaining that Patreon is not a full banking app.Well, duh.Patrons and small-time creators are very happy with what it does, and don't care about what it doesn't do - Patreon pays the monthly rent of a lot of artists who have no other short-term options until their career is in full-swing. By contrast, Youtube is notorious for being unreliable as a revenue source.My only complaints about Patreon are:- the app is one of the slowest web apps today. Actually, I lied - it's the slowest. Shame on the programming team behind this. Get your shit together.- they just started charging sales tax on donations if the creator offers rewards content (almost all do so.) That doesn't make sense for posting a video link a day early, foreign artists, etc.- I think a VC bought Patreon. We know how that always ends.My suggestions are:- profile the app performance and fix it.- maybe ask the article author what he's expecting for discoverability on a payment app. Perhaps adding a couple pieces of metadata alone might help?Source: I used it daily as a Patron from July, 2019 through June, 2020 while providing feedback to a creator.

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jes5199将近 5 年前

you know that feeling when you worked at a company, and you tried to push it in a certain direction, but the powers that be made it impossible to really get to the core issues? yeah.

billpg将近 5 年前

If you send money with the expectation of a perk or reward, (other than the continued production of the video/podcast/etc) than you're not really a patron any more. You're a customer.