We used to run a marketplace for designers and one of the things we learned (too late) was to charge more. Pick a number, double it, and you are still probably not charging enough. You can't run a service on dog food forever.
Sure Patreon raised funds, but those funds can't subsidize them for a lifetime, they gotta get sustainable and do it fast. There is not a chance they will be wasting time to build their own credit-card processing, so Stripe fees are here to stay.
Although contributors are important, Patreon would have nothing without their creators. Creators make the content which people pay for, and creators need to put food on the table to keep doing what they are doing.
If you are a creator making $2,000 a month, for example, then an extra $100 is an extra trip to the grocery store, and that's important. If someone wants to fund a creator, they will, and the extra couple of bucks isn't going to discourage that.
Furthermore, I suspect Patreon has data on how much is being contributed by each user. I doubt, like the top comment suggest, that 1 person on the platform would fund 100 creatives. Probably 1:3 ratio, with a couple of outliers, is most likely.
This is a good change.
p.s. If they don't have it yet, expect Patreon to start partnering with places like Teespring to offer merch by their creators. It just makes sense.
Well, small problem with that - words have meanings. They were a customer, in that they were giving Patreon money. Now they are not a customer. It's not that they were never a customer, because they were giving Patreon money. And now they're not.
Patreon is presenting this as solely as an improvement for the sake of the creators (see https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/). If it's a necessity to Patreon alive, they're not presenting it as such. I have yet to find a creator who is not upset about this change. And they seem to be ignorant or uncaring about the uproar it's caused.
This is the end of Patreon if they don't course-correct very quickly.
Again, speaking from experience, of course as the company you would present it as a benefit, and creators might get upset, but trust me they would be more upset if/when the site shuts down.
Creators are currently upset because some of them are starting to see patrons stop supporting them due to this. Oh and also upset because Patreon is presenting this as "putting more patron's money in creator's pockets" when it's clearly not for anything outside of the cherry-picked examples they give.
> If someone wants to fund a creator, they will, and the extra couple of bucks isn't going to discourage that.
An awful lot of patreon users give a dollar or two a month to a bunch of creators. It won't just be an extra couple of bucks for them; it'll be an extra 30% or so.
Sure Patreon raised funds, but those funds can't subsidize them for a lifetime, they gotta get sustainable and do it fast. There is not a chance they will be wasting time to build their own credit-card processing, so Stripe fees are here to stay.
Although contributors are important, Patreon would have nothing without their creators. Creators make the content which people pay for, and creators need to put food on the table to keep doing what they are doing.
If you are a creator making $2,000 a month, for example, then an extra $100 is an extra trip to the grocery store, and that's important. If someone wants to fund a creator, they will, and the extra couple of bucks isn't going to discourage that.
Furthermore, I suspect Patreon has data on how much is being contributed by each user. I doubt, like the top comment suggest, that 1 person on the platform would fund 100 creatives. Probably 1:3 ratio, with a couple of outliers, is most likely.
This is a good change.
p.s. If they don't have it yet, expect Patreon to start partnering with places like Teespring to offer merch by their creators. It just makes sense.