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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Youtube has in the last few months totally changed their rules to allow basically no spice at all. No they haven't. They've made it harder to make good money off ads for it, which is an entirely different situation. They've made it so you want an external source of money from the people who watch the things you upload, and Patreon was only the easiest way to do it, soon Drip or something else will be. The big time YouTubers on Patreon wouldn't be able to sustain their viewership and thus their Patreon income without YouTube's facilities though. fishmech fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Dec 10, 2017 |
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Dec 10, 2017 05:57
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Baby Babbeh posted:You're probably thinking of this: What is their business model anymore, then? Why would creators not just ask people to subscribe directly through Paypal, and decide themselves whether they want to eat the fees or charge those upfront?
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Dec 10, 2017 05:57
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If it was legally required for them to do this, you'd think it might have saved some some PR disaster to outright say so?
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Dec 10, 2017 06:33
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Absurd Alhazred posted:What is their business model anymore, then? Why would creators not just ask people to subscribe directly through Paypal, and decide themselves whether they want to eat the fees or charge those upfront? Patreon provides services other than just payment processing like content gating and digital rewards for donating.
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Dec 10, 2017 06:35
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So the Patreon price increase can likely be attributed to Patreon realizing that they have an obligation to follow a set of financial regulations designed to prevent money laundering? And that obligation means that they realistically can't aggregate payments and have to pay higher costs per transaction? Wow, this explanation is even more ironic wrt thread posters' worldviews than the earlier story that Patreon raised price to cover new costs owing to a dispute they had with their payment processor.
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Dec 10, 2017 16:29
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silence_kit posted:So the Patreon price increase can likely be attributed to Patreon realizing that they have an obligation to follow a set of financial regulations designed to prevent money laundering? Nope. There is no reason their existing price structure couldn't have handled it, and definitely no reason they had to slap big fees on the consumer facing side too.
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Dec 10, 2017 16:35
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silence_kit posted:So the Patreon price increase can likely be attributed to Patreon realizing that they have an obligation to follow a set of financial regulations designed to prevent money laundering? And that obligation means that they realistically can't aggregate payments and have to pay higher costs per transaction? Wow, this explanation is even more ironic wrt thread posters' worldviews than the earlier story that Patreon raised price to cover new costs owing to a dispute they had with their payment processor. how is it ironic they could've just said that at the outset and not upset anyone. also as fishmech said it wouldn't actually be a defense since the fee structure didn't have to change.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:00
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Thanks so much, Baby Babbeh. That was exactly what I was thinking of.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:04
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Company sets itself up as the number one, most effective source for a specific service; it becomes popular enough to the point no other competitor could break into the market without massive amounts of capital; company raises prices for its service because lol where else are you going to go bitch. Everybody: it is a total mystery why this happened.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:13
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there are alternatives.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:17
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Groovelord Neato posted:how is it ironic they could've just said that at the outset and not upset anyone. It's ironic because many of the same posters who were bitching about the price increase have spent much of the 435 pages of this thread chiding many startup companies for pricing products/services below cost and making up the difference with VC money and for dodging regulations to lower costs. And then when a startup company actually follows regulations and prices their products/services to earn a profit, they complain that the prices are too high, and that some other company will swoop in and take their business. You'd expect fervent critics of startup companies' mode of operation to not really be that price sensitive, especially for something as frivolous as Patreon. It's ironic to see the the posters in this thread who denounce the actions of startup companies providing motivation for and playing (an admittedly) small part in startup companies' actions.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:31
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they weren't operating below cost and wouldn't be operating below cost. this has already been pointed out to you. patreon is extra bad because they did a massive round of vc funding when they were operating at a profit. they have no reason to upscale operations.
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Dec 10, 2017 17:32
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silence_kit posted:It's ironic because many of the same posters who were bitching about the price increase have spent much of the 435 pages of this thread chiding many startup companies for pricing products/services below cost and making up the difference with VC money and for dodging regulations to lower costs. And then when a startup company actually follows regulations and prices their products/services to earn a profit, they complain that the prices are too high, and that some other company will swoop in and take their business. That's a loving lie. Stop posting in this thread and lying about it all the time. Get a loving hobby you piece of poo poo. gently caress you. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 10, 2017 17:54
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Temper!
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Dec 10, 2017 19:03
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Groovelord Neato posted:there are alternatives. Name them and explain how they are exactly comparable to Patreon, in both functionality and visibility.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:07
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ryonguy posted:Company sets itself up as the number one, most effective source for a specific service; it becomes popular enough to the point no other competitor could break into the market without massive amounts of capital; company raises prices for its service because lol where else are you going to go bitch. Except Kickstarter literally just opened Drip which is also backstopped by Amazon and can immediately take on as many Patreon users as they want when Kickstarter decides to drop the whole "beta mode" thing it's currently in. I suspect they were initially planning to just go with a smaller list of creators to start with, as they've been doing, to ramp up to being open to all early next year, but they should be able to open early if the yelling gets loud enough. https://d.rip/discover You can see right now they've got a whole thing doing with a set of big names and a set of small time projects, most in a "founding period" mode to build hype. And all that aside, a ton of Patreon's use cases are supported quite well by PayPal subscriptions and existing plugins to say, provide access to podcast feeds or blogs using subscriber codes. Many people that are on Patreon still have such services available.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:11
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silence_kit posted:It's ironic because many of the same posters who were bitching about the price increase have spent much of the 435 pages of this thread chiding many startup companies for pricing products/services below cost and making up the difference with VC money and for dodging regulations to lower costs. And then when a startup company actually follows regulations and prices their products/services to earn a profit, they complain that the prices are too high, and that some other company will swoop in and take their business. if you're so angry this thread exists you can choose not to post in it, just sort of throwing a tantrum for catharsis is funny tho
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Dec 10, 2017 19:15
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fishmech posted:Except Kickstarter literally just opened Drip which is also backstopped by Amazon and can immediately take on as many Patreon users as they want when Kickstarter decides to drop the whole "beta mode" thing it's currently in.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:43
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Arsenic Lupin posted:The magic words are "right now". I know artists who are losing a chunk of their monthly income because their Patreon patrons are fleeing en masse. You can't get into Drip yet. Paypal's subscription service often doesn't work (I've tried) and in any case Paypal, with your account being mysteriously frozen with no recourse. It's rarely mysterious why someone's account gets frozen on Paypal.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:45
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fishmech posted:It's rarely mysterious why someone's account gets frozen on Paypal. not to you, maybe. try explaining to the nice lady setting up the church fundraiser that her account is frozen because the machine learning fraud detection system saw her collecting donations and decided she was probably a meth dealer. then explain to her why there's nobody she can call to clear it up, and that she can't access the money or even reverse the donations until it's "investigated" for 6-8 months while paypal collects interest on it.
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Dec 10, 2017 21:00
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fishmech posted:And all that aside, a ton of Patreon's use cases are supported quite well by PayPal subscriptions and existing plugins to say, provide access to podcast feeds or blogs using subscriber codes. Many people that are on Patreon still have such services available. Indeed, it's not conceptually hard to cobble something together, it's just (a) a PITA (b) utterly beyond non-techie creators used to doing it on a website. The sort of people who correctly translate "No no it's quite simple computer wizard magic!" as "you're hosed." Patreon's special feature was (1) putting all this stuff in-a-box (2) usable by utter non-techies (3) reliably. I'm hoping someone will set up something in-a-box for nontechie small creators, like a WordPress plugin or plugin set. Though that might tempt them to self-hosting WordPress, which is a vale of tears.
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Dec 10, 2017 21:12
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divabot posted:Indeed, it's not conceptually hard to cobble something together, it's just (a) a PITA (b) utterly beyond non-techie creators used to doing it on a website. The sort of people who correctly translate "No no it's quite simple computer wizard magic!" as "you're hosed." Those exist. It's also something that many of those podcast-networks out there who handle ads and their requisite payments will do for you. Let's say you use PodBean to host your podcast's existing free podcasts, which a lot of them do because it has both free and very cheap hosting plans. You can just turn on a "make a feed only for paid subscribers" option on their site, they take a cut, they handle the payment details. You don't need to know how to do anything besides put up your audio in the first place. Same sort of thing on LibSyn, with their service that explicitly expands beyond just having different feeds, can also handle video, text based posts, etc: https://www.libsyn.com/my-libsyn-premium-content/ I know I'm harping on how to do it for podcasts here, but podcasts and youtube channels who want to offer exclusive content early/always are both served by those mechanisms and they make up a huge chunk of the Patreon audience. There's all sorts of other plugins and services that work with basic free/cheap hosting sites to manage recurring payments and locking content behind paywalls for you.
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Dec 10, 2017 22:06
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fishmech posted:Let's say you use PodBean to host your podcast's existing free podcasts, which a lot of them do because it has both free and very cheap hosting plans. You can just turn on a "make a feed only for paid subscribers" option on their site, they take a cut, they handle the payment details. You don't need to know how to do anything besides put up your audio in the first place. Yes, but then you have to explain to your aunt what a PodBean is. There are other benefits to having a centralized place for this kind of transaction, trust being the biggest one. For example, there are a shitload of crowdfunding sites other than Kickstarter or IndieGogo, but you never hear about them because winning the required mindshare to compete is now too expensive. It's hard enough to ask people to invest in a project that isn't done yet, asking them to do it on your website or some startup platform makes it way more difficult. People already know what Kickstarter is, and there's a good chance they already have an account, which means way less friction. Patreon is new and small enough that it's less of an issue, but it's still an issue. Before this kerfuffle, Kickstarter would have had an uphill battle trying to convert those users, but Patreon basically just handed them an opportunity to eat their lunch.
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Dec 10, 2017 22:18
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Groovelord Neato posted:they weren't operating below cost and wouldn't be operating below cost. this has already been pointed out to you. Do you have any evidence that this is the case? Because if their numbers are anywhere near the ones reported here there is no way in hell they are anywhere near profitable.
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Dec 10, 2017 23:17
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:Yes, but then you have to explain to your aunt what a PodBean is. There are other benefits to having a centralized place for this kind of transaction, trust being the biggest one. For example, there are a shitload of crowdfunding sites other than Kickstarter or IndieGogo, but you never hear about them because winning the required mindshare to compete is now too expensive. It's hard enough to ask people to invest in a project that isn't done yet, asking them to do it on your website or some startup platform makes it way more difficult. People already know what Kickstarter is, and there's a good chance they already have an account, which means way less friction. This complaint is insane. "Your Aunt" doesn't know what the gently caress a Patreon is either. You also don't tell your listeners to go to PodBean. You tell them to go MikesPodcast.com and PodBean (or LibSyn or any of the other similar services) is just the invisible layer making everything work on their site while you see a friendly little "paid subscription" link where you enter your payment information and then get whatever it is that Mike wanted behind the paywall. It's also not like Patreon actually makes it easy to find new things to go listen to/watch/read and then support in the first place, it's not a discovery service, it's a place you go to pay for what you found elsewhere.
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Dec 10, 2017 23:22
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There is a reason the Sears Wishbook was, up until the 1970s, the preferred mail-order catalog. You didn't have to go to six different catalogs for clothes, tools, refrigerators, fat massagers, ... There's a reason why Amazon didn't stop at just books. "One-stop shopping" is an important and profitable feature. Let's write off "your aunt" and "your mom" for a moment (I am the mom of adult children, and somehow I manage technology just fine.  ) You're a destitute millennial, most of your artist friends are destitute millennials, and some of your favorite artists/podcasters/writers who are not actually your friends are also destitute. It is much more appealing to kick in $20 to Patreon and say "Give this to X podcaster, Y writer, Z person who's just in trouble, and omega person who I am hoping to sleep with some day" than it is to say "Right, I'll give $1.50 to Podr and $2 to Writr and $4 to Poorer and what the hell, I'll just ask Elsie if she's up for it."
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Dec 10, 2017 23:52
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That's a loving lie. Stop posting in this thread and lying about it all the time. Get a loving hobby you piece of poo poo. gently caress you. That’s a perfectly accurate description of this thread if perhaps somewhat negative. Settle down Beavis
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Dec 11, 2017 00:14
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Arsenic Lupin posted:There is a reason the Sears Wishbook was, up until the 1970s, the preferred mail-order catalog. You didn't have to go to six different catalogs for clothes, tools, refrigerators, fat massagers, ... There's a reason why Amazon didn't stop at just books. "One-stop shopping" is an important and profitable feature. But Patreon isn't a catalog. It doesn't provide one-stop shopping. Maybe they really want to pretend it'll become that someday, but it's not now and they're actively making it harder for it to be one at this point. But you don't give Patreon $20 and it splits it up for you, you have to hunt down and figure out each individual project/recipient's page and separately sign up to give to them. Patreon barely manages to make it easy to keep track of what you're doing really. The experience is essentially the same as if all the recipients were on separate sites, I'm not sure why people keep getting hung up on an idea that The Problem was that separate sites existed for the separate recipients - they still exist. Patreon is a swappable under-layer for how the payment gets done and the content gets delivered. The other ways were too, and often still are.
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Dec 11, 2017 00:22
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blah_blah posted:Do you have any evidence that this is the case? Because if their numbers are anywhere near the ones reported here there is no way in hell they are anywhere near profitable. i mean if they weren't that's because they hosed up royally.
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Dec 11, 2017 00:27
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Groovelord Neato posted:i mean if they weren't that's because they hosed up royally. p much. Fishmech's comments are technically correct, the best kind of correct, but i fear he is too good at computer touching and has mercifully forgotten the visceral fear that grips normal people doing anything on a computer, and 10x so if it involves money. ramble ramble so we need another central Patreon-like service, since this one's clearly sodomised the pooch. Because it's run by a loving idiot who we should have known would be a loving idiot. (am I just bitter because I signed up last month and they pull this? noooo not at all well maybe just a little.) i'm daily wondering when Bandcamp will suffer a rush of blood to the arse and pull similar bullshit. Internet indie record stores should be piss-easy too, but goddamn if Bandcamp hasn't absolutely nailed it.
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Dec 11, 2017 01:17
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divabot posted:technically correct, the best kind of correct rushes in what?! Who called for m- divabot posted:Fishmech's comments aw. Someday...
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Dec 11, 2017 03:34
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http://twitter.com/thisblackmagic/status/939888455517069312
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Dec 11, 2017 03:44
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That advice is good, god forbid Patreon helps its content creators use marginally better marketing language
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Dec 11, 2017 03:55
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divabot posted:
I've helped quite a few "non-experienced" people set up Patreons as well as non-Patreon subscription service stuff, web stores, etc. They all seemed about equally terrified and confused by the process no matter what. And as far as the other side goes, the Patreon checkout and then use the things you purchased experience isn't really better either. A lot of those podcast hosting and subscription solutions for instance make it easier to find the custom feeds they generate and even plop it right into iTunes, big podcast apps etc - a lot of Patreon's stuff for that still requires to go back and find an original email because you can't as easily find it in Patreon's UI.
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Dec 11, 2017 04:22
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Like, there's a reason people say 'Like, subscribe, and check out out my Patreon link below', people find Patreons when they're linked by content creators on other sites. While I'm sure some people so, I imagine the vast majority of users never see the Patreon home page unless they want to change their settings.
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Dec 11, 2017 06:50
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It's not charity to pay someone to pump out content for a living. While I'm sure there's plenty of people who would whinge about how this is somehow sullying 'the noble calling of the Bohemian artist barely making ends meet' this is actually good advice. If you're paying someone 2$ a month to pump out content you're not making a personal sacrifice, you are paying for a service that you like.
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Dec 11, 2017 08:43
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I think helping someone out for selfish reasons is somewhere in between charity and hiring for a specific service.
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Dec 11, 2017 10:42
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super sweet best pal posted:I think helping someone out for selfish reasons is somewhere in between charity and hiring for a specific service. There's is nothing selfish about paying to have something produced. There is also for the exact same reason nothing charitable about it. Being charitable is being selfless. You could be charitable on Patreon if you wanted, just punt money to anyone who's content you have no interest in partaking in. However, the vast majority who are on the site are there because they want the content producers they like to be able to keep producing content. Patreon in price-setting is basically perfect price discrimination, only consumers who are willing to pay will pay and they do so after their own valuation and ability to pay. MiddleOne fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 11, 2017 10:51
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Inescapable Duck posted:If it was legally required for them to do this, you'd think it might have saved some some PR disaster to outright say so? That might be admitting guilt/liability at this point in time, at least I think that might be the rationale in not talking about it.
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Dec 11, 2017 13:26
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MiddleOne posted:There's is nothing selfish about paying to have something produced. There is also for the exact same reason nothing charitable about it. Being charitable is being selfless. You could be charitable on Patreon if you wanted, just punt money to anyone who's content you have no interest in partaking in. However, the vast majority who are on the site are there because they want the content producers they like to be able to keep producing content. Patreon in price-setting is basically perfect price discrimination, only consumers who are willing to pay will pay and they do so after their own valuation and ability to pay. They need to put more context around the advice basically.
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Dec 11, 2017 14:29
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