Patreon Raises $90M Series E at $1.2B Valuation
Someone posted a widely-downvoted comment of &quot;They are another facebook. They will turn cancerous very soon, if they haven&#x27;t already&quot;; while I certainly don&#x27;t think Patreon is another Facebook, it&#x27;s at least worth considering what their sky-high valuation means. With this round of funding, they&#x27;ve officially passed &quot;unicorn status,&quot; and that&#x27;s kind of a double-edged sword.<p>The problem, at risk of stating the obvious, is that investors are hoping for big returns, and that means big revenue -- and that means changing the definition of &quot;success&quot; on Patreon. To hit a few hundred million in revenue a year and earn their valuation, they&#x27;re going to need to start competing with not just YouTube and Twitch, but major music labels and indie-friendly TV&#x2F;film studios. They&#x27;re going to need to recruit the new Taylor Swift, the new Lady Gaga. Hell, they may need to recruit the <i>current</i> Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.<p>The most successful campaigns they have now are bringing in tens of thousands a month, but those are wild outliers. The vast majority of their creators are making side money, not a living; bringing in just $1000 a month puts you in the top 5%. (It&#x27;s hard to be sure, but I think there&#x27;s a good chance it puts you in the top 1%, given that there&#x27;s about 178K campaigns total and there are folks in the top 1000, according to Graphtreon, barely making over $1K a month.) And... that vast majority of folks won&#x27;t be Patreon&#x27;s focus in future years. It can&#x27;t be. (One can argue it isn&#x27;t now.)<p>I don&#x27;t think Patreon will &quot;turn cancerous,&quot; per se -- but the Patreon of 2022 may not look that much like the Patreon of early 2020, which some would argue didn&#x27;t look as much like the Patreon of 2018 as ideal.