Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture
I&#x27;m <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;airwindows" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;airwindows</a> and I&#x27;m writing audio DSP plugins in AU and VST form, for a living. Here are my observations over the past year of relative success on Patreon.<p>I&#x27;m in the top 3.2% of all Patreon, sitewide. That amounts to only a little over $700 a month (I&#x27;m using it to replace a for-pay business model that wildly oscillated from $400 to $3000 a month). It&#x27;s growing.<p>I&#x27;m having to put out twice or three times the work, but I&#x27;m happier with a &#x27;free&#x2F;patronage&#x27; model because what was happening to me under the for-pay model was, I got locked into a &#x27;hype cycle&#x27; versus other developers and companies. The sense I had was, my industry sector is dying. The way we treat customers is worsening, and it&#x27;s a race to DRM-based, extremely invasive monthly software rental and a degree of dishonesty that didn&#x27;t sit well with me. I feel that I bailed &#x27;in time&#x27; to turn my ten years of reputation and experience into just-barely a subsistence using Patreon, and that if I hadn&#x27;t done so, I would have been run out of business by competitors using every sort of deceptive and customer-abusing practice, and the epitaph would&#x27;ve been &#x27;A shame, he was one of the good ones. Tough business&#x27;.<p>As such I feel I have a real-world view of what Patreon actually is. It&#x27;s a form of payment processor that can let you bill for basically &#x27;goodwill&#x27;: the strong point is, it lets you render your income more predictable, at the cost of not being able to exploit individual creations which might be more valuable.<p>Never, NEVER get sucked into the &#x27;just 0.1% of all living humans donating one cent a month will make you rich!&#x27; argument. If you have a hundred thousand known fans, MAYBE you can get a hundredth of them to give to you. You&#x27;ve got no control over what &#x27;the crowd&#x27; will do. I don&#x27;t know how many times I&#x27;ve revealed on HN that I&#x27;m creating mass quantities of code with an open-source (planned MIT license) future, on Patreon, and of the 347 patrons I&#x27;ve got, ALL of them are from my existing connections who already use my software. I&#x27;m looking to do an experiment with Facebook ads where I literally link to my entire library as a free zip to download and say &#x27;I&#x27;m paying Facebook to tell you that I made this for you&#x27;. Haven&#x27;t done it yet, don&#x27;t have high hopes for it.<p>ALL your traction on Patreon comes organically from what you&#x27;re already doing. In no way does it find you patrons: it&#x27;s your shopping cart software. That does have one unusual consequence: since they aggregate patronage together and bill people in a lump sum, I&#x27;ve never seen anything more effective at enabling content that is routinely censored by credit card companies. Anyone who knows anyone who&#x27;s tried to run an internet content business with NSFW material as part of the mix (I know a bunch of cartoonists) knows the dangers of getting banned by Visa and Mastercard (IIRC, particularly Visa won&#x27;t touch you if you&#x27;re dirty-minded). Patreon is a layer of abstraction that has enabled a startling opening up of opportunity for censored content, and that&#x27;s shown in the NSFW side of Patreon. It&#x27;s still not a &#x27;free ticket to money&#x27; as you still have to generate your own attention, but obviously if you&#x27;re good at NSFW content and distributing it free then the internet will beat a path to your door, and Patreon is accepted (in fact, the paywall model seems popular among NSFW creators with few objections to the idea. Premium content may not last long before being &#x27;liberated&#x27; but I rarely see objection to the basic concept of a paywall around the freshest source of the creator&#x27;s output).<p>I&#x27;ve been keeping records of what constitutes the top 1% of all Patreon, because I was keeping records of where I stood (started out at top 10% almost immediately because I had ten years of existing relationships w. customers). About a year ago, the 1% mark sat at around $2350 a month, with total creators between 41,000 and 45,000. It&#x27;s been dropping, and as Patreon approaches 78,000 creators the 1% mark is dropping below $1890. This is while key patreon accounts are hitting new records for monthly income. It&#x27;s definitely the internet power-law thing in action: the number of participants doubles, but most people are doing worse: the distribution is NOT staying the same, it&#x27;s getting more skewed towards the outliers. I&#x27;m guessing this is partly caused by a flood of people who think it&#x27;s an internet lottery ticket and not a way to bill masses of existing customers…<p>Summary: Patreon is probably even less prone to &#x27;discovery of worthwhile projects&#x27; than Kickstarter, because the mode of engagement is different: rather than seek out &#x27;discoveries&#x27; it&#x27;s a method of inserting benevolent digital leeches onto people&#x27;s credit cards, very much like DRM-based rental schemes but less coercive. Because it can be used in a &#x27;strictly voluntary&#x27; way, the revenue you&#x27;ll get seems to be a quarter to a tenth what you&#x27;d get on a &#x27;direct sales&#x27; model, but the consistency of a massed small-donation model combined with billing people&#x27;s credit cards gives you a steadiness of income that is a LOT more easy to live with than boom-and-bust product development (which I did for a decade, pre-Patreon).<p>If you can budget for a growth month-over-month that&#x27;s a little better than, say, the growth of index funds, and you&#x27;ve got created product with a decent number of people already aware of what you do, it&#x27;s great. I have no regrets about going Patreon. I passed up an opportunity to do my whole &#x27;for-pay&#x27; model over again to a market at least twice the size of my original (my whole decade of for-pay work was Mac only, and I relaunched targeting PC VST) but I&#x27;m glad I did. It let me double down on my positioning as a product maker, and completely avoid spending any time on being an internet cop. I just give everything away now, and the patronage gradually gets closer to minimum wage ;)<p>For now, I am your audio DSP waitress, on roller-skates. I always figured that was what ten years of creative work was worth ;)