Patreon's company blog covers fee changes, layoffs, funding rounds, creator policies and some engineering lessons.
HN commenters link it in threads on layoffs and creator funding, with one praising the waived equity vesting cliff for departing staff.
The thread's title points to a CNBC story by Brandon Gomez. However, the journalism is very light and is missing a lot of context about what CEO Jack Conte is talking about.
However, a better story that Dan Olson linked to (scroll down his twitter feed) is the September 2017 announcement of the $60 million round by Jack Conte himself[0]. In that blog, JC laid out in more detail the new products Patreon was trying to build to increase revenue. Excerpt of the bullet points:
1. Business Infrastructure - Think of this as the back office — the tools, workflows, dashboards, and information that you need to get your business cranking. [...] analytics [...] financials [...]
2. Rewards to Energize Patrons
This is everything you need to entice and keep your patrons, [...] Actual goods, whether digital or physical, like a signed poster or an extra episode [...]
Patreon doesn't want to be just a simple "paypal/stripe" payment middleman that takes a 5% cut of subscribers payments. As a rough analogy, they also want to be a "SalesforceCRM/QuickenAccounting" backoffice and a "Amazon/WooCommerce" for merchandise -- for their creators.
JC is hoping that creators will give up more than 5% (e.g. maybe 30% cut) to pay for those services.
So when people ask "what does Patreon need all that VC money for?", JC basically told you. The question remains if the creators are willing to pay for those extra "value-added" services to manage the creators' backoffice + storefront. (Examples of…
This bit from the employee announcement about how they're handling equity vesting [1] is worth highlighting as a pretty classy move, all things considered:
> We’re waiving the one-year equity vesting cliff for all departing employees so that everyone has an opportunity to be a shareholder, regardless of your tenure. [...] All departing teammates will qualify for an extended option exercise period of 5 years, and we have extended it to 7 years in regions where we are legally able.
It must be jarring to be on the receiving end of a layoff. In the grand scheme of things, a laid-off employee surely has bigger things to worry about... but I still think what they did here with the equity, especially the option exercise period, is a nice touch. Not many companies do this sort of thing, but they should.
[1]: https://blog.patreon.com/a-note-from-jack
This is discussed in the original announcement [0]
Essentially, some creators were having a problem where their donations dissapeared at the end of the month because the donator canceled before making the payment. To rectify this, Patreon introduced a pay up front system, where the first payment happens when you pledge, and all future payments happen at the beggining of the month.
This introduces a problem when you pledge at the end of the month. In this case you could pay on the 29th when you sign up, and again on the 1st when the monthly pledge ticks.
Charging seperatly would enable them to charge you when you first pledge, and monthly, starting with your pledge. So in the above example, they would charge you on the 29th of each month.
[0] https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/
EDIT: Due to a blog post I was unaware of, the rest of this post is incorrect. Patreon will still make a bit more money than before, but with the new structure of billing each pledge on its own schedule, not nearly as much as I had outlined.
https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/
ORIGINAL:
Most patrons provide many small donation amounts. Patreon will, as called out in the article, get a lot more money from those patrons.
If you assume a 2.9% + $0.30 CC charge fee (i.e. Stripe), and a patron giving $1 to 100 artists:
Before: Patreon gets $5 from their cut from the artists; the patron is charged $100, the artists each get $0.67.
After: Patreon gets $5 from their cut from the artists, and $34.70 from the additional fees; the patron is charged $137.50, the artists each get $0.95.
I once contacted Patreon about re-adding support for non-SMS-based 2FA & while the customer service agent didn't seem to entirely understand, they did forward my request to the dev team when I asked. A few days/weeks later, it was back[1]. I'm grateful for all those involved who made that happen, as most companies don't listen when contacted about 2FA.
And tangentially, while I can't be as certain about my involvement in this next part, Nickelodeon eventually uploaded a non-pixelated version of ATLA on Google Play shortly after the second time I contacted them. I still can't understand how an MS Paint quality version was uploaded in the first place, but I'm glad no one else will have to suffer through that like my brother did.
[1] https://blog.patreon.com/TOTP-two-factor-authentication
> It's becoming clearer that Bitcoin is the "currency" of the far right.
Does this extend to all cryptocurrencies or is it just Bitcoin?
A Ukrainian organization called 'Come back Alive' who have just been de-platformed by Patreon [0] are now turning to Bitcoin donations [1]. Does that make them far right?
Or maybe the starving Afghans who are under sanctions due to the Taliban are trying to survive by using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies managed and accepted by NGOs helping them survive [2]. Perhaps they are all far-right too?
[0] https://blog.patreon.com/on-the-removal-of-come-back-alive
[1] https://decrypt.co/93810/patreon-suspends-ukrainian-ngo-come-back-alive-for-funding-military-activity
[2] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanctions-taliban/