The Rise (and Fall) of Patreon

A video about Patreon. Its rise, and ongoing fall...

Written, directed and presented by Tom Nicholas.
Edited by Georgia Burrows.

*Chapters*
00:00 Patreon in Crisis
04:04 Jack Conte and the Birth of Patreon
08:28 Enter the Venture Capital Investors
11:36 Making a Monopoly
14:08 10X Growth and Increased Fees
18:30 Patreon-19
22:17 Stagnation
23:59 Patreon's Whales
27:15 The Enshittification of Patreon
33:52 Payout Problems

*Bibliography*

For ten years now, Patreon has been at the core of the creator economy. Since it was founded by Jack Conte in 2013, it has enabled huge swathes of YouTubers, podcasters, illustrators and other content creators to derive an income from their work, to expand their budgets and to be more ambitious in the work they produce.

But, recently, it's found itself in a bit of trouble. After experiencing mind-boggling levels of growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has since hit a patch of stagnation. And, with venture capital investors looking to recoup over $400 million in investment, that's going to be a problem.

Select footage courtesy of Getty
Music from Epidemic Sound

[Tom_Nicholas]

Hopefully you've noticed that I've really been pushing the production value of what I make over the last few videos.

I'm really proud of the video we're putting out, but doing so is fairly costly.

If you'd like to support me and my team to make more videos like this then you can do so in a couple of ways:



Thanks so much and I hope you enjoyed the video!

[Kaosi]

Me : wait, what happened to Patreon
Tom : So, venture capitalists [...]
Me : oh no

[YourBlackLocal]

It’s insane that people can mess up what is essentially a money printer.

[closeben]

I don’t understand why Patreon ever had to raise so much money and have so many staff. The company was simply an avenue for us to support creators, we never wanted it to be a replacement for any kind of social media.

[ColeYote]

"Oh no, our company isn't as capable of infinite growth as we thought, better start haphazardly cutting costs in a way that hurts our ability to generate revenue and scrambling for new monetization schemes that chase away loyalists, that'll definitely help."
Tale as old as capitalism.

[Homiloko]

It's amazing how investors can ruin anything with this mindset of "everything I invest on must keep growing infinitely", as if a steady, sustainable income was a bad thing.

[iainawatson]

I used to think the Goose Who Laid The Golden Egg was such a dumb story as a kid.

If you had a magical goose that laid golden eggs every day, I thought literally noone on earth would be so stupid, short sighted and crazed by greed that they would cut the goose open to try to get all the gold at once.

I don't think that any more.

[momob]

I relied on Patreon for income in the early days. Jack Conte used to have monthly live streams to catch everyone up on what Patreon was doing and take questions from creators. I attended all of these because they were fun and candid and a rare event where the CEO was talking to us the creators, not investors. I'm now on Kofi. I'm not mad, just disappointed in the direction Patreon has gone. I will miss you, Patreon, it was great while it lasted.

[ash.mystic]

It’s ironic how Pateron’s mission was to free creators from corporate gatekeepers, but to build the platform they allied with the most predatory corporations that exist.

[xrunxnowx]

Saddest thing is that Patreon could've easily been sustainable using the "generous" business model, if they hadn't needed to make billions for investors

[ZephyrKelsey]

It’s a problem with the obsession with infinite growth. The scare started when the slope started to level off, they weren’t loosing money they were just not getting exponentially more money. For some reason investors can’t seem to understand that there’s only a finite number of people, it’s a natural curve for a service like this to acquire a large number of people in the beginning and then slowly level off as you’ve already acquired the majority of your audience and supporters

[XBluDiamondX]

Man, that's crazy. All Patreon served was to facilitate the exchange of money from a viewer to content creator if the viewer wishes to support them (after Patreon takes a small cut). There was no reason to accept investments from venture capitalists outside of sheer greed.

[whitewave]

I remember watching a video a while back in which Jack Conte himself said Patreon would NEVER ask more than 5% from creators. Ever. I'm not surprised at this turn of events but I am disappointed.

[grfrjiglstan]

If only Jack had believed in his own product. If he really needed all this money to make Patreon as good as it could be, he should’ve just set up a Patreon for it. I bet people would’ve chipped in.

[lynpotter]

I don't understand why a company where each customer pays for themselves is raising all this funding in the first place. You could literally do nothing and be solvent.

[iamaspacecalf]

I’ve used Patreon for a while, and was excited in 2020 when a recruiter for the company reached out to me for a software engineer position. I mentioned how I always appreciated Patreons focus on core competencies, linking to discord and other platforms to manage community and output. He then started talking about Patreon’s plans for future. He mentioned adding chat features and trying to do embedded video, and all I could think was “why bother? Who wants this?” Suffice to say, it sounded silly to me, and in that one phone call I became much less excited about the platform. Nice to see an actual explanation of what they were thinking (and get vindication for my thoughts)

[sasukeissocoollike]

I can't believe I've gone from watching pomplamoose videos on early youtube and buying Jack Conte's albums in middle school trying to finesse them onto my MP3 player to watching a video about the ubiquitous platform he created... in my office as an adult in my late twenties. It's just wild

[BrigitteEmpire]

I love when my only source of income keeps sabotaging itself for no discernible reason

[thespiffingbrit]

Fellow founder creator here. Honestly all of the new features on patron are ok but can be done elsewhere (Often better). The site for me exists to funnel people onto discord a process that I can already do much easier with YouTube members. The interaction rate with posts is abysmal on patron in comparison to YouTube member/discord posts. I just can't see them doing anything else than doubling down and trying to squeeze more profit with useless bloat features.

[avocares]

I used to have a Patreon to support various creators with about $45/mo in monthly subscriptions. Had an account for years, never posted or logged in (save for maintenance). About 6 months ago my account was deleted without warning and all I got was the email stating it was deleted and my premium podcasts stopped working. After time with CS I was eventually told that they won't tell me why my account was deleted, they won't reinstate it because the data is gone, but they would like me to make my account again using the same email and set everything up again.

I was so irritated I will never again let Patreon take a free from my creator support. Unfortunately most of those who I support ONLY have Patreon, so they will no longer receive support from me. I look forward to when they collapse and force creators to look elsewhere like Subscribe Star.