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: Firstly, you can sign-up to my premium streaming service Nebula (with 40% off an annual plan) at go.nebula.tv/tomnicholas Secondly, you can support the channel whilst getting access to video scripts, early bits and weekly updates on what I've been working on at patreon.com/tomnicholas Thanks so much and I hope you enjoyed the video!
The quality is great, however compared to your earlier videos, your speech has slowed down and more dragged out, I have to watch the videos in like 1.25-1.5 speed for it to be at a normal speed that doesn't seem slow.
Have you ever watched a ton of some ones videos and then all of a sudden realised you are not subbed and you just go "wait, i could have sworn i subbed to tom" anyway another great vid keep up the good shit broseph.
so oversimplified: they took a faustian deal and now fear the repercussions? also given that the founders are stanford grads i wouldnt be suprised if they thought that would work instead of using the already existing base of users to build a cussion..
No kidding. Pretty much anytime I find out what went wrong with a business or a product, "venture capitalists," "shareholders," and "investors" not making as much money as they wanted to usually comes up. (Less frequently, "it was a pyramid scheme/fraudulent.") You'd think we'd hear something else these days like, "bad management," or "no demand for the product" or "it was a terrible idea anyway." Or even something like what happened with GM, where too much debt in the wrong place bogged the company down. But no. It's usually investors these days.
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.
This is a common belief and some economies, such as Australia and house prices, will never give up on this. That is, the majority/large percentage of Aussies believe house prices will 'never' fall. When reality hits this core belief, then the politicians sandbag that belief which hurts the rest of the economy. Because voters will not allow this belief to be upset by reality.
@@yesand5536 All very true, but the fact governments serve the rich by making sure house prices _do_ never fall, means people are pretty much right that house prices will never fall. But this is true in many (all?) western countries.
@@SgtLion Yes, they have a significant hand, and once you get to a point where people want this to happen, they are following the population who lead. Which is how it seems Australia is. Our treasurer in the mid-80s tried to put a cap on it, and he got bludgeoned. It's managing that growth belief that is in pretty much all of us to one extent or another. Other animals seemed to miss out on that one.
I mean, servers are expensive, but you could probably have some bloke in India run the servers and essentially run on a very small crew. Other costs such as storage are so dirt cheap as to not matter
@@Demopans5990probably also have to pay lawyers and programmers, but idk how much you have to fvck up for that to be cutting into such massive profit potential.
@@0ThrowawayAccount0 This is such an old and bad argument that you should feel ashamed for making it. You don't need to be capable of doing it better yourself to point out that someone is doing a bad job. You don't need to be a chef to know that the food tastes like shit.
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.
A lot of it is if you can get the money, and you can't see the long term repercussion, of course you take the money. I'm hoping during the next online cycle, people realise venture capital is a poisoned chalice. The money is never free, and they will bleed you dry when they can
Does the scale of a platform have an effect on this though? Not defending the practice, but I'd imagine operating costs increase with users and growth. It costs more to host a server with 1000's of active user's vs 100's (users hosting content on their site to prevent people sharing unlisted links on YT, which I remember was the standard), but I JUST started the video so I apologize if this is addressed and I'm missing your argument.
@@retroripple its digital services, its a fallacy that costs increase with users, if we didnt have computers and needed the old human 'calculators', i'll agree that costs increase with users. Its just exploitation here.
"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.
Reminds me of the alleged "Kickstarter shit video game cycle" -Promise a new game / remastered / remade game "for the fans" of a franchise -Insist that you're gonna make the game "the way the fans want it" -Get crowdfunds -Show *industry investors* how popular your game can be ("look how much we've raised!") -Get investor funds -Realize you can't pay those investors back if you only sell the game "to the fans" -Start either watering the game down / bloating it to make it marketable to "non-fans" -Release a delayed, terrible game, or nothing at all -Fans are disappointed -Investors are disappointed -Your studio fails Rinse, repeat.
The problem is that they weren't charging enough money to cover their costs, they were using investor funds to subsidize their low take rate in order to increase the growth rate of the company by pulling people onto the platform. The problem is that there's nothing special about Patreon, so there's no way to crank the costs higher, because people can just leave and use other sites for the same purpose. This is the thing that kills a lot of start ups.
Well, to me the problems seems to be that they hired far too much people in the first place. What do they need people in dozens of offices worldwide for? I bet the actual people needed to maintain their core business are only a tiny fraction of their staff. Most of it will be marketing guys and pricy developers. And to keep those busy they have to constantly "invent" new shitty features for their site. To keep them employed (and their ever raising salaries to be paid) they constantly need to grow their revenue. Had they not hired so much superfluous staff they weren't in this bad shape. But they also just can't fire all of them now because of the bad press they would get for it.
Growth in revenue is not growth in profit. They were always losing money and hoped that they could outgrow their expenses with revenue. When that became not possible they needed to cut costs fast.
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
That's exactly the problem. They should have used a community funding approach and be completely transparent about how much they need to keep the service running and then divide that by every user.
Capitalism will ruin every application, website, and platform we love eventually, unless more people start to move away from centralized internet. It really sucks to live in a world where anything you enjoy enough will eventually become another vector of wealth for the elusive specter of, "infinite growth."
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 TH-cam members. The interaction rate with posts is abysmal on patron in comparison to TH-cam 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.
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.
Seems like a pretty easy story to understand to me. You have this goose and it lays golden eggs, so someone says they'll give you $10m to set up a goose farm, and they'll take half of the farm but you'll both get obscenely wealthy. Soon rather than having one goose, you have a goose farm, a goose fat product line, goose themed merch, a hundred farm hands and forty investors who think you owe them $4 billion. You're getting desperate and wondering how on earth you're going to pay these guys back... and the knife starts looking mighty tempting.
@@fang_xianfu The initial investment isn't the problem - Patreon could have made a few investors VERY wealthy. After the debt is paid off, they get golden eggs for the life of the company that is entirely profit. The issue is taking it public. Jack is incentivised to do so because he'll probably get the biggest pay check he'll ever see in his life, but Patreon isn't infinitely scalable and there isn't enough golden eggs for everyone
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.
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.
Yes and no? There's a good reason they did. You've never heard of their dozen competitors who didn't. Patreon works by making people feel safer about their money than randomly giving youtubers their credit card number. It relies ENTIRELY on reputation. They took the money to make it so we heard of them and imagined them as safe.
@@tristanridley1601you're doing a lot of mental gymastics to justify their greed. They didn't need VC money to make people think their money is "safe". Patreon was already succeeding because they're one of the first to do it, and the momentum had caught on. They're already massively successful compared to others even before taking VC money.
in india a few creators are taking a different path. this idea of a monthly subscription isn't popular and viable but whenever they need gear, support or money they plug their "UPI" id which is basically ur bank account and u can receive money in that and majority of the indians have a upi id and they can pay their favourite creators and support them. i wish this unified payment option spreads fast across the world cause it makes life 1000x easier for everyone and people don't need to rely on patreon
@@aryanram02 So a nationalized institutional paypal pretty much? Because if it is this way, it is decently similar to what happens in some brazilian channels with "pix"
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.
I think it's really easy to take for granted that big websites are extremely expensive to keep running because small websites are extremely cheap, or even free, to keep running to the point where tiny websites can exist online for as long as the internet itself continues to exist. It's something I learned in the early 2010s when every fandom was making their own website. They'd all start out with, like, 5 members, then they'd just keep growing until they reached, say, 1000 members. Until that point everything's free, and the site is run entirely by volunteers, but when it gets to the tipping point the site has to start paying to keep the site up, and the volunteers are going to want to earn some money for doing a full-time job, or wanting an incredible amount of power over the community, or both. Like, just the cost of keeping TH-cam running is astronomical before the costs of employees and the payments for the creators are even accounted for.
Building a payment provider webside usually isn't something you (should) do as side husle. At that point you need investrors and they want to see as much money as possible.
Sorry, but that's not reality. Because of money laundering and counterterrorism regulations, you need a back end system to manage that, and dealing with the banking system in general. You have to pay people, service suppliers, programmers, etc. And managing people and customers costs money. And manage a website, and keep it secure. But, venture capital money is like inviting Dracula to sniff your neck...
Why does every kid working construction inevitably buy a Ford F-150 they don't need? Getting your big VC moment is just a part of silicon valley culture.
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
They understand it. They just want all of their money out (+20%) once growth tapers off as they have 2 or 3 other investment opportunities that they are unable to capitalize on because their asset are all tied up on non-growth investments. It's why capitalism fails. People used to build a company and run that company from start to finish because they really believed in the product or service they provided. Now they just trade businesses like Pokemon cards.
That "some reason" you talk about has a name: "greed". I'd add that limitless growth also has a name, at least in biology: "cancer". The stuff gets even worse on the national scale - nations tend to be pressed into growing their GDP, and that being seen as how successful a nation is. What people *do not* tend to look at is what kind of growth that is. Like is this growth due to increased production of useful goods, or is this growth due to something useless ("plastic flamingos") or something that is thrown away after a short while without the need to do so ("I absolutely must have the neweset iphone"). Nobody seems to measure things based on whether the median prosperity/purchasing power actually rises, to name one potential reasonable measure (that should be paired with something regarding variance, like standard deviation or quantiles).
You forget, that when you invest in a company, you expect return to your investment that's higher than your investment+ inflation and costs. This usually means you must SELL your stake at higher price than you bought it, thus when line starts to equalise, you're in panic to sell immediately to cut your losses and that drives down the stock price and crashes the investors trust on ability to sell at profit. No investor believes they can in any way get their profits from NOT selling their stocks, and this is the issue. Human life is too short to be realistically able to wait for 100 years to get your investment back from other ways to gain income from investment than selling the stock. This, the line MUST go up or everythings for naught... It's idiotic, short sighted pyramid scheme that's just been accepted to be good system....
You misunderstand what investors want. They literally do not care about the company or product. It's set dressing. All that matters is being able to sell your shares for more than you bought them for. And investors are the owners by legal rights. So if you own a company you don't care about, with the intentions to sell your shares for a profit, of course you will jack up the short term profitability as high as possible, get insane valuations, and then sell. You don't care about the long term. The stock market was a genuine mistake
@@Crawver oh yes I’m aware of all those issues as well. The whole system is nonsense. The people with all the money are trading paperwork that they made up to somehow make more money meanwhile the rest of us are fighting to survive.
Founder creator here. It's no exaggeration that my channel would not exist without Patreon and the patrons who supported me there. For the first year or so of my channel's existence, I had 7 patrons giving me a total of $50 a month. Enough to buy equipment and editing software. It still is a huge part of my revenue, and the site's enshittification scares the shit out of me. A lot of creators will go out of business if they collapse.
I'm another founder. Patreon was kind of a background thing for me for several years, but a recent tweak I've made (probably not repeatable by most other creators) has caused my Patreon income to suddenly grow into something more meaningful. I would love to see another platform or two come in as meaningful alternatives to Patreon (and TH-cam). Preferably platforms guided by steadier, more sensible people than the likes of Conti.
Aren't there other good alternatives to Patreon? Even if the alternative website isn't big itself, you could just direct your current supporters there. At least that's how I see it with my big brain 🤣
@@beren171 You never create a business didn’t you. People, especially millenial and gen z trust patreon. They won’t trust new website simillar to patreon
@@aliefr2984 If a content creator I like explains the shitty situation with Patreon I wouldn't be immediately suspicious. Unless the new website looks sketchy and literally no one heard of it, why would I not give it a try? Heck, link to this video lol
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.
In what world is this true? No one put a gun to CEO's head and forced him to take any checks. The failure of Pateron is a failure of management and perhaps concept, but how you can play investors, who did nothing other that write checks with the obvious and clear expectation of ROI is absurd. Unless you are going to claim that literally all investments are predatory and I can't see how the VC's were "predatory" at all.
@@brendanconlon8292the hike in prices is a direct result of Patreon needing to pay back investors. Patreon has stagnated in growth, and so the only way they can satisfy their stakeholders (which they have a legal obligation to do) is to take money out from their users. If they weren’t beholden to the stakeholders, they could simply keep the 5% fee.
@@brendanconlon8292The patterns of enshitification are everywhere, and Patreon is no exception. As long as infinite growth is the target, this is unavoidable. VCs and other investors want infinite growth. So we’re here.
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)
I seriously don't understand what they were raising all that venture capital for in the first place. All they had to do was maintain their functionality and sit back and collect their processing fees while the site grew organically from all the word of mouth from its creators asking people to subscribe.
It's probably to be able to handle all the growth. Software infrastructure (security, networking, integration with vendors, server hosting, etc) to run such an operation is expensive, and only becomes more expensive and complex as you grow. When such explosive demand hits your servers and you can't keep up, you can't simply wait and save up the cash to scale later - people leave. Therefore, you need some money _now_, and the ways to get it are debt and outside investment. The founder probably had a strong vision of an ethical product, and didn't want to see it fail by being unable to serve the demand he saw in front of him. VCs came in to offer a solution, and it allowed him to build his business, his vision, his passion. I don't know if patreon would have survived as a platform without making it accessible to whoever wanted to. Finally, founders, especially the visionary types, are rarely great managers of large, multi-billion dollar companies. Steve Jobs was ousted as the CEO because he was doing a bad job, and was brought back on after he gained more experience elsewhere. It's Tim Cook that made apple into the behemoth it is today. It's a very hard job, and it seems that the patreon CEO is in over his head - managing investor demands while building a long term sustainable business after "blitz-scaling" is incredibly difficult. Good luck to him, and to patreon.
Ego. They didn’t want to just start or lead a renaissance, they wanted to own the renaissance. They needed the capital to box out others who could copy the simple model if they didn’t grow fast enough. They didn’t want to rely on always needing to be better than others, they wanted more capital to have the advantage of being bigger.
It's not enough to make money, you have to make ALL of the money. These sorts of services start out great, but at some point they're going to reach the limit of how big they can grow. Every business model has a ceiling. Capitalism cannot accept this, you can't simply be making plenty of money, you have to always be growing, always making exponentially more then last year, or you feel like your failing. They will then proceed to kill themselves in a desperate attempt to somehow grow larger.
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.
It really bums me out that Jack is behind this, and this is what it's become. I was an OG fan of his music, and followed all of his projects for years.
You can't bank on "content creators", since they are floated by botnet, and have heavy nepotism and incest relations with each other, and run lockouts on others (so no to Nebula, always and forever). Jack knew this...they are risky, mentally deficient "talent" (and I use that loosely) investments running cheap cult of personality ponzi pyramids that are constant generic fly-by-night boom/bust...so the safest way are always people with real jobs, that work for a living and understand the reality of how "creators" aren't real jobs, just walking tip jars for rubes & fish, so use them accordingly... and outside that, you got peanut crunchers running really large, successful companies with shoddy books and tons of cash they have to hide somewhere...so Patreon takes them in and takes that cut. This is degenerate speculative gambling, always was...stop whining about what's been the model for 5 centuries. Patreon was in it for the money, always was. Time to grow up, kids. The fact that you just watched a 45 minute ad for Tom's Not-Paytreon and didn't realize it was entirely a sales pitch says a lot about marks out here today.
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.
You harmed their engagement metrics. Or they forgot to include payments in their account activity monitoring. I am only half-joking, in this clown "numbers go only up" world it is all too plausible.
i wish youtube join-membership thing picks up, idk how much of a cut they take from the creators but so far I've seen many TH-camrs use it and ofc youtube is a reliable mega giant conglomerate so this sort of stupid stuff wont happen.,
@@aryanram02It's massive already so It'll probably survive, and premium is just TH-cam's TH-cam membership so I don't think they take more than 5-10 per cent cut
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.
Patreon is such a bizarre business to fuck up on. All it has to do is maintain a functional platform and they will make money hand over fist by being a middleman. It's literally free money!
I’m guessing that maintaining the platform with that many users gets expensive but as other have suggested they could’ve set up a patreon for themselves to try and crowdsource maintenance fees.
1: it costs money to start a business venture 2: VCs are gonna want a huge return on investment I'm pretty sure the video addresses this at some point.
@@SorowFame Not really. The maintenance fees are a portion of the fees they collect, there's no reason why it would lead them to financial trouble. Consider how incredibly gigantic TH-cam is (while hosting videos!)... and each "user" (=product) only generates so little money that a single paying customer offsets the costs of tens of thousands or so. Patreon _only_ has paying customers. Platforms are expensive, but not per-user - what makes them tricky is that people have been trained to accept "free" services, so the portion of people actually paying for the service is absurdly tiny; Patreon shouldn't have that problem at all. The problem is the VCs. And taking VC money in the first place, like _what were they thinking_ ? This is some "dollar sign eyes" ridiculousness.
Oh, and they have an effective monopoly in their sector. A capitalist wet dream. Just goes to show how VC's "instant and exponential growth forever" expectations fuck everything up.
I support 2 creators on Patreon. I rarely ever login, only if there is a payment issue or something. Patreon tried too hard and lost focus of its mission. If those 2 creators go elsewhere, so will I. Patreon need to learn that nobody goes to Patreon for Patreon.
^ This. It’s a one-and-done site for subscriptions. If TH-cam weren’t so idiotic, they could have all that money I spend on Patreon. Alas, making it so that a 5€/month membership makes that channel ad-free is too much to ask, so f YT.
@@codycastpeople only keep using it because there isn’t a popular direct competitor yet. As soon as there is, creators will leave and patrons will follow.
It's absolutely buckwild to me that nobody (not just patreon but investors and businesses in all sorts of sectors) stopped to ask themselves if the circumstances during a pandemic might not be indicative of future trends? Like I work for a trucking company that decided 2022 was the perfect time to move to a 10% year over year growth model. It....I mean it seems like we're fine...for now. My friends in the office only seem slightly more frazzled than usual. The increase in an already pathetic turnover rate isn't worrisome at all!
@@skyblazeeterno I think the real problem is that business owners and c suite think they're magically far more intelligent than everyone else and so completely ingore everyone who critcises their ideas no matter how qualified they are. See the recent unity event's, the employees all knew how it would go down and where telling them they just didn't care and now unity is all but dead. No developer is going to choose them when starting a new project and no new developer is going to choose to learn it over competitors.
Agreed. I'm an online teacher and I started having SO much work on 2020. I never once assumed it would be like that forever, and I took advantage of the moment and tried to work as much as I could to save money for some future plans I had. It's insane to me that a business illiterate like me could think of this but these business owners couldn't.
Business people are stupid. The last few years trucking was incredibly profitable! Truck prices went thru the roof, fuel and insurance were up too, but there was lots of money to be made if they could just deliver the goods (lol) but. When loads stop paying $6 & $7k cross Country, you need to dial down your expectations. I did and i didn't fall on my ass, because I didn't bet the farm that the price of freight was going to stay high forever. All these companies that are failing or threatened need to wake up to the current reality. And insisting that clients or employees take it in the shins while company profits rise forever isn't going to last long.
Big tech destroyed the old internet. I remember how pleasant and exciting it was to be online in 2010, like there was a world of possibilities... I had a Deviantart with 3k followers and I already was monetising my TH-cam page for around 80$ a month while still in college. Nowadays it's so much harder to do that even if you're a full-time creator! The amount of commitment for social media is atrocious, new creators have a super hard time and all websites say is "omg we're starving so much lmao! now pay" all for corporate greed because they're making more money than ever 😡
They're making lots of money, but overwhelmingly on a small and shrinking number of creators. It's economies of scale that are killing the internet as we once hoped it would be in the 1990s. Antimonopoly measures are one of the few things I can think of to cure the situation (breaking up Google, Meta, et al.).
It's funny you call 2010 pleasant and exciting, when that was the era (for me) where the internet began to collapse (frustratingly) into its current megacorporate shape. Now the internet of the 1990s and very early 2000s, now *there* was an exciting internet. Everyone had a webpage somewhere, people were operating networked BBSes at a wide scale, it was anarchic and a person's access to spaces depended on their ability to seek them out based on limited social awareness. Like the fictional wild west, it was beautiful and ugly and joyous and morose all at once, and it was doomed to come an end as more money found its way there.
It may or may not interest you, but there is a small community of people out there doing things in the way that they used to be done in the early internet, places like neocities and spacehey are good examples of small yet incredibly active communities that preserve that niche feeling the internet once had
@@AuntieHauntieGames Yeah, I don't OPs comment. 2010 was already bad. Once "everyone" got lured in the gold rush and nothing was left the bubble exploded. Early diggers got the gold and got rich(generally speaking of course), the latecomers just ate dirt. It was inevitable that with more people jumping into the pool the less space everyone had. There are just so many eyeballs you can attract in a sea of other creators. And we all have limited time at hand which we curate to get the most fun and use out. So many creators won't even make it in the first place.
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
You can see the enshittification of the internet on Tumblr too. In trying to be more profitable, they're dropping what made the site so great and useful--the blogging and tagging aspect--to try to chase after Twitter's UI and blurring its unique identity. It sucks. I wish Patreon the best
The livestreaming thing too! No one asked for it and now it’s a super intrusive feature not many people even use. Makes me sad to see, cause I got here right before it starting going down the toilet… 😢
While a lot of Tumblr's issues have been a thing for a while now (I say as someone who has been on the site since 2008/2009), but the monetisation of the site is just so annoying. I don't even mind some of the options it gives for people to pay for, ad-free experience for those using mobile, being able to pay for sponsored posts and having little checkmarks next to your name are all great. But the whole Live function (which luckily for me isn't a thing) being handled by another company is so weird because you don't really understand the culture of Tumblr if you just use Live (strange aeons did a fantastic video about Tumblr Live), and changing the UI after Twitter's is baffling. Especially when they have a pornbot problem (which in turn relates to Live as most of them are either bots or actual sex workers which is fine but Tumblr's rules on porn/NSFW content is weird), and that there are so many homophobes, transphobes, racists, misogynists who run blogs on the site and their accounts are never taken down when reported. It just... baffles me. Though apparently the CEO is a huge Musk fanboy so a lot of the changes and the enshitification doesn't surprise me.
Tags have always been bad. At this point it's a feature, not a bug. What bothers me about tumblr live is 1) I can't turn it off all the way (it's not for me, I don't want it on my dash), 2) they only advertise the porn. Strange Aeons did a deep dive into TL and apparently there's plenty of people using it because it's smaller than competitors and more chill. So. Literally the Tumblr of livestreaming. I don't have an issue with that. Also 3) the company they partnered with for the video and payment features is Roblox levels of fair and transparant. I personally wish they'd prioritize the NSFW community settings/bot detection/"hey, existing while trans isn't inherently a sex thing". I do think prioritising new features over maintaining and improving the old is a symptom of enshittification. And the changes to the UI making it look like Twitter is a Bad Move for the userbase (and kinda gauche to boot). But it's not so bad yet, I don't think. Or if it is, it's been this bad for a while now.
It's mind boggling to me that Patreon can say "since less than 1/20 creators are growing with goals, we're discontinuing goals." as if they don't understand that it's orders of magnitude easier to [ ask ] for money than it is to [ actually receive ] money. Rather, it's infuriating that people in high positions at businesses with access to and the ability to act on the analysis of business related statistics have consistently shown an complete ineptitude on the front of properly parsing what the numbers actually mean. I feel like we're forever doomed to be controlled by out-of-touch suits that think that because they see funny charts they have a god's-eye-view of their entire business while having no clue what's actually going on, ruining everything along the way.
I personally always hate that. I don't think your channel goals should be public. "Help us reach 1000 subscribers!" No. I don't want you to have a 1000 subscribers because then you interrupt your own video 3 times with ads for products you've never tried yourself. It makes creators look like liars.
I guarantee you the goals feature wasn't particularly expensive to maintain, either, and if it was, then it was because it was written by a team that experienced tons of layoffs and attrition and the replacement programmers they hired couldn't understand the pile of spaghetti code that the authors had left behind. It happens all too often in software. I've worked at companies where they cut entire features because one guy wrote it in a week, it worked great, and they shipped it without doing code review or pair programming or anything like that. Then the guy quit, and after a while, the feature needed to be updated to be compatible with some new framework or whatever, but no one understood how it worked, so it got sacked. (I left the company right as they were starting to rewrite their entire backend in a different programming language, Clojure, because one of their best engineers really wanted to use it. I'm pretty sure this is the thing that made that feature get sacked, but idr, it's been over a decade.) The actual cost of compute time for the feature was like, maybe a couple dollars a month? It was a tiny, but useful, feature in some control panel, and the server costs for the things backing that were hundreds of dollars a day, but they did a whole crapload of stuff. So Patreon's either in a situation like that where they're finding reasons not to understand their own code base, or they just straight up don't have a problem and they're getting rid of it because some SVP or the consultation firm they last hired is deranged.
if they never get 1000 subscribers they stop doing videos, i guess that is better, on the other hand if they get a lot of subscribers they can choose good advertisers instead of taking any offer@@AlwaysUp-uf9dl
Astonishingly, this number is HIGHER than the number of people representing 50% of the company's income. At 26:26, @TimNicholas points out that only 1.75% are earning 50% of Patreon revenue. That means they turned off a feature that hypothetically was helping their most significant projects grow. Also, as a side note, goals helped me decide if I wanted to support someone, or if their project seemed to be vapor. Reasonable goals = strong reason to support.
It sucks because Patreon IS a really great way to directly support creators you love (or at least, it used to be). I love the idea of fans collectively pitching a few bucks to their favorite creators every month as a way to supplement the less reliable streams of income internet creators have to rely on. Of course capitalism had to ruin everything with the whole "infinite growth" mantra.
Exactly this. The concept of patreon is so cool. Taking the old concept of rich monarchs funding art for themselves we swapped it to crowdsourcing where large numbers people give other people money to make art. 4 mins in and a plateauing graph of users and profits makes sense and like should be fine.
Yeah, it's a really nice concept! One thing I didn't get a chance to go into (but could touch on in a follow-up if I was to do one) was how the "digital tip-jar"/"subscription crowdfunding" stuff is gradually being re-branded as just one of many "products" Patreon offers. In fact, in the last few days, they've stopped using the word "Patron" to describe supporters, replacing it with "Members" instead).
@@FosukeLordOfError Seriously!! When Tom said "Patreon's investors say it's in crisis because the number of new people signing up is dwindling" I was like "....so?" Patreon seems to be quite successful and has TONS of users already, why is it necessary to keep infinitely adding more? Oh right, because that's what capitalism demands. Any business that doesn't show record profits every single quarter is a "failure." It's not enough to be successful and sustainable, you need to keep pushing the envelope... even if it results in the entire company crashing and burning.
The company literally printed money off the backs of creators. They barely had to advertise because the creators themselves would plug Patreon in all their videos. Insane that they essentially fucked the company up by chasing after that VC money. I guess all the higher-ups probably don't care because they lined their pockets on the way out.
welcome to capitalism one of the shittiest system's out there that likes to convince people they have any individual freedom rather or that anything else matter's rather then how much money there daddy has.
Most serious VCs ask “why do you want this amount of investment and what are you going to do with it?” I’d love to know what the answers to those were here, if the question was even asked at all
@@TheMikster95 Because the infrastructure required cost a lot of money, plus it's likely they were actually collecting a lower fee than required to entice creators to join.
Let's be honest, here. Greed and ambition caused the CEO of Patreon to run out and get VC money in the first Place. Patreon's business model would have been able grow naturally just fine. Might have taken a but longer, but it could have gotten there.
The part you’re missing is that other similar services existed, run by less greedy creators (e.g. Hank green) Under capitalism, the greediest company grows fastest and outcompetes the others. Capitalism selects the greedy and ambitious CEO. By design.
@@tp6335 retail banks _must_ avoid lending to high risk startups. You literally cant get a "standard business loan" for something as risky as a tech startup.
Or better yet: believed in his own model and set up a Patreon where most of the subscribers were the creators on the platform themselves. It's unbelievable that the idea didn't occur to him. But I think the problem is, while Jack Conte is unquestionably a creator, he still has a capitalist tech bro mindset himself, just like other platform creators like Jack Dorsey.That's why they got along so well with venture capitalists. These guys believe so hard in their finance system that they never consider the downsides.
Vast majority of start ups run through the VC world and founder funds for a reason. Banks don't want to lend to high risk industries for low returns. If you are willing to risk your money to a tech start-up you want the high rewards you can earn in getting equity in the company. They probably wouldn't have exist otherwise much like many other startups.
You completely missed the 2018 purge of creators, which led to many people, both creators and fans, abandoning the platform. Conti has been his own worst enemy for years!!
even to this day they constantly attack anyone who makes "anime style" products (and i dont even mean "controversial" stuff, but plain old anime style art, not even NSFW art ) or modders for games. (also either NSFW or not, you going into the chopping block) I used to support around 12 creators there, (at some point close to 250USD month) but they slowly moved to other platforms, and so i went with them. This after almost half of them almost got banned for no particular reason. I actively avoid patreon after that.
@@toobig7150 yeah it's ridiculous how I've seen creators who don't post explicit anime-style art, just pretty girls with kinda big boobs, have their posts taken down and their accounts flagged (though I've yet to see anyone get suspended, just... warned. For not violating the ToS, but rather just running afoul of some bad automation's flagging system.) In some ways it's worse than fanbox, which obviously allows anime art styles, but forces you to use mosaics if you draw expicit stuff, and they're extremely proactive about enforcing that (or so I hear, anyway. I wouldn't know from first-hand experience. I can't even read Japanese.) I totally get that they don't want people posting fictional CP, hell I would not to see that shit and I don't want people who make it to be able to get massive crowd funding. But the way they go about trying to prevent that is so dysfunctional it's ludicrous. Meanwhile, they let right-wing provocateurs and straight up fascists use their platform to fund political "activism," disinformation campaigns, hate speech content, etc. for a very long time, and to this day I don't think they completely banned it, they just kicked off a few big names who were infamous. Contrast this with Subscribestar, which has a very liberal and open-minded policy toward art styles (while still being completely reasonable and banning CP, as they should) but a very strong policy against using their platform for any kind of political activism (but especially for the propagation of hate speech and other fascist rhetoric-their post explaining this has a literal "no nazis" sign on it.) I really hope more anime-style artists move to Subscribestar as it's a much more welcoming platform that has all the key features (pledge tiers, polls, discord integration, optional address sharing for sending physical prints and other merch, and even allowing you to make sure someone's been pledged for a certain amount of time before they can see your back catalog) that Patreon has and charges around 5%, the same as Patreon's cheapest (and now unavailable) offering.
@@NickanM Me too. Patreon even confiscated their earnings. I know of at least one creator owed more than $5000. And no, screenshots are not legally proof of a debt, so the thieves get to keep the money they stole. Patreon proved itself to be simply to big of a risk to get into business with. Thats what killed them.
Patreon succeded in doing what most start-ups bank their entire business case and hope of future profitability on. They managed to create a new market and gain a full monopoly. Things that many startups like Netflix, and Uber tried and failed to do and are now struggling because they will never get the dominant market share that their investors hoped for. Patreon got that almost monopoly market share but they had raised so much from investors who now expected a Facebook or Amazon level of return for something that's always going to be a niche market. People who are willing to pay voluntarily in a world of infinite free content.
Patreon's entire job was to be a middleman between creators and patrons. All they needed to do is meditate when someone acts in bad faith. That's it, otherwise they needed to sit back and they would have money. Because they kept pushing for a bigger cut each time, the discontent opened a market for competition and people left for better deals. They over reached and thus compromised what would otherwise be a very simple, constant source of money.
There is a game that patreon played several years ago called "Getting rid of adult content" in 2017 and it's degrading since then. It does not help that their creditors are perhaps the most regressive portions of the financial industry you could imagine. Their financial advisors & investors have all been.... kinda horrid.
Honestly, going after adult content should be the first call for everyone to jump ship. It NEVER is followed by the user experience getting a lot better
@madarick2 It's literally taken over the ENTIRE internet. There is a real and coordinated effort to eradicate SWers and adult content in general from social media and from the internet at large.
The whole 'venture capitalists want 10 times the return' explains _so_ much about so called successful businesses going under, or turning to exploitative practices.
@@elLooto That doesn't make sense once the company is afloat. The risk involved at the 3rd round of investment isn't the same as at the 1st round, so the 10x has no justification, it's a random number thrown in. That's especially true for a company like Patreon that BY CONSTRUCTION can't go under once its business is running (unless all patreon subs suddenly decide to stop supporting all the creators). And if the VC demands this ROI from the companies after they make benefits, what he is really doing is transferring the risks he takes to the companies he invests into instead of himself. That's akin to a Ponzi scheme.
Venture capitalists are simply playing hot-potato, passing a failing business off to the masses via an IPO. They sell if off high after the underwriter cooks up a higher-than-actual value, and then they take their IPO money and short the stocks until they've extracted all of the perceived value and it lays there, just as worthless as it was on day with the public picking up the losses through their financial advisors who are working directly for a series of hedge funds.
@@elLooto this. People don’t understand that investors, invest, to make money, which means they need a return. And investing in speculative growth is risky, which means they lose a lot, they need to make up those losses with the few that win…
Seems though, that there's a gap in the market for VC-financed companies that are successful but not successful enough that it makes sense for VC to keep financing it. VCs are hyper aggressive in offloading the companies that didn't take off and are willing to lose money to get out fast so that they can invest in new stuff. All of this makes sense. But why are they more willing to lose all of their investment instead of selling off at a smaller loss, to less aggressive investors who are happy to get 10% return on their investment? Is it because it is important that the companies that VCs are giving up on, burn out and look like spectacular failures, rather than salvageable? Say you finance 100 startups, of which 5 "take off", 45 are successes and "only" grow at a rate of perhaps 10% per year. The last 50 fail. It is my impression that the aggressively cut the 95 companies and make sure the 45 regularly successful companies have as low as possible a chance of recovery. Seems incredibly wasteful.
I've been a creator on Patreon for 3 years, and I've had a personal meeting with one of their research teams. I was extremely vocal with my ideas and critiques for the website on the creator forums, which were deleted and completely shut down last year. It eliminated one of the few ways to express ourselves to Patreon itself. I've sent several emails about real issues on the creator's end, issues that have made my Patreon sometimes unbearable to manage (I actually use Patreon to send physical items). I have a fair amount of Patrons, but Patreon takes a huge cut while not offering a lot. If you're not a creator or don't need to keep track of Patrons and addresses, you might not be aware how dysfunctional it is. Not to mention how slow the website and app are...
@@MichelleHell No it literally isn't. Investing is the purchase of equity, indebting is the purchase of debt. They are completely different classes of securities and function entirely differently. With debt, money has a to paid back a fixed point or points, with equity, you own a percentage of the enterprise which has to be run with your interest in mind, but the company does not have to pay you at any specific point in time.
If you raise finance at a $4billion valuation then the investors will expect to see that value realised in the revenue/profit. If Jack stopped at the series B or C rather than going to a series F then the investors would have been happy with the current revenue.
It's impressive how even during pandemic times they were still asking for investor money to do what is a glorified forum with payment processor integration.
Honestly at that point I would've been working on how to get rid of the VCs. Not inviting in more of them. Use the pandemic windfall to buy back the stake of the company so you aren't beholden to investors, so you don't have to pay for outstanding loans. Then cruise on the fact that you have a near monopoly on long-term financial support for internet creators. Yeah they have overhead costs for maintenence and making sure there's no illegal activity trying to piggyback off their systems. But I refuse to believe that they couldn't have been solvent with 5% of established creators and 8% of everyone who signed up during covid.
@@Treegona That's a classic "clueless people at the helm" situation, similar with Twitter pre-Musk, where the CEO/founder is just an idea man that is good at convincing VC investors by rapid-firing buzzwords. He has no idea of what happens inside the company. Everyone under him is just there to take the free VC money for themselves. Patreon could probably just fire all their 400+ employees and just keep (or hire) a skeleton crew of like 20 people tops to actually run the services (that they host on Amazon anyway). Don't worry about the costs of the "making sure there is no illegal activity" part, they are not doing anything fancy about that themselves besides virtue signaling and banning some high profile creators for political reasons.
@@marcogenovesi8570 Twitter PRE-Musk is a "clueless people at the helm" situation? Then what in God's name do you call it NOW? An "actively and intentionally driving full-speed towards a cliff" situation?
Well with the money printers going BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR and zero percent interest rates VC is going to dump hundreds of millions of dollars somewhere, and you're fucked if it's the competition.
@@rawbebaba we are literally seeing how a company that got 50 million VC investment is on fire and not profitable and you still think VC investment money spent on the competition is what is going to turn the tables? Newsflash, they also invested in the competition anwyay, there still is not a whole lot. SubscribeStar is still tiny, Ko-fi is still a meme and so on.
It feels like every time these different sites go "family friendly" with their content, they shut down shortly afterward. They want to impress their creditors, but in the end they end up not making anyone happy.
It makes no sense. Just do what Disney did: Set up a different brand, with the same policies and functionality, but allowing the content that doesn't fit the family-friendly label.
"Subbable was a walled garden, inaccessible to the general public and therefor had no chance against the broader, more open alternatives... Anyway, this video is brought to you by Nebula!"
Yeah, creators on Nebula should be up in arms and forcing them to add a comment system to it, and fix its shitty Android TV app. It is just a dead space as is.
Nebula is basically an investor scam, but it's done by the creators (that are shareholders of it). The whole idea is making it grow and eventually selling it off to clueless investors, and then split the bounty as they all have a share.
I think Nebula is rad, and it also misses the lesson you learned by examining Patreon’s business. The thing creatives need is a banking service that harnesses the patron cultural movement, not another paid video service.
Nebula is one of the escapes from TH-cam corporate corruption . Network TV had 7 banned words, TH-cam seems to have 7000 and flawed robotic enforcement .
Something to note is that Google and Apple actively bar competition in their app stores against Patreon; see the fanhouse issue where Apple insisted on enforcing their 30% fee on Fanhouse, but not on Patreon.
And this is a great example of the difference between entrepreneurship and late stage capitalism. Instead of having a good idea , working hard for a good income venture capitalism is a system that sucks every cent out of everything and everyone until creativity dies.
It really is one of the worst things about capitalism that once a company has investors the profit motive is no longer about making money but about making all the money all the time. The wants and needs of the customers and staff become secondary to the wants of the investors.
It's not primarily a problem of capitalism or capitalists, though. The problem is inflationary currency. If people had the option to just save money for later use, without it not-so-slowly losing its value, the rich wouldn't have to invent shittier and shittier ways of investing their saving.
That puts a bad name on investors. In reality, a lot of investors don't want that. The vast majority of investors actually want a stable, well working company that will stay in business for the next five decades to finance their retirement and all that. And of course, they want to reap the rewards of the company working well too - a lot of investors invest in companies they believe in and whose products and services they use. But once you cross a certain wealth threshold, and you don't get rid of the idea that more wealth is always better, short-term high-risk investment pays more. So you can keep watching your number grow. It's no longer about having a nice life; it's just a silly egoistic crawl to more status. I know plenty of people like that who are always just waiting and hoping for their "big payoff". They suck. And of course, those big time investors have disproportionate power. They're too big, so they need to be "appeased". That's a big part of the problem everywhere. Index funds also make this quite a bit worse. You often don't even know who you are financing. And yes, inflationary currency makes all of this even worse. It removes the significant competition from the "might as well keep the money in the account" segment. Instead of compound interest increasing the value of your money, we have the exact opposite.
The wants of investors who are nigh-impossible to satisfy since greed knows no limits. As that one commenter in the video pointed out, Patreon is essentially a banking site. VC investors are so greedy and short-sighted they basically passed on a bank. A BANK. The only thing close to the level of "I just sit here and revenue magically appears" of a bank is a casino.
The problem is that every site and service wants to form a monopoly. Get everyone on and rely on friction to keep them there as you rent seek. Start enforcing anti anti competitive regulations and the behavior will change.
While I generally agree, some services, especially online services, just form natural monopolies. You can only regulate those, not really break them up
@@maximilianbeyer5642 You could easily regulate some form of integration to break up the natural monopoly. Look at IRC, Torrent clients, fediverse as an example of a shared protocol creating a diverse market.
@@maximilianbeyer5642I'm not sure Patreon is a natural monopoly though. It's not like it has to exist, in some alternate reality TH-cam pays it's employees directly, or TH-cam memberships are used far more instead. It's essentially just a middleman for payments and so it's monopoly doesn't really exist out of necessity or improved efficiency, they just grew faster than others.
This is very specific but I love how you added Shaun saying "Patreon" at 4:09 because that's the first thing I imagine when the platform comes to my mind. The odd and charming way he pronounces it.
If i had a nickel for every bald and bearded tech CEO named Jack who is disorganized and exploitative and somehow manage to fumble an essentially ubiquitous platform, id have two nickels. Which isnt a lot but its weird it happened twice!
@@Bronze_Age_Sea_Person He's not bald - but he definitely is a CeeUNextTime. The bald Jack I can think of (though unbearded) is Jack Ma, of Alibaba - I don't know his quirks and management-style (but then, don't you have to be somewhat sociopathic 'to reach the top'?)
@@ibubezi7685 Dorsey is frequently bald, if not wont to frequent enough public appearances to confirm if that's his current hairstyle; whereas as far as I can see Ma has never been bald and Alibaba is doing fine. I think you might be reaching!
@@WillHirschUK Never saw Dorsey bald, but found a few pics indeed. Also, Ma isn't bald - should have checked. He didn't appear in public for several months (probably because he criticised the Party). I don't know how Alibaba is doing - I didn't mention that.
I've always thought it was ridiculous how slow the patreon is on both mobile and desktop (especially desktop), and equally ridiculous is the inability to explore or index exactly who is actually on patreon and explore your related interests
Yeah. the app and website are both hideously outdated. I think they're currently in the process of updating them both but it feels a bit a little too late. Unfortunately, that in itself probably contributed to their demise as it's meant people don't really *use* the site in the way that you would hope for a healthy platform.
Absolutely. As a user, I've never ever used it to look for other content I might like. Now that I think about it, that really is a huge missed opportunity for them.
@@Tom_Nicholas Patreon's core problem is their inability to make good decisions. Only by chance will their updated app/website be any better than the current versions.
this! it's wild. As a person who loves reaction channels but only for specific things like specific TV show or concert it's SO hard to find the creators that offer exactly what I want unless they advertise on other platforms, which usually punish them for it (like Twitter always suppressed posts mentioning P at all). It's such a weird missed opportunity for the service!
Would be their relationship to risk, and how much they decide things by committee/collective, and whether they hold to an ideology that would stop any growth if it doesn't fit a certain look or feel....
@@bootedbuilds lack of funds to push for marketing so the brand just isn't as strong, late to the party in the first place so they can only be seen *as* alternatives, didn't offer anyone except for people who were already pretty left-leaning an incentive to switch (at the time, they might be more attractive now with patreon looking like a tire fire.) mostly that. i've heard nothing bad about their services. comradery is also a good support site that i personally use and enjoy that runs on much lower margins but it doesn't do that kind of "post content to your supporters" kind of thing, it's really more like a barebones, easy subscription setup kind of thing that kind of unifies what would have been, back in the early days, a bunch of disparate paypal bills you'd get every month from the artists you support.
i imagine it is due to marketing, since i never heard about those@@bootedbuilds, the main reason to get investors is paying for the marketing of the product
As a creator spawned during the pandemic, there's such a palpable sense of secondhand anxiety/dread in that part where Jack and co misdiagnosed the obvious (I would say obvious even in its moment, without hindsight) bubble of the attention economy and free time and all that as some kind of new dawning. This video is great for how it articulates the why that I've always had in my head every time I get an email about Patreon doing something weird. I mean, I knew it was probably VC, but this is a great answer to "wait shouldn't Patreon just be raking it in? how are they having all these weird struggles?"
Patreon's only use for me as a subscriber was that I could have all my pledges go out at the same time as a single payment. Once that was lost, there was no reason to keep using it. Sites like this need to remember that their customers aren't just the creators, but also the patrons. As a creator, the fact they list a possible option for rewards to patrons being high quality versions of images but downgrade the quality of images uploaded in the app... pretty much sums up the experience for me.
Alternative video title: "This is why we can't have nice things" As someone who's been donating to webcomics, ect, via PayPal before Patreon was even a thing, this bothers me so much. While you do point out how Patreon's % take increase is backward from economies of scale, I think you let your/everyone's desensitization to the insanity of capitalistic thinking mute your critique, when it really should have been hammered louder. The idea that Patreon willing took 105 Million in VC loans, when it had only 25 Million in annual revenue is fu*king insane! You would have to be actually dislodged from reality to think the platform could ever grow fast enough, long enough, to pay just that much back. More importantly, WHAT THE F*** ARE THEY SPENDING THE VC MONEY ON!? Patreon was as pure of a really great concept of a trusted middleman service provider as can be conceived. It needed a small dev team to keep the website always up to date, and it needed to scale its backend and customer service to keep up with any increased demand. *Patreon is the PERFECT service for a lightweight, high cash flow business.* It did not need to "evolve" to add entirely new products/services! It's just that capitalist, cancerous, growth at all costs mindset. Could not be satisfied even with a fu*king 25 mil cashflow in 2019! For a 0 physical, purely online, website! *Instead of making a new company for a new service, like Patreon itself once did, it now must grow, and grow. Patreon either must take over the online world, and soon, or it will rot, wither, and die.* Really sucks that Subbable was bought, meaning it can't be scaled up as an alternative. My most realistic hope is that Nebula (as a creator owned platform) can launch a Patreon-equivalent sub feature. Because guess what Patreon? The implementation of your idea is absurdly easy, it was just the first mover, *brand trust,* and inertia that kept people attached to the platform. . Migrating response-reply over here: "(and worth saying that it's an investment rather than a loan, which might seem pedantic!)." Not pedantic at all! I purposefully said "VC loan", as I think 99% of people would get a better idea of the reality w/ that word. The idea behind a VC "investment" is the same as any conventional loan. It is indirect, done via the increased "worth" of the invested company, but the whole point for the capitalist is the exact same. Investment of capital is always the same. They invest X dollars, and expect a certain % increase on that investment, however long of a game, or at whatever odds they are willing to play. If they think that % increase will be higher somewhere else, be it a diversified stock portfolio, bonds, ect, *the capitalist has no reason NOT to move their capital over there and get MORE money*. That's the rub. Any VC investment is temporary, and the "~loan" comes due when they cash out of the company. Sure, the company's value can drop, but that's the same risk carried in a traditional loan. . Still, the idea that Patreon thought they needed EVEN MORE VC money after that 105 mil in 2019 is beyond infuriating. As we are reminded every time there's a crash, that VC money IS NOT THE PERSONAL WEALTH OF BILLIONAIRES. It can, and does, come from all sorts of places. Financial institutions play the lottery with other people's money, and we ALL pay the price when these tech companies promise the moon and never even break the stratosphere.
Nebula launching a sub feature doesn't capture a huge amount of Patreons creator base - I support bloggers, Sims modders, comic creators, coders, artists. Nebula can't capture them, where do they go?
@@wastelanderone The idea would be that it would be a separate side of the site, not limited to their video creators nor apart of that video service. Right now, there's some form of revenue split of Nebula subscription $ influenced by on how videos are watched, which would be kept apart from the Patreon replacement. That's doubly important because of how there's some form of collective ownership of Nebula, and that would need to be kept separate from the much larger scale sub-supported creators. Ideally, Nebula could expand beyond video creators as the co-owners, and there would be a path for any sub-supported content creator to buy-in and get that vote/co-ownership/ect.
Nebula has the same problem Subbable had. They want to keep it for elite content/creators only, to keep up the brand but it leads to a very narrow type of content available even in purely video format not to mention all other types of arts and crafts. I can't even imagine Nebula hosting just some random dude reacting to kpop MVs or anime series from his bedroom shot on a grainy phone. Yet many of those mid tier creators that make up the majority of Patreon numbers do exactly those types of "low-brow" entertainment.
fwiw Subscribestar is a very viable alternative to Patreon that charges around 5% and the only downsides are that they don't take PayPal (PayPal blacklisted them, I think, for whatever reason) so you need to set up ACH to get your payout, and you need to have 5 subscribers before you can get a payout at all. but for anyone who's got even a dozen patreon subs, it'd be pretty easy to launch a substar page and ask people to move. you might lose a couple of them but you'd definitely have no problem getting above the 5 sub minimum. and your takehome per supporter would be higher!
the fact that patreon was terrible abroad created one alternative in Brazil called Padrin, but later the government created a service that allows people to send money with a qr code, and that was the best thing for creators, they leave the qr code in the corner and people can even send messages for them to read along with the money, and it is paid with taxes so the creators get the full amount, the only thing that is lacking is a subscriber model, because a more stable income allows creators to plan ahead, so it actually increased youtube membership, people are even streaming directly on youtube instead of twich because twich stoped paying brazilian creators in dollars
I’ve noticed a big increase in creators mentioning ko-fi along side patreon in their calls to action recently. I don’t really remember it being a thing at all at the start of this year. Let’s hope it or something similar can grow to at least compete or take over if patreon does continue down the enshitification pipeline
I've seen Ko-Fi mentioned by Rimworld mod creators on Steam for a few years now. It seemed a more commonly-mentioned donation stream than Patreon, though I do donate to one mod creator on Patreon.
One thing that might be worth mentioning with Patreon's decline is the exodus of NSFW/Adult content creators. Back when Patreon was in its early years, adult content was encouraged with little moderation and very loose guidelines. The larger it grew - and the more 'mainstream' it became - the more those NSFW creators got (or felt) sidelined. I think it was some time around 2018/2019 that a bunch of NSFW Patreons were suspended for having adult content in 'public' posts. And, even recently, pressure from payment processors has forced Patreon to start enforcing a photo-ID verification requirement for NSFW creators. When alternatives like OnlyFans, Fansly, etc exist, it's easy to see why some would decide to switch platforms when they're uncertain about their longevity on Patreon. While NSFW creators were never the bulk of Patreon's income, it's undeniable how lucrative they could've been for the platform if that trust hadn't been spoiled (just look at success of OnlyFans). As a side note; I wouldn't be surprised if Patreon introduced a 'pay to unlock post' feature at some point - similar to the system those other sites have.
AFAIK the nsfw stuff actually included their largest accounts back then. Their wholesale banishment might actually have initiated the executive panic and counter-productive changes.
@@tristanridley1601 The banishment is consecutive by lobbying of american conservative groups from several social media platforms and demands by VISA and Mastercard, who seem influenced by said groups.
I truly believe "enshittifaction" is going to be the word of the era that defines this era of ephemeral service capital. This is my first video of yours, and I love what I'm seeing!
I wish we lived in a world where basic payment processing like Patreon (and to some extent Uber, Lyft etc.) could be run as a non-profit coop - without someone immediately running off with the money...
Not enough people know why they should want that. I liken it to education on democracy. In the Western world we get boners for democracy, but in other parts of the world that word is unknown. The reason is education and propaganda. Even if our democracy is broken, we still know we should want it. Can't say the same for coops and state industries led by unions.
We have that in India. Its called UPI (Unified Payment Interface). Before Uber and Ola, we had private taxis but unfortunately they've been almost completely decimated by Uber.
How the hell could a company with seemingly such small costs associated with it be in financial crisis, they're just middlemen. What I don't get is just how AWFUL patreon pages are to navigate! Good god, they could not make browsing them less user friendly if they tried
It used to be much worse - there was no way to filter posts by tag, keyword, or date - all you could do was extend the infinite scroll further and hope your browser didn't crash. I wrote to them about that problem and got back the response that they had "talked about changing" it. It was immediately obvious that all their decision makers were fools and I'm surprised Patreon has lasted this long. Consider that they've been pushing anniversary billing for years - after both of their first two attempts almost killed their company, they're now trying it again - they apparently hope that if they obfuscate the fact that they're destroying their primary value added, that nobody will notice.
With my limited software development knowledge, it sounds like a scaling problem. What looks like minor architecture decisions made for a small project can become exponentially expensive when you scale up. Most humans are awful at spotting, and even worse at extrapolating, exponential functions in reality. Patreon could quite literally have gotten themselves into a situation where every new creator was costing exponentially more to maintain, in server load, bandwidth, accounting costs, you name it, all before getting dollar one in income from that creator.
Let's not forget Patreon pulled a Tumblr and lost lots of creators to OnlyFans for scaling down support for adult entertainment (with OF losing a lot to other subscription services when they stopped supporting extreme content and threatened to stop supporting more).
This is a great point too because if I remember right, OnlyFans was another one that initially championed supporting and uplifting its creators only to stab them in the back for appearances' sake, and only after it had profited off of them.
I don't know how true this is, but I remember memes from earlier this year about how OF was going to get rid of the adult content to be more respectable and get the patreon crowd, and the jokes being that they were removing their only reason for existing.
@@catholiccontriversy It was true, but also an oversimplification as memes tend to be. MasterCard and Visa regulations introduced in late 2021 pretty much forced all platforms to pre-approve all adult content, so OF was going to ban porn (not nudity), pretty much in the exact same way as Patreon did earlier. They didn't want or have the moderation capacity to pre-approve everything. This was often reported as them banning adult content as a whole, while most creators only did and do nudity, with the ban not affecting them. However, it obviously was still to affect some of the biggest creators. They managed to resolve it with their payment partners, hence the ban didn't end up happening last minute, but they did tighten their creator (and collaboration) verifications, and restricted some of the most extreme content. OF was almost exclusively targeted, for being the biggest platform of its kind and wanting to do everything by the book. Quite a few creators left in fear or started using other subscription platforms on the side, while the new card regulations were universal.
"Investments should make a 10x return or they're not worth it" - It's industry standards like this and the demand for exponential profit growth year after year that are causing products to get worse and prices to get higher every year. Where does this all end aside from the rich owning the air and the poor paying to breathe?
It's a tragedy of the commons thing. Rich people use these services too, and it's just as shittified as it is for everyone else. Some people are getting richer, but no one's getting happier.
How much return do you need if the person asking for the money has a prima facie 90% failure rate? Thats not greed youre complaining about, its basic mathematics.
I was a huge fan of Jack Conte and his music back in the day, so I still remember clearly when the "Pedals" video dropped. I remember hearing his pitch for Patreon and thinking "that's a cool idea" but NEVER for a second guessing it would be as big as it is. The greatest irony was that Conte, if I remember correctly, said that he wouldn't take a salary as CEO and would instead rely on his Patrons so he could continue making music. So much for that, eh?
If you look at the mockups of merch, any Printful user will tell you that Patreon is just abstracting Printful's service and probably marking up, as a middleman, to a service that is essentially another middleman. And, as a fellow "grandfathered" 5% user, I feel like Patreon is constantly trying to trick me into switching into a different tier using aggressive/confusing language.
We have a completely different set of problems with Patreon in the open source world. We use it for software development, which Patreon themselves have never really liked or supported. But we also have alternatives like OpenCollective, LiberaPay, etc. but there are advantages to Patreon's current set of features and it's worth keeping hold of those even if we're forced to move. You know, for copying.
Patreon is the perfect example that shows capitalism doesn’t mean the best ideas survive. It just destroys everything. “Success” just means it’s destroying you slower than everything else
Expecting a 10 times return on investment explains a lot of the problems our civilisation is experiencing.....Enshitification through insane greed seems responsible for the ruin of every good idea with almost no exception.
@@elLootoconversely it's pretty justified for the audience of these platforms to be increasingly sceptical of adopting anything since 90% of the services they have (that haven't exited) are going to be knowingly pushed and prodded into either that 10x success or catastrophic failure
@@elLooto It's not basic maths, it's a Ponzi scheme. The VC transfers the risks he takes on the companies he has shares in. There is no justification for that 10x number. No bank asks for a 10x ROI after 5 years, not even close, and the stock market has a ROI of 50% at best historically. That's 20 times less than the ROI demanded by vulture capitalists.
The Machine of Capital consumes everything, unfortunately. We can't just have nice things in this system, when everything is controlled by a handful of oligarchs, "venture capitalists"...
The most depressing thing about the ongoing enshittification of platforms is how it's revealed the incuriosity and inertia of the majority of any given platform's users. They'll eat shit sandwiches for months rather than rouse themselves to find any other way to do what they're doing. Great vid, thank you very much.
How do you propose normal people find alternatives to enshittification? We have grown reliant on these services and more importantly our network is what they have a strong hold on. Its really difficult to find alternatives to these platforms unless there is a mass migration.
“Nebula” is such a counterproductive name for a creator hub. Interesting to see how a company with a good idea loose track of the importance of “customer perception “.
I can't help but wonder if Enshitification comes hand in hand with a company going public. Public companies change their point of interest from making a good product to making money from shareholders.
No, it's true ("for shareholders," BTW). Companies exist for the sake of their customers. Workers, management, shareholders etc. get their piece of the economic value pie. But the customers are the ultimate point.
It's not primarily a problem of capitalism or capitalists, though. The problem is inflationary currency. If people had the option to just save money for later use, without it not-so-slowly losing its value, the rich wouldn't have to invent shittier and shittier ways of investing their saving.
@veejayroth: Man you're drunk on the money Koolaid. The same people who caused the inflation (FED printing trillions of dollars for wall street that was itself kicked off by the bailout scam) are these rich people who just "have" to constantly invent shitty ways to parasitize creators. Think for yourself.
@@veejayrothlmao deflationary currency is far worse than inflationary currency, instead of investing you would just have the richest people sit on their money and do nothing with it. The economy would suffer recession as spending dries up, after all why buy things when you can get richer by just sitting on money doing nothing with it.
The Vlogbrothers have so much they focus on already, it felt like they made subbable to help themselves and their friends, and all the channels they helped launch with the TH-cam fund, and at some point it seemed Patreon was doing it better...and they had other things to do, like solve maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone's Kono district, and access to the right testing and drugs to cure people of TB and MDR TB.
Having Nebula as the sponsor of this video makes it feel like a hit piece of a video as opposed to a well thought out and balanced observation of Patreon
Patreon is such a sad story because the very basic concept is a very good one that did a ton of help for creators. Like, we absolutely would not have the current content environment without Patreon and the fan funding it allowed. It *just* needed to keep doing what it was doing - maybe improve the app and website in terms of usability, but it should’ve just been something that could’ve safely coasted along as a simple, valuable service. Instead, it’s this.
Why they would even consider hosting videos while struggling to find income streams is baffling. The sheer cost of running a video hosting site is insane on it's own without even a thought to how to set it up in the first place. Did they think they could somehow beat TH-cam without them noticing? TH-cam pays more running their service than Patreon is valued in its entirety. If they aren't going to do massively better, it won't even be a blip and would be enough to take them out.
Mission or not, this echoes the previous video about the gig economy so hard that I really got flashbacks. The lesson we learn once again is to never go to the venture capital. I always admired Gabe Newell for keeping Valve private to the bone; he really gets to do whatever he wants with the economy he created whether these are shitty ideas or genius ones (the latter being rather more common).
@@CordeliaAurora if you mean kickstarting all the lootboxes story, no, I don't think it's gambling in the way it was introduced by Valve. One can as accurately call original Pokémon or MtG "gambling" then
Most CEOs lose interest by year 7 or so, some push it to 10 years before they completely drop out. It's difficult for an individual to stick to a goal any longer. This is how VC's hijack their investments.
This video was so impressive. Granted, my ADD requires me to listen to it on a faster speed, but it's still a gripping listen and I'm absolutely wowed by your ability to reference the VC problem so well and to explain it without any issues for non-finance/economics-fluent viewers.
Have they considered that the reason why (almost) no one interacts with content posted directly to Patreon is because the website and app are both excruciatingly slow?! I only ever go to Patreon if there is no other way to access something and even then, I try to leave the site as soon as I can and it still takes me ages. (It's not my internet connection, other sites are fast.)
I'm subscribed to the Patreons of many many fiction writers to read chapters ahead of free. While there's probably platforms they can move to, Patreon becoming shit is very sad.
The executives of corporations literally have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits. It’s literally illegal if they don’t, and they can be sued into oblivion. This is not something can be fixed in our system as it is, but be making companies hurt when they do this shit, then it will mean the profit motive pushes them in the right direction.
As a patron, I feel like some good changes are a no brainer. Twitter and TH-cam are experiencing enshittification. Create a chronological feed page. Let us follow creators without being patrons in order to see what we are missing. This could also allow public posts and updates which would make patreon interactions more meaningful because there is a reason to be on the site rather than checking once per month. Let us see recommendations for creators that are also patrons or followers. Let us see the entirety of who we could be supporting! As for creators, I'm sure they could use more protections on people posting their content elsewhere.
@@veejayrothStockmarket investment prioritizes short term gain over long term success. Investors only want to see the line go up to get the most possible dividends and don’t care how it’s done. Infinite growth isn’t possible but chasing it will eventually kill a good company or cause labour malpractice.
When I first got on Patreon a few months ago to support my favorite creators, I was shocked at what a janky, old, limited website it was. And its app is even worse. I honestly still can’t believe how it’s been the backbone of this economic niche, relied on so heavily by so many creators for so long, without being replaced by a competing service.
Much like many legacy apps and websites, they exist because of the built in user base, widespread adoption, and reluctance of people to use another platform. Patreon's faults will inhibit future growth but it's existence stunts the growth of alternative platforms .
It wasn't the only site of this type and it's not the only site now. Other sites like this have popped up and Patreon didn't manage to buy them all and they took some of its creators and some of the patrons. Creators should probably start advertising another platform and not Patreon anymore even if they have Patreon.
@@zaco-km3su Patreon banned countless artists and creators, controversial and uncontroversial ones. I am pretty sure it had a strong impact on the amount of money they generated.
It's really sad that a site created to benefit creators has lost sight of its original purpose in order to benefit itself. Patreon for me, as a patron for a small handful of creators, is literally just a tip jar/banking service. I don't donate for the perks; I donate because I like the content and want them to know they are both appreciated and that they should keep making it. I only ever go onto the site itself if I've gotten an email from a creator about posting pet pics or to update my card information. I'd almost rather literally just mail a couple dollars to their PO boxes every month if Patreon wants to keep screwing people over.
hey, you're in Nebula, right? could you propose to them the idea of having a cooperatively owned alternative to patreon, that functions solely as a payment processor? Nebula has the audience to promote such a thing, and maybe succeed where others have failed
Nebula raised $6M - it’s VC backed. Not only that but it’s backed by CuriositySteam which also raised hundreds of millions and failed in the public market.
I used to say that when I get a job I want to be able to use Patreon for creators I like, but since 9/10 the creators I like are TH-camrs and TH-cam has their own membership program, I'd rather just sign up to their TH-cam membership than deal with Patreon.
I can only imagine how much more stable everything would be if subbable had survived independently seeing how the Green brothers don't seem to chase money/valuation from their projects
Nebula is owned by Standard Broadcast LLC based in New York, they are a subsidiary of the Standard Broadcast Media Group and not "owned" by the creators.
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:
Firstly, you can sign-up to my premium streaming service Nebula (with 40% off an annual plan) at go.nebula.tv/tomnicholas
Secondly, you can support the channel whilst getting access to video scripts, early bits and weekly updates on what I've been working on at patreon.com/tomnicholas
Thanks so much and I hope you enjoyed the video!
zomg 3hr ago!!!!!
we appreciate the effort of counterenshittification.
The quality is great, however compared to your earlier videos, your speech has slowed down and more dragged out, I have to watch the videos in like 1.25-1.5 speed for it to be at a normal speed that doesn't seem slow.
Have you ever watched a ton of some ones videos and then all of a sudden realised you are not subbed and you just go "wait, i could have sworn i subbed to tom" anyway another great vid keep up the good shit broseph.
so oversimplified: they took a faustian deal and now fear the repercussions?
also given that the founders are stanford grads i wouldnt be suprised if they thought that would work instead of using the already existing base of users to build a cussion..
Me : wait, what happened to Patreon
Tom : So, venture capitalists [...]
Me : oh no
Venture Capitalists are basically Satan. You may THINK you can make a pact that will not screw you, but you are wrong, VCs always win in the end
'So we wanted to make a deal with the devil...'😅
„What could possibly go wrong?“
@@ArDeeMee "It literally cannot go tits up"
No kidding. Pretty much anytime I find out what went wrong with a business or a product, "venture capitalists," "shareholders," and "investors" not making as much money as they wanted to usually comes up. (Less frequently, "it was a pyramid scheme/fraudulent.") You'd think we'd hear something else these days like, "bad management," or "no demand for the product" or "it was a terrible idea anyway." Or even something like what happened with GM, where too much debt in the wrong place bogged the company down.
But no. It's usually investors these days.
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.
They want to dump money on something and make a quick exit with a huge return on investment. Wouldn't VC if they were in it for the long term.
Capitalism is such a cool and good system lmao
This is a common belief and some economies, such as Australia and house prices, will never give up on this. That is, the majority/large percentage of Aussies believe house prices will 'never' fall. When reality hits this core belief, then the politicians sandbag that belief which hurts the rest of the economy. Because voters will not allow this belief to be upset by reality.
@@yesand5536 All very true, but the fact governments serve the rich by making sure house prices _do_ never fall, means people are pretty much right that house prices will never fall. But this is true in many (all?) western countries.
@@SgtLion Yes, they have a significant hand, and once you get to a point where people want this to happen, they are following the population who lead. Which is how it seems Australia is. Our treasurer in the mid-80s tried to put a cap on it, and he got bludgeoned.
It's managing that growth belief that is in pretty much all of us to one extent or another. Other animals seemed to miss out on that one.
It’s insane that people can mess up what is essentially a money printer.
I mean, servers are expensive, but you could probably have some bloke in India run the servers and essentially run on a very small crew. Other costs such as storage are so dirt cheap as to not matter
@@Demopans5990But they are already profitable.
the only cost keeping them down is repaying investors.
@@Demopans5990probably also have to pay lawyers and programmers, but idk how much you have to fvck up for that to be cutting into such massive profit potential.
Make your own company then since it is so easy
@@0ThrowawayAccount0 This is such an old and bad argument that you should feel ashamed for making it.
You don't need to be capable of doing it better yourself to point out that someone is doing a bad job. You don't need to be a chef to know that the food tastes like shit.
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.
good old greed
A lot of it is if you can get the money, and you can't see the long term repercussion, of course you take the money.
I'm hoping during the next online cycle, people realise venture capital is a poisoned chalice. The money is never free, and they will bleed you dry when they can
this is twitter's future LOL 'genius' lonnie musk bought it just exactly the wrong time.
Does the scale of a platform have an effect on this though? Not defending the practice, but I'd imagine operating costs increase with users and growth. It costs more to host a server with 1000's of active user's vs 100's (users hosting content on their site to prevent people sharing unlisted links on YT, which I remember was the standard), but I JUST started the video so I apologize if this is addressed and I'm missing your argument.
@@retroripple its digital services, its a fallacy that costs increase with users, if we didnt have computers and needed the old human 'calculators', i'll agree that costs increase with users. Its just exploitation here.
"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.
Reminds me of the alleged "Kickstarter shit video game cycle"
-Promise a new game / remastered / remade game "for the fans" of a franchise
-Insist that you're gonna make the game "the way the fans want it"
-Get crowdfunds
-Show *industry investors* how popular your game can be ("look how much we've raised!")
-Get investor funds
-Realize you can't pay those investors back if you only sell the game "to the fans"
-Start either watering the game down / bloating it to make it marketable to "non-fans"
-Release a delayed, terrible game, or nothing at all
-Fans are disappointed
-Investors are disappointed
-Your studio fails
Rinse, repeat.
The problem is that they weren't charging enough money to cover their costs, they were using investor funds to subsidize their low take rate in order to increase the growth rate of the company by pulling people onto the platform.
The problem is that there's nothing special about Patreon, so there's no way to crank the costs higher, because people can just leave and use other sites for the same purpose.
This is the thing that kills a lot of start ups.
Well, to me the problems seems to be that they hired far too much people in the first place. What do they need people in dozens of offices worldwide for? I bet the actual people needed to maintain their core business are only a tiny fraction of their staff. Most of it will be marketing guys and pricy developers. And to keep those busy they have to constantly "invent" new shitty features for their site. To keep them employed (and their ever raising salaries to be paid) they constantly need to grow their revenue. Had they not hired so much superfluous staff they weren't in this bad shape. But they also just can't fire all of them now because of the bad press they would get for it.
@@Tokru86 It's mostly for tax evasion purposes.
I'm paying in Canadian dollars and yet it's going to an Irish account. Nothing to see here.
Growth in revenue is not growth in profit.
They were always losing money and hoped that they could outgrow their expenses with revenue. When that became not possible they needed to cut costs fast.
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
That's exactly the problem.
They should have used a community funding approach and be completely transparent about how much they need to keep the service running and then divide that by every user.
@@johannageisel5390 Indeed, it's pretty weird that they didn't think of supporting patreon by giving it a patreon.
@@johannageisel5390ironically, patreon could have been run/funded like a patreon
Capitalism will ruin every application, website, and platform we love eventually, unless more people start to move away from centralized internet.
It really sucks to live in a world where anything you enjoy enough will eventually become another vector of wealth for the elusive specter of, "infinite growth."
Only need to make those billions if you want to cash out rather than a steady job
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 TH-cam members. The interaction rate with posts is abysmal on patron in comparison to TH-cam 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.
It seems like they're both left leaning. That much seems to be obvious.
I just saw your comment on Max Fosh's new video, turns out I follow similar creators to you.
Damn, if even spiff hasn’t figured out how to break Patreon it really must be rubbish
@@Adi-bo5do The character spiff portraits in his videos does not necessarily reflect his political views in real life.
GO HAVE SOME TEA. YORKSIRE. TEA.
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.
Omg you are right, totally forgot about this story
Seems like a pretty easy story to understand to me. You have this goose and it lays golden eggs, so someone says they'll give you $10m to set up a goose farm, and they'll take half of the farm but you'll both get obscenely wealthy. Soon rather than having one goose, you have a goose farm, a goose fat product line, goose themed merch, a hundred farm hands and forty investors who think you owe them $4 billion. You're getting desperate and wondering how on earth you're going to pay these guys back... and the knife starts looking mighty tempting.
@@fang_xianfu "He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year" - attributed to Leonardo da Vinci
There is no limit to human stupidity if big money comes into play.
@@fang_xianfu The initial investment isn't the problem - Patreon could have made a few investors VERY wealthy.
After the debt is paid off, they get golden eggs for the life of the company that is entirely profit.
The issue is taking it public. Jack is incentivised to do so because he'll probably get the biggest pay check he'll ever see in his life, but Patreon isn't infinitely scalable and there isn't enough golden eggs for everyone
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.
The irony of Patreon trying to dominate the crowdfunding market but ending up so shitty that people jumped ship to join the competition
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.
Yes and no? There's a good reason they did. You've never heard of their dozen competitors who didn't.
Patreon works by making people feel safer about their money than randomly giving youtubers their credit card number. It relies ENTIRELY on reputation. They took the money to make it so we heard of them and imagined them as safe.
@@tristanridley1601you're doing a lot of mental gymastics to justify their greed. They didn't need VC money to make people think their money is "safe". Patreon was already succeeding because they're one of the first to do it, and the momentum had caught on. They're already massively successful compared to others even before taking VC money.
in india a few creators are taking a different path. this idea of a monthly subscription isn't popular and viable but whenever they need gear, support or money they plug their "UPI" id which is basically ur bank account and u can receive money in that and majority of the indians have a upi id and they can pay their favourite creators and support them. i wish this unified payment option spreads fast across the world cause it makes life 1000x easier for everyone and people don't need to rely on patreon
@@aryanram02 That's literally just venmo or cashapp.
@@aryanram02 So a nationalized institutional paypal pretty much? Because if it is this way, it is decently similar to what happens in some brazilian channels with "pix"
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.
Step 1 - convince a star struck CEO to take investment that locks them into an unsustainable growth profile
Step 2 - suck the company dry
I think it's really easy to take for granted that big websites are extremely expensive to keep running because small websites are extremely cheap, or even free, to keep running to the point where tiny websites can exist online for as long as the internet itself continues to exist.
It's something I learned in the early 2010s when every fandom was making their own website. They'd all start out with, like, 5 members, then they'd just keep growing until they reached, say, 1000 members. Until that point everything's free, and the site is run entirely by volunteers, but when it gets to the tipping point the site has to start paying to keep the site up, and the volunteers are going to want to earn some money for doing a full-time job, or wanting an incredible amount of power over the community, or both.
Like, just the cost of keeping TH-cam running is astronomical before the costs of employees and the payments for the creators are even accounted for.
Building a payment provider webside usually isn't something you (should) do as side husle. At that point you need investrors and they want to see as much money as possible.
Sorry, but that's not reality. Because of money laundering and counterterrorism regulations, you need a back end system to manage that, and dealing with the banking system in general. You have to pay people, service suppliers, programmers, etc. And managing people and customers costs money. And manage a website, and keep it secure. But, venture capital money is like inviting Dracula to sniff your neck...
Why does every kid working construction inevitably buy a Ford F-150 they don't need?
Getting your big VC moment is just a part of silicon valley culture.
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
They understand it. They just want all of their money out (+20%) once growth tapers off as they have 2 or 3 other investment opportunities that they are unable to capitalize on because their asset are all tied up on non-growth investments. It's why capitalism fails. People used to build a company and run that company from start to finish because they really believed in the product or service they provided. Now they just trade businesses like Pokemon cards.
That "some reason" you talk about has a name: "greed".
I'd add that limitless growth also has a name, at least in biology: "cancer".
The stuff gets even worse on the national scale - nations tend to be pressed into growing their GDP, and that being seen as how successful a nation is.
What people *do not* tend to look at is what kind of growth that is. Like is this growth due to increased production of useful goods, or is this growth due to something useless ("plastic flamingos") or something that is thrown away after a short while without the need to do so ("I absolutely must have the neweset iphone").
Nobody seems to measure things based on whether the median prosperity/purchasing power actually rises, to name one potential reasonable measure (that should be paired with something regarding variance, like standard deviation or quantiles).
You forget, that when you invest in a company, you expect return to your investment that's higher than your investment+ inflation and costs.
This usually means you must SELL your stake at higher price than you bought it, thus when line starts to equalise, you're in panic to sell immediately to cut your losses and that drives down the stock price and crashes the investors trust on ability to sell at profit.
No investor believes they can in any way get their profits from NOT selling their stocks, and this is the issue.
Human life is too short to be realistically able to wait for 100 years to get your investment back from other ways to gain income from investment than selling the stock.
This, the line MUST go up or everythings for naught...
It's idiotic, short sighted pyramid scheme that's just been accepted to be good system....
You misunderstand what investors want. They literally do not care about the company or product. It's set dressing. All that matters is being able to sell your shares for more than you bought them for.
And investors are the owners by legal rights. So if you own a company you don't care about, with the intentions to sell your shares for a profit, of course you will jack up the short term profitability as high as possible, get insane valuations, and then sell. You don't care about the long term.
The stock market was a genuine mistake
@@Crawver oh yes I’m aware of all those issues as well. The whole system is nonsense. The people with all the money are trading paperwork that they made up to somehow make more money meanwhile the rest of us are fighting to survive.
Founder creator here. It's no exaggeration that my channel would not exist without Patreon and the patrons who supported me there. For the first year or so of my channel's existence, I had 7 patrons giving me a total of $50 a month. Enough to buy equipment and editing software. It still is a huge part of my revenue, and the site's enshittification scares the shit out of me. A lot of creators will go out of business if they collapse.
I'm another founder. Patreon was kind of a background thing for me for several years, but a recent tweak I've made (probably not repeatable by most other creators) has caused my Patreon income to suddenly grow into something more meaningful. I would love to see another platform or two come in as meaningful alternatives to Patreon (and TH-cam). Preferably platforms guided by steadier, more sensible people than the likes of Conti.
Aren't there other good alternatives to Patreon? Even if the alternative website isn't big itself, you could just direct your current supporters there. At least that's how I see it with my big brain 🤣
@@beren171 You never create a business didn’t you. People, especially millenial and gen z trust patreon. They won’t trust new website simillar to patreon
@@aliefr2984 If a content creator I like explains the shitty situation with Patreon I wouldn't be immediately suspicious. Unless the new website looks sketchy and literally no one heard of it, why would I not give it a try? Heck, link to this video lol
@@aliefr2984 why would they trust a company that has a track record of banning creators and confiscating their earnings?
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.
Very American methinks
In what world is this true? No one put a gun to CEO's head and forced him to take any checks. The failure of Pateron is a failure of management and perhaps concept, but how you can play investors, who did nothing other that write checks with the obvious and clear expectation of ROI is absurd. Unless you are going to claim that literally all investments are predatory and I can't see how the VC's were "predatory" at all.
@@brendanconlon8292the hike in prices is a direct result of Patreon needing to pay back investors. Patreon has stagnated in growth, and so the only way they can satisfy their stakeholders (which they have a legal obligation to do) is to take money out from their users. If they weren’t beholden to the stakeholders, they could simply keep the 5% fee.
@@brendanconlon8292The patterns of enshitification are everywhere, and Patreon is no exception. As long as infinite growth is the target, this is unavoidable.
VCs and other investors want infinite growth.
So we’re here.
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)
Did you not accept the job in the end?
@@SkynetCyb No it was just a recruiting call - not an offer. I chose not to apply for the position
I seriously don't understand what they were raising all that venture capital for in the first place. All they had to do was maintain their functionality and sit back and collect their processing fees while the site grew organically from all the word of mouth from its creators asking people to subscribe.
Greed. The more money you make, the more you want
It's probably to be able to handle all the growth. Software infrastructure (security, networking, integration with vendors, server hosting, etc) to run such an operation is expensive, and only becomes more expensive and complex as you grow. When such explosive demand hits your servers and you can't keep up, you can't simply wait and save up the cash to scale later - people leave. Therefore, you need some money _now_, and the ways to get it are debt and outside investment.
The founder probably had a strong vision of an ethical product, and didn't want to see it fail by being unable to serve the demand he saw in front of him. VCs came in to offer a solution, and it allowed him to build his business, his vision, his passion. I don't know if patreon would have survived as a platform without making it accessible to whoever wanted to.
Finally, founders, especially the visionary types, are rarely great managers of large, multi-billion dollar companies. Steve Jobs was ousted as the CEO because he was doing a bad job, and was brought back on after he gained more experience elsewhere. It's Tim Cook that made apple into the behemoth it is today.
It's a very hard job, and it seems that the patreon CEO is in over his head - managing investor demands while building a long term sustainable business after "blitz-scaling" is incredibly difficult. Good luck to him, and to patreon.
It's just the way things are done. It's ideology.
There's even an age-old children's story about it. Have these people never heard of the Golden Goose?
Ego. They didn’t want to just start or lead a renaissance, they wanted to own the renaissance. They needed the capital to box out others who could copy the simple model if they didn’t grow fast enough. They didn’t want to rely on always needing to be better than others, they wanted more capital to have the advantage of being bigger.
I love when my only source of income keeps sabotaging itself for no discernible reason
It's not enough to make money, you have to make ALL of the money. These sorts of services start out great, but at some point they're going to reach the limit of how big they can grow. Every business model has a ceiling. Capitalism cannot accept this, you can't simply be making plenty of money, you have to always be growing, always making exponentially more then last year, or you feel like your failing. They will then proceed to kill themselves in a desperate attempt to somehow grow larger.
Seems like a prime time for as many creators as possible to switch to Nebula or otherwise create a collectively owned Patreon replacement
Wise up
Maybe doing something valuable is better advice.
just seen your content, as a queer irishman you’ve got yourself a new sub
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.
It really bums me out that Jack is behind this, and this is what it's become. I was an OG fan of his music, and followed all of his projects for years.
+
You can't bank on "content creators", since they are floated by botnet, and have heavy nepotism and incest relations with each other, and run lockouts on others (so no to Nebula, always and forever). Jack knew this...they are risky, mentally deficient "talent" (and I use that loosely) investments running cheap cult of personality ponzi pyramids that are constant generic fly-by-night boom/bust...so the safest way are always people with real jobs, that work for a living and understand the reality of how "creators" aren't real jobs, just walking tip jars for rubes & fish, so use them accordingly...
and outside that, you got peanut crunchers running really large, successful companies with shoddy books and tons of cash they have to hide somewhere...so Patreon takes them in and takes that cut. This is degenerate speculative gambling, always was...stop whining about what's been the model for 5 centuries.
Patreon was in it for the money, always was. Time to grow up, kids.
The fact that you just watched a 45 minute ad for Tom's Not-Paytreon and didn't realize it was entirely a sales pitch says a lot about marks out here today.
Oh the irony.
Or he could've taken out a business loan like other businesses do, if Patreon didn't have the money to invest in itself
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.
You harmed their engagement metrics.
Or they forgot to include payments in their account activity monitoring.
I am only half-joking, in this clown "numbers go only up" world it is all too plausible.
Yeah the banning of creators and supporters never made sense to me.
i wish youtube join-membership thing picks up, idk how much of a cut they take from the creators but so far I've seen many TH-camrs use it and ofc youtube is a reliable mega giant conglomerate so this sort of stupid stuff wont happen.,
@@aryanram02It's massive already so It'll probably survive, and premium is just TH-cam's TH-cam membership so I don't think they take more than 5-10 per cent cut
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.
They aren't asking for more than 5%. They are asking for 5% plus 3%, plus another 4%, plus another 3%. It's all in how you frame it!
Patreon is such a bizarre business to fuck up on.
All it has to do is maintain a functional platform and they will make money hand over fist by being a middleman. It's literally free money!
When you screw up passive income
I’m guessing that maintaining the platform with that many users gets expensive but as other have suggested they could’ve set up a patreon for themselves to try and crowdsource maintenance fees.
1: it costs money to start a business venture
2: VCs are gonna want a huge return on investment
I'm pretty sure the video addresses this at some point.
@@SorowFame Not really. The maintenance fees are a portion of the fees they collect, there's no reason why it would lead them to financial trouble. Consider how incredibly gigantic TH-cam is (while hosting videos!)... and each "user" (=product) only generates so little money that a single paying customer offsets the costs of tens of thousands or so. Patreon _only_ has paying customers. Platforms are expensive, but not per-user - what makes them tricky is that people have been trained to accept "free" services, so the portion of people actually paying for the service is absurdly tiny; Patreon shouldn't have that problem at all.
The problem is the VCs. And taking VC money in the first place, like _what were they thinking_ ? This is some "dollar sign eyes" ridiculousness.
Oh, and they have an effective monopoly in their sector. A capitalist wet dream.
Just goes to show how VC's "instant and exponential growth forever" expectations fuck everything up.
I support 2 creators on Patreon. I rarely ever login, only if there is a payment issue or something. Patreon tried too hard and lost focus of its mission. If those 2 creators go elsewhere, so will I. Patreon need to learn that nobody goes to Patreon for Patreon.
^ This. It’s a one-and-done site for subscriptions. If TH-cam weren’t so idiotic, they could have all that money I spend on Patreon. Alas, making it so that a 5€/month membership makes that channel ad-free is too much to ask, so f YT.
Precisely. One creator that leaves takes away so many followers
it"s like thinking people would go to Uber for Uber
Disagree. Patreon has abused its creators and supporters but people keep using it. So why wouldn’t they think they can do whatever they want.
@@codycastpeople only keep using it because there isn’t a popular direct competitor yet. As soon as there is, creators will leave and patrons will follow.
It's absolutely buckwild to me that nobody (not just patreon but investors and businesses in all sorts of sectors) stopped to ask themselves if the circumstances during a pandemic might not be indicative of future trends? Like I work for a trucking company that decided 2022 was the perfect time to move to a 10% year over year growth model. It....I mean it seems like we're fine...for now. My friends in the office only seem slightly more frazzled than usual. The increase in an already pathetic turnover rate isn't worrisome at all!
the trouble is we seem to think business owners are somehow magically far more intelligent than us, so we tend not to criticise their stupid ideas
@@skyblazeeternoit's more like business owners only listen to investors and are untouchable due to organizational hierarchy.
@@skyblazeeterno I think the real problem is that business owners and c suite think they're magically far more intelligent than everyone else and so completely ingore everyone who critcises their ideas no matter how qualified they are.
See the recent unity event's, the employees all knew how it would go down and where telling them they just didn't care and now unity is all but dead. No developer is going to choose them when starting a new project and no new developer is going to choose to learn it over competitors.
Agreed. I'm an online teacher and I started having SO much work on 2020. I never once assumed it would be like that forever, and I took advantage of the moment and tried to work as much as I could to save money for some future plans I had. It's insane to me that a business illiterate like me could think of this but these business owners couldn't.
Business people are stupid. The last few years trucking was incredibly profitable! Truck prices went thru the roof, fuel and insurance were up too, but there was lots of money to be made if they could just deliver the goods (lol) but. When loads stop paying $6 & $7k cross Country, you need to dial down your expectations. I did and i didn't fall on my ass, because I didn't bet the farm that the price of freight was going to stay high forever. All these companies that are failing or threatened need to wake up to the current reality. And insisting that clients or employees take it in the shins while company profits rise forever isn't going to last long.
Big tech destroyed the old internet. I remember how pleasant and exciting it was to be online in 2010, like there was a world of possibilities... I had a Deviantart with 3k followers and I already was monetising my TH-cam page for around 80$ a month while still in college. Nowadays it's so much harder to do that even if you're a full-time creator! The amount of commitment for social media is atrocious, new creators have a super hard time and all websites say is "omg we're starving so much lmao! now pay" all for corporate greed because they're making more money than ever 😡
They're making lots of money, but overwhelmingly on a small and shrinking number of creators. It's economies of scale that are killing the internet as we once hoped it would be in the 1990s. Antimonopoly measures are one of the few things I can think of to cure the situation (breaking up Google, Meta, et al.).
It's funny you call 2010 pleasant and exciting, when that was the era (for me) where the internet began to collapse (frustratingly) into its current megacorporate shape. Now the internet of the 1990s and very early 2000s, now *there* was an exciting internet. Everyone had a webpage somewhere, people were operating networked BBSes at a wide scale, it was anarchic and a person's access to spaces depended on their ability to seek them out based on limited social awareness.
Like the fictional wild west, it was beautiful and ugly and joyous and morose all at once, and it was doomed to come an end as more money found its way there.
It may or may not interest you, but there is a small community of people out there doing things in the way that they used to be done in the early internet, places like neocities and spacehey are good examples of small yet incredibly active communities that preserve that niche feeling the internet once had
@@AuntieHauntieGames Yeah, I don't OPs comment. 2010 was already bad. Once "everyone" got lured in the gold rush and nothing was left the bubble exploded. Early diggers got the gold and got rich(generally speaking of course), the latecomers just ate dirt. It was inevitable that with more people jumping into the pool the less space everyone had. There are just so many eyeballs you can attract in a sea of other creators. And we all have limited time at hand which we curate to get the most fun and use out. So many creators won't even make it in the first place.
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
Jack and Nataly are like life concierges!
You can see the enshittification of the internet on Tumblr too. In trying to be more profitable, they're dropping what made the site so great and useful--the blogging and tagging aspect--to try to chase after Twitter's UI and blurring its unique identity. It sucks. I wish Patreon the best
The livestreaming thing too! No one asked for it and now it’s a super intrusive feature not many people even use. Makes me sad to see, cause I got here right before it starting going down the toilet… 😢
to be fair tumblr’s tag system has always been straight dog
While a lot of Tumblr's issues have been a thing for a while now (I say as someone who has been on the site since 2008/2009), but the monetisation of the site is just so annoying. I don't even mind some of the options it gives for people to pay for, ad-free experience for those using mobile, being able to pay for sponsored posts and having little checkmarks next to your name are all great. But the whole Live function (which luckily for me isn't a thing) being handled by another company is so weird because you don't really understand the culture of Tumblr if you just use Live (strange aeons did a fantastic video about Tumblr Live), and changing the UI after Twitter's is baffling. Especially when they have a pornbot problem (which in turn relates to Live as most of them are either bots or actual sex workers which is fine but Tumblr's rules on porn/NSFW content is weird), and that there are so many homophobes, transphobes, racists, misogynists who run blogs on the site and their accounts are never taken down when reported.
It just... baffles me. Though apparently the CEO is a huge Musk fanboy so a lot of the changes and the enshitification doesn't surprise me.
Tags have always been bad. At this point it's a feature, not a bug.
What bothers me about tumblr live is 1) I can't turn it off all the way (it's not for me, I don't want it on my dash), 2) they only advertise the porn. Strange Aeons did a deep dive into TL and apparently there's plenty of people using it because it's smaller than competitors and more chill. So. Literally the Tumblr of livestreaming. I don't have an issue with that. Also 3) the company they partnered with for the video and payment features is Roblox levels of fair and transparant.
I personally wish they'd prioritize the NSFW community settings/bot detection/"hey, existing while trans isn't inherently a sex thing". I do think prioritising new features over maintaining and improving the old is a symptom of enshittification. And the changes to the UI making it look like Twitter is a Bad Move for the userbase (and kinda gauche to boot). But it's not so bad yet, I don't think. Or if it is, it's been this bad for a while now.
Tumblr died when they banned pron, whatever they did after that is irrelevant. That's the big brains at Yahoo doing that btw
It's mind boggling to me that Patreon can say "since less than 1/20 creators are growing with goals, we're discontinuing goals." as if they don't understand that it's orders of magnitude easier to [ ask ] for money than it is to [ actually receive ] money.
Rather, it's infuriating that people in high positions at businesses with access to and the ability to act on the analysis of business related statistics have consistently shown an complete ineptitude on the front of properly parsing what the numbers actually mean.
I feel like we're forever doomed to be controlled by out-of-touch suits that think that because they see funny charts they have a god's-eye-view of their entire business while having no clue what's actually going on, ruining everything along the way.
I personally always hate that. I don't think your channel goals should be public. "Help us reach 1000 subscribers!" No. I don't want you to have a 1000 subscribers because then you interrupt your own video 3 times with ads for products you've never tried yourself. It makes creators look like liars.
I guarantee you the goals feature wasn't particularly expensive to maintain, either, and if it was, then it was because it was written by a team that experienced tons of layoffs and attrition and the replacement programmers they hired couldn't understand the pile of spaghetti code that the authors had left behind. It happens all too often in software. I've worked at companies where they cut entire features because one guy wrote it in a week, it worked great, and they shipped it without doing code review or pair programming or anything like that. Then the guy quit, and after a while, the feature needed to be updated to be compatible with some new framework or whatever, but no one understood how it worked, so it got sacked. (I left the company right as they were starting to rewrite their entire backend in a different programming language, Clojure, because one of their best engineers really wanted to use it. I'm pretty sure this is the thing that made that feature get sacked, but idr, it's been over a decade.) The actual cost of compute time for the feature was like, maybe a couple dollars a month? It was a tiny, but useful, feature in some control panel, and the server costs for the things backing that were hundreds of dollars a day, but they did a whole crapload of stuff. So Patreon's either in a situation like that where they're finding reasons not to understand their own code base, or they just straight up don't have a problem and they're getting rid of it because some SVP or the consultation firm they last hired is deranged.
if they never get 1000 subscribers they stop doing videos, i guess that is better, on the other hand if they get a lot of subscribers they can choose good advertisers instead of taking any offer@@AlwaysUp-uf9dl
Astonishingly, this number is HIGHER than the number of people representing 50% of the company's income. At 26:26, @TimNicholas points out that only 1.75% are earning 50% of Patreon revenue. That means they turned off a feature that hypothetically was helping their most significant projects grow.
Also, as a side note, goals helped me decide if I wanted to support someone, or if their project seemed to be vapor. Reasonable goals = strong reason to support.
5% growth seems like a huge thing to throw away.
It sucks because Patreon IS a really great way to directly support creators you love (or at least, it used to be). I love the idea of fans collectively pitching a few bucks to their favorite creators every month as a way to supplement the less reliable streams of income internet creators have to rely on. Of course capitalism had to ruin everything with the whole "infinite growth" mantra.
Exactly this. The concept of patreon is so cool. Taking the old concept of rich monarchs funding art for themselves we swapped it to crowdsourcing where large numbers people give other people money to make art. 4 mins in and a plateauing graph of users and profits makes sense and like should be fine.
Yeah, it's a really nice concept! One thing I didn't get a chance to go into (but could touch on in a follow-up if I was to do one) was how the "digital tip-jar"/"subscription crowdfunding" stuff is gradually being re-branded as just one of many "products" Patreon offers. In fact, in the last few days, they've stopped using the word "Patron" to describe supporters, replacing it with "Members" instead).
@@FosukeLordOfError Seriously!! When Tom said "Patreon's investors say it's in crisis because the number of new people signing up is dwindling" I was like "....so?" Patreon seems to be quite successful and has TONS of users already, why is it necessary to keep infinitely adding more?
Oh right, because that's what capitalism demands. Any business that doesn't show record profits every single quarter is a "failure." It's not enough to be successful and sustainable, you need to keep pushing the envelope... even if it results in the entire company crashing and burning.
Hurr durr capitalism bad hurr durrr
@@chaserseven2886 You're so right bestie. Capitalism IS bad and you should say it.
The company literally printed money off the backs of creators. They barely had to advertise because the creators themselves would plug Patreon in all their videos.
Insane that they essentially fucked the company up by chasing after that VC money. I guess all the higher-ups probably don't care because they lined their pockets on the way out.
welcome to capitalism one of the shittiest system's out there that likes to convince people they have any individual freedom rather or that anything else matter's rather then how much money there daddy has.
Most serious VCs ask “why do you want this amount of investment and what are you going to do with it?”
I’d love to know what the answers to those were here, if the question was even asked at all
@@TheMikster95 Because the infrastructure required cost a lot of money, plus it's likely they were actually collecting a lower fee than required to entice creators to join.
Let's be honest, here. Greed and ambition caused the CEO of Patreon to run out and get VC money in the first Place. Patreon's business model would have been able grow naturally just fine. Might have taken a but longer, but it could have gotten there.
A moderate amount of VC money, carefully limited to serious investors, would have been fine, with a reasonable exit time.
The part you’re missing is that other similar services existed, run by less greedy creators (e.g. Hank green)
Under capitalism, the greediest company grows fastest and outcompetes the others.
Capitalism selects the greedy and ambitious CEO. By design.
But then they might have competition! We can't have that!
Patreon is the perfect example of a business that should have gotten traditional loans instead of pursuing VC money.
Traditional loans are apparently so uncommon in tech that it never crossed their minds
@@tp6335 retail banks _must_ avoid lending to high risk startups. You literally cant get a "standard business loan" for something as risky as a tech startup.
Or better yet: believed in his own model and set up a Patreon where most of the subscribers were the creators on the platform themselves. It's unbelievable that the idea didn't occur to him. But I think the problem is, while Jack Conte is unquestionably a creator, he still has a capitalist tech bro mindset himself, just like other platform creators like Jack Dorsey.That's why they got along so well with venture capitalists. These guys believe so hard in their finance system that they never consider the downsides.
Vast majority of start ups run through the VC world and founder funds for a reason. Banks don't want to lend to high risk industries for low returns. If you are willing to risk your money to a tech start-up you want the high rewards you can earn in getting equity in the company. They probably wouldn't have exist otherwise much like many other startups.
0% of businesses should use VC money. Thus, I agree that Patreon is part of the 100% of businesses that should avoid VC money like the plague.
Imagine a bizarre situation where, rather than venture capitalists, Patreon's founding was *funded via Kickstarter*
Vice versa, imagine if Kickstarter were once Patreons
Ironic it would be
Go do it.
You completely missed the 2018 purge of creators, which led to many people, both creators and fans, abandoning the platform. Conti has been his own worst enemy for years!!
And their ongoing censorship practices
even to this day they constantly attack anyone who makes "anime style" products (and i dont even mean "controversial" stuff, but plain old anime style art, not even NSFW art ) or modders for games. (also either NSFW or not, you going into the chopping block)
I used to support around 12 creators there, (at some point close to 250USD month) but they slowly moved to other platforms, and so i went with them.
This after almost half of them almost got banned for no particular reason.
I actively avoid patreon after that.
@@toobig7150 yeah it's ridiculous how I've seen creators who don't post explicit anime-style art, just pretty girls with kinda big boobs, have their posts taken down and their accounts flagged (though I've yet to see anyone get suspended, just... warned. For not violating the ToS, but rather just running afoul of some bad automation's flagging system.) In some ways it's worse than fanbox, which obviously allows anime art styles, but forces you to use mosaics if you draw expicit stuff, and they're extremely proactive about enforcing that (or so I hear, anyway. I wouldn't know from first-hand experience. I can't even read Japanese.)
I totally get that they don't want people posting fictional CP, hell I would not to see that shit and I don't want people who make it to be able to get massive crowd funding. But the way they go about trying to prevent that is so dysfunctional it's ludicrous.
Meanwhile, they let right-wing provocateurs and straight up fascists use their platform to fund political "activism," disinformation campaigns, hate speech content, etc. for a very long time, and to this day I don't think they completely banned it, they just kicked off a few big names who were infamous.
Contrast this with Subscribestar, which has a very liberal and open-minded policy toward art styles (while still being completely reasonable and banning CP, as they should) but a very strong policy against using their platform for any kind of political activism (but especially for the propagation of hate speech and other fascist rhetoric-their post explaining this has a literal "no nazis" sign on it.) I really hope more anime-style artists move to Subscribestar as it's a much more welcoming platform that has all the key features (pledge tiers, polls, discord integration, optional address sharing for sending physical prints and other merch, and even allowing you to make sure someone's been pledged for a certain amount of time before they can see your back catalog) that Patreon has and charges around 5%, the same as Patreon's cheapest (and now unavailable) offering.
I left patreon when it happened, what they did was totally UNACCEPTABLE. 😡
@@NickanM Me too. Patreon even confiscated their earnings. I know of at least one creator owed more than $5000. And no, screenshots are not legally proof of a debt, so the thieves get to keep the money they stole.
Patreon proved itself to be simply to big of a risk to get into business with. Thats what killed them.
Patreon succeded in doing what most start-ups bank their entire business case and hope of future profitability on. They managed to create a new market and gain a full monopoly. Things that many startups like Netflix, and Uber tried and failed to do and are now struggling because they will never get the dominant market share that their investors hoped for. Patreon got that almost monopoly market share but they had raised so much from investors who now expected a Facebook or Amazon level of return for something that's always going to be a niche market. People who are willing to pay voluntarily in a world of infinite free content.
Patreon's entire job was to be a middleman between creators and patrons. All they needed to do is meditate when someone acts in bad faith. That's it, otherwise they needed to sit back and they would have money. Because they kept pushing for a bigger cut each time, the discontent opened a market for competition and people left for better deals. They over reached and thus compromised what would otherwise be a very simple, constant source of money.
There is a game that patreon played several years ago called "Getting rid of adult content" in 2017 and it's degrading since then. It does not help that their creditors are perhaps the most regressive portions of the financial industry you could imagine. Their financial advisors & investors have all been.... kinda horrid.
the attack on sex workers and related things to become more "advertising friendly" has been the failure of so many things: imgur, tumblr, etc etc
@@The_Ant_Eater_404sex ‘workers’
Honestly, going after adult content should be the first call for everyone to jump ship. It NEVER is followed by the user experience getting a lot better
@madarick2 It's literally taken over the ENTIRE internet. There is a real and coordinated effort to eradicate SWers and adult content in general from social media and from the internet at large.
@@webspinster they do better work than you do and you know it
The whole 'venture capitalists want 10 times the return' explains _so_ much about so called successful businesses going under, or turning to exploitative practices.
Its a natural outcome of the fail rate of new ventures. Its just math.
@@elLooto That doesn't make sense once the company is afloat. The risk involved at the 3rd round of investment isn't the same as at the 1st round, so the 10x has no justification, it's a random number thrown in. That's especially true for a company like Patreon that BY CONSTRUCTION can't go under once its business is running (unless all patreon subs suddenly decide to stop supporting all the creators). And if the VC demands this ROI from the companies after they make benefits, what he is really doing is transferring the risks he takes to the companies he invests into instead of himself. That's akin to a Ponzi scheme.
Venture capitalists are simply playing hot-potato, passing a failing business off to the masses via an IPO. They sell if off high after the underwriter cooks up a higher-than-actual value, and then they take their IPO money and short the stocks until they've extracted all of the perceived value and it lays there, just as worthless as it was on day with the public picking up the losses through their financial advisors who are working directly for a series of hedge funds.
@@elLooto this. People don’t understand that investors, invest, to make money, which means they need a return. And investing in speculative growth is risky, which means they lose a lot, they need to make up those losses with the few that win…
Seems though, that there's a gap in the market for VC-financed companies that are successful but not successful enough that it makes sense for VC to keep financing it. VCs are hyper aggressive in offloading the companies that didn't take off and are willing to lose money to get out fast so that they can invest in new stuff. All of this makes sense.
But why are they more willing to lose all of their investment instead of selling off at a smaller loss, to less aggressive investors who are happy to get 10% return on their investment?
Is it because it is important that the companies that VCs are giving up on, burn out and look like spectacular failures, rather than salvageable?
Say you finance 100 startups, of which 5 "take off", 45 are successes and "only" grow at a rate of perhaps 10% per year. The last 50 fail. It is my impression that the aggressively cut the 95 companies and make sure the 45 regularly successful companies have as low as possible a chance of recovery. Seems incredibly wasteful.
The 2017 backlash of a flat fee cost is so stupidly funny in this moment with how unity just killed itself by anouncing a similar fee
Unimaginative money men are unimaginative, more news at 20:00
Shittification of platforms, gladly brought to you by ven-vulture capitalists.
I've been a creator on Patreon for 3 years, and I've had a personal meeting with one of their research teams. I was extremely vocal with my ideas and critiques for the website on the creator forums, which were deleted and completely shut down last year. It eliminated one of the few ways to express ourselves to Patreon itself. I've sent several emails about real issues on the creator's end, issues that have made my Patreon sometimes unbearable to manage (I actually use Patreon to send physical items). I have a fair amount of Patrons, but Patreon takes a huge cut while not offering a lot. If you're not a creator or don't need to keep track of Patrons and addresses, you might not be aware how dysfunctional it is. Not to mention how slow the website and app are...
can you please elaborate what difficulty exactly you faced ?, i am building something similar to patreon
The ultimate lesson is that if a firm has investors it will eventually be broken like a piggy bank to give those investors money.
Investing is literally indebting
@@MichelleHell No it literally isn't. Investing is the purchase of equity, indebting is the purchase of debt. They are completely different classes of securities and function entirely differently. With debt, money has a to paid back a fixed point or points, with equity, you own a percentage of the enterprise which has to be run with your interest in mind, but the company does not have to pay you at any specific point in time.
@@brendanconlon8292 it's a roundabout way of accomplishing the same thing, interest on money lent.
If you raise finance at a $4billion valuation then the investors will expect to see that value realised in the revenue/profit. If Jack stopped at the series B or C rather than going to a series F then the investors would have been happy with the current revenue.
It's impressive how even during pandemic times they were still asking for investor money to do what is a glorified forum with payment processor integration.
Honestly at that point I would've been working on how to get rid of the VCs. Not inviting in more of them. Use the pandemic windfall to buy back the stake of the company so you aren't beholden to investors, so you don't have to pay for outstanding loans. Then cruise on the fact that you have a near monopoly on long-term financial support for internet creators. Yeah they have overhead costs for maintenence and making sure there's no illegal activity trying to piggyback off their systems. But I refuse to believe that they couldn't have been solvent with 5% of established creators and 8% of everyone who signed up during covid.
@@Treegona That's a classic "clueless people at the helm" situation, similar with Twitter pre-Musk, where the CEO/founder is just an idea man that is good at convincing VC investors by rapid-firing buzzwords. He has no idea of what happens inside the company.
Everyone under him is just there to take the free VC money for themselves.
Patreon could probably just fire all their 400+ employees and just keep (or hire) a skeleton crew of like 20 people tops to actually run the services (that they host on Amazon anyway).
Don't worry about the costs of the "making sure there is no illegal activity" part, they are not doing anything fancy about that themselves besides virtue signaling and banning some high profile creators for political reasons.
@@marcogenovesi8570 Twitter PRE-Musk is a "clueless people at the helm" situation? Then what in God's name do you call it NOW? An "actively and intentionally driving full-speed towards a cliff" situation?
Well with the money printers going BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR and zero percent interest rates VC is going to dump hundreds of millions of dollars somewhere, and you're fucked if it's the competition.
@@rawbebaba we are literally seeing how a company that got 50 million VC investment is on fire and not profitable and you still think VC investment money spent on the competition is what is going to turn the tables?
Newsflash, they also invested in the competition anwyay, there still is not a whole lot. SubscribeStar is still tiny, Ko-fi is still a meme and so on.
It feels like every time these different sites go "family friendly" with their content, they shut down shortly afterward. They want to impress their creditors, but in the end they end up not making anyone happy.
It makes no sense. Just do what Disney did: Set up a different brand, with the same policies and functionality, but allowing the content that doesn't fit the family-friendly label.
"Subbable was a walled garden, inaccessible to the general public and therefor had no chance against the broader, more open alternatives... Anyway, this video is brought to you by Nebula!"
I laughed at that too.
Yeah the point of the video is to not put all your eggs in one basket.
@@DJDiskmachine I'm not sure that is the point of the video.
Yeah, creators on Nebula should be up in arms and forcing them to add a comment system to it, and fix its shitty Android TV app. It is just a dead space as is.
Nebula is basically an investor scam, but it's done by the creators (that are shareholders of it). The whole idea is making it grow and eventually selling it off to clueless investors, and then split the bounty as they all have a share.
I think Nebula is rad, and it also misses the lesson you learned by examining Patreon’s business. The thing creatives need is a banking service that harnesses the patron cultural movement, not another paid video service.
Nebula is one of the escapes from TH-cam corporate corruption . Network TV had 7 banned words, TH-cam seems to have 7000 and flawed robotic enforcement .
Something to note is that Google and Apple actively bar competition in their app stores against Patreon; see the fanhouse issue where Apple insisted on enforcing their 30% fee on Fanhouse, but not on Patreon.
And this is a great example of the difference between entrepreneurship and late stage capitalism. Instead of having a good idea , working hard for a good income venture capitalism is a system that sucks every cent out of everything and everyone until creativity dies.
It really is one of the worst things about capitalism that once a company has investors the profit motive is no longer about making money but about making all the money all the time. The wants and needs of the customers and staff become secondary to the wants of the investors.
It's not primarily a problem of capitalism or capitalists, though. The problem is inflationary currency. If people had the option to just save money for later use, without it not-so-slowly losing its value, the rich wouldn't have to invent shittier and shittier ways of investing their saving.
That puts a bad name on investors. In reality, a lot of investors don't want that. The vast majority of investors actually want a stable, well working company that will stay in business for the next five decades to finance their retirement and all that. And of course, they want to reap the rewards of the company working well too - a lot of investors invest in companies they believe in and whose products and services they use. But once you cross a certain wealth threshold, and you don't get rid of the idea that more wealth is always better, short-term high-risk investment pays more. So you can keep watching your number grow. It's no longer about having a nice life; it's just a silly egoistic crawl to more status. I know plenty of people like that who are always just waiting and hoping for their "big payoff". They suck.
And of course, those big time investors have disproportionate power. They're too big, so they need to be "appeased". That's a big part of the problem everywhere.
Index funds also make this quite a bit worse. You often don't even know who you are financing.
And yes, inflationary currency makes all of this even worse. It removes the significant competition from the "might as well keep the money in the account" segment. Instead of compound interest increasing the value of your money, we have the exact opposite.
@@veejayroth stop spamming this nonsense reply under every comment.
The wants of investors who are nigh-impossible to satisfy since greed knows no limits.
As that one commenter in the video pointed out, Patreon is essentially a banking site. VC investors are so greedy and short-sighted they basically passed on a bank. A BANK. The only thing close to the level of "I just sit here and revenue magically appears" of a bank is a casino.
@@TheRockerX Its terrible when a guy is right and wont shut up, eh?
they had the golden goose, it was a company that prints money without doing anything. how could they mess this up
As always venture capitalists strangled the goose
The problem is that every site and service wants to form a monopoly. Get everyone on and rely on friction to keep them there as you rent seek. Start enforcing anti anti competitive regulations and the behavior will change.
While I generally agree, some services, especially online services, just form natural monopolies. You can only regulate those, not really break them up
@@maximilianbeyer5642 You could easily regulate some form of integration to break up the natural monopoly. Look at IRC, Torrent clients, fediverse as an example of a shared protocol creating a diverse market.
@@maximilianbeyer5642I'm not sure Patreon is a natural monopoly though. It's not like it has to exist, in some alternate reality TH-cam pays it's employees directly, or TH-cam memberships are used far more instead. It's essentially just a middleman for payments and so it's monopoly doesn't really exist out of necessity or improved efficiency, they just grew faster than others.
This is very specific but I love how you added Shaun saying "Patreon" at 4:09 because that's the first thing I imagine when the platform comes to my mind. The odd and charming way he pronounces it.
If i had a nickel for every bald and bearded tech CEO named Jack who is disorganized and exploitative and somehow manage to fumble an essentially ubiquitous platform, id have two nickels. Which isnt a lot but its weird it happened twice!
I guess the other Jack you earned a nickel from is Jack Dorsey.
@@Bronze_Age_Sea_Person He's not bald - but he definitely is a CeeUNextTime. The bald Jack I can think of (though unbearded) is Jack Ma, of Alibaba - I don't know his quirks and management-style (but then, don't you have to be somewhat sociopathic 'to reach the top'?)
Don't forget about Jack Welch who's the first to implement Shareholder Capitalism and basically gutted GM from the inside to falsify growth
@@ibubezi7685 Dorsey is frequently bald, if not wont to frequent enough public appearances to confirm if that's his current hairstyle; whereas as far as I can see Ma has never been bald and Alibaba is doing fine. I think you might be reaching!
@@WillHirschUK Never saw Dorsey bald, but found a few pics indeed. Also, Ma isn't bald - should have checked. He didn't appear in public for several months (probably because he criticised the Party). I don't know how Alibaba is doing - I didn't mention that.
I've always thought it was ridiculous how slow the patreon is on both mobile and desktop (especially desktop), and equally ridiculous is the inability to explore or index exactly who is actually on patreon and explore your related interests
Yeah. the app and website are both hideously outdated. I think they're currently in the process of updating them both but it feels a bit a little too late. Unfortunately, that in itself probably contributed to their demise as it's meant people don't really *use* the site in the way that you would hope for a healthy platform.
Absolutely. As a user, I've never ever used it to look for other content I might like. Now that I think about it, that really is a huge missed opportunity for them.
@@Tom_Nicholas Patreon's core problem is their inability to make good decisions. Only by chance will their updated app/website be any better than the current versions.
this! it's wild. As a person who loves reaction channels but only for specific things like specific TV show or concert it's SO hard to find the creators that offer exactly what I want unless they advertise on other platforms, which usually punish them for it (like Twitter always suppressed posts mentioning P at all). It's such a weird missed opportunity for the service!
it's honestly a shame that the nonprofit alternatives to patreon (liberapay and opencollective) never took off as much as patreon did
Would be their relationship to risk, and how much they decide things by committee/collective, and whether they hold to an ideology that would stop any growth if it doesn't fit a certain look or feel....
Why were they unable to take off? Patreon's attempts to own the market, or were there other reasons?
@@bootedbuilds lack of funds to push for marketing so the brand just isn't as strong, late to the party in the first place so they can only be seen *as* alternatives, didn't offer anyone except for people who were already pretty left-leaning an incentive to switch (at the time, they might be more attractive now with patreon looking like a tire fire.) mostly that. i've heard nothing bad about their services. comradery is also a good support site that i personally use and enjoy that runs on much lower margins but it doesn't do that kind of "post content to your supporters" kind of thing, it's really more like a barebones, easy subscription setup kind of thing that kind of unifies what would have been, back in the early days, a bunch of disparate paypal bills you'd get every month from the artists you support.
They didn't "take off" for the same reason that Patreon did - Patreon amassed VC to grow its business, and they (sensibly) didn't.
i imagine it is due to marketing, since i never heard about those@@bootedbuilds, the main reason to get investors is paying for the marketing of the product
As a creator spawned during the pandemic, there's such a palpable sense of secondhand anxiety/dread in that part where Jack and co misdiagnosed the obvious (I would say obvious even in its moment, without hindsight) bubble of the attention economy and free time and all that as some kind of new dawning.
This video is great for how it articulates the why that I've always had in my head every time I get an email about Patreon doing something weird. I mean, I knew it was probably VC, but this is a great answer to "wait shouldn't Patreon just be raking it in? how are they having all these weird struggles?"
And to think that some platforms, like Disney+, managed to hemorrhage money during that time of excess time and eyeballs.
Patreon's only use for me as a subscriber was that I could have all my pledges go out at the same time as a single payment. Once that was lost, there was no reason to keep using it. Sites like this need to remember that their customers aren't just the creators, but also the patrons.
As a creator, the fact they list a possible option for rewards to patrons being high quality versions of images but downgrade the quality of images uploaded in the app... pretty much sums up the experience for me.
Alternative video title: "This is why we can't have nice things"
As someone who's been donating to webcomics, ect, via PayPal before Patreon was even a thing, this bothers me so much.
While you do point out how Patreon's % take increase is backward from economies of scale, I think you let your/everyone's desensitization to the insanity of capitalistic thinking mute your critique, when it really should have been hammered louder.
The idea that Patreon willing took 105 Million in VC loans, when it had only 25 Million in annual revenue is fu*king insane! You would have to be actually dislodged from reality to think the platform could ever grow fast enough, long enough, to pay just that much back.
More importantly, WHAT THE F*** ARE THEY SPENDING THE VC MONEY ON!?
Patreon was as pure of a really great concept of a trusted middleman service provider as can be conceived.
It needed a small dev team to keep the website always up to date, and it needed to scale its backend and customer service to keep up with any increased demand.
*Patreon is the PERFECT service for a lightweight, high cash flow business.* It did not need to "evolve" to add entirely new products/services!
It's just that capitalist, cancerous, growth at all costs mindset. Could not be satisfied even with a fu*king 25 mil cashflow in 2019! For a 0 physical, purely online, website!
*Instead of making a new company for a new service, like Patreon itself once did, it now must grow, and grow. Patreon either must take over the online world, and soon, or it will rot, wither, and die.*
Really sucks that Subbable was bought, meaning it can't be scaled up as an alternative.
My most realistic hope is that Nebula (as a creator owned platform) can launch a Patreon-equivalent sub feature.
Because guess what Patreon? The implementation of your idea is absurdly easy, it was just the first mover, *brand trust,* and inertia that kept people attached to the platform.
.
Migrating response-reply over here:
"(and worth saying that it's an investment rather than a loan, which might seem pedantic!)."
Not pedantic at all!
I purposefully said "VC loan", as I think 99% of people would get a better idea of the reality w/ that word.
The idea behind a VC "investment" is the same as any conventional loan.
It is indirect, done via the increased "worth" of the invested company, but the whole point for the capitalist is the exact same. Investment of capital is always the same.
They invest X dollars, and expect a certain % increase on that investment, however long of a game, or at whatever odds they are willing to play.
If they think that % increase will be higher somewhere else, be it a diversified stock portfolio, bonds, ect, *the capitalist has no reason NOT to move their capital over there and get MORE money*.
That's the rub. Any VC investment is temporary, and the "~loan" comes due when they cash out of the company.
Sure, the company's value can drop, but that's the same risk carried in a traditional loan.
.
Still, the idea that Patreon thought they needed EVEN MORE VC money after that 105 mil in 2019 is beyond infuriating.
As we are reminded every time there's a crash, that VC money IS NOT THE PERSONAL WEALTH OF BILLIONAIRES. It can, and does, come from all sorts of places.
Financial institutions play the lottery with other people's money, and we ALL pay the price when these tech companies promise the moon and never even break the stratosphere.
Nebula launching a sub feature doesn't capture a huge amount of Patreons creator base - I support bloggers, Sims modders, comic creators, coders, artists. Nebula can't capture them, where do they go?
@@wastelanderone
The idea would be that it would be a separate side of the site, not limited to their video creators nor apart of that video service. Right now, there's some form of revenue split of Nebula subscription $ influenced by on how videos are watched, which would be kept apart from the Patreon replacement.
That's doubly important because of how there's some form of collective ownership of Nebula, and that would need to be kept separate from the much larger scale sub-supported creators.
Ideally, Nebula could expand beyond video creators as the co-owners, and there would be a path for any sub-supported content creator to buy-in and get that vote/co-ownership/ect.
Nebula has the same problem Subbable had. They want to keep it for elite content/creators only, to keep up the brand but it leads to a very narrow type of content available even in purely video format not to mention all other types of arts and crafts. I can't even imagine Nebula hosting just some random dude reacting to kpop MVs or anime series from his bedroom shot on a grainy phone. Yet many of those mid tier creators that make up the majority of Patreon numbers do exactly those types of "low-brow" entertainment.
fwiw Subscribestar is a very viable alternative to Patreon that charges around 5% and the only downsides are that they don't take PayPal (PayPal blacklisted them, I think, for whatever reason) so you need to set up ACH to get your payout, and you need to have 5 subscribers before you can get a payout at all. but for anyone who's got even a dozen patreon subs, it'd be pretty easy to launch a substar page and ask people to move. you might lose a couple of them but you'd definitely have no problem getting above the 5 sub minimum. and your takehome per supporter would be higher!
the fact that patreon was terrible abroad created one alternative in Brazil called Padrin, but later the government created a service that allows people to send money with a qr code, and that was the best thing for creators, they leave the qr code in the corner and people can even send messages for them to read along with the money, and it is paid with taxes so the creators get the full amount, the only thing that is lacking is a subscriber model, because a more stable income allows creators to plan ahead, so it actually increased youtube membership, people are even streaming directly on youtube instead of twich because twich stoped paying brazilian creators in dollars
I’ve noticed a big increase in creators mentioning ko-fi along side patreon in their calls to action recently. I don’t really remember it being a thing at all at the start of this year. Let’s hope it or something similar can grow to at least compete or take over if patreon does continue down the enshitification pipeline
I've seen Ko-Fi mentioned by Rimworld mod creators on Steam for a few years now. It seemed a more commonly-mentioned donation stream than Patreon, though I do donate to one mod creator on Patreon.
boosty is a good alternative to patreon as well
One thing that might be worth mentioning with Patreon's decline is the exodus of NSFW/Adult content creators.
Back when Patreon was in its early years, adult content was encouraged with little moderation and very loose guidelines. The larger it grew - and the more 'mainstream' it became - the more those NSFW creators got (or felt) sidelined. I think it was some time around 2018/2019 that a bunch of NSFW Patreons were suspended for having adult content in 'public' posts. And, even recently, pressure from payment processors has forced Patreon to start enforcing a photo-ID verification requirement for NSFW creators. When alternatives like OnlyFans, Fansly, etc exist, it's easy to see why some would decide to switch platforms when they're uncertain about their longevity on Patreon.
While NSFW creators were never the bulk of Patreon's income, it's undeniable how lucrative they could've been for the platform if that trust hadn't been spoiled (just look at success of OnlyFans).
As a side note; I wouldn't be surprised if Patreon introduced a 'pay to unlock post' feature at some point - similar to the system those other sites have.
2019, the same time Jack Conte proposed his infamous increase in Patreon price. What a coincidence. Almost as if some VC forced him to do that...
AFAIK the nsfw stuff actually included their largest accounts back then. Their wholesale banishment might actually have initiated the executive panic and counter-productive changes.
@@tristanridley1601 The banishment is consecutive by lobbying of american conservative groups from several social media platforms and demands by VISA and Mastercard, who seem influenced by said groups.
I truly believe "enshittifaction" is going to be the word of the era that defines this era of ephemeral service capital. This is my first video of yours, and I love what I'm seeing!
Soon to be listed in the OED
I wish we lived in a world where basic payment processing like Patreon (and to some extent Uber, Lyft etc.) could be run as a non-profit coop - without someone immediately running off with the money...
Not enough people know why they should want that. I liken it to education on democracy. In the Western world we get boners for democracy, but in other parts of the world that word is unknown. The reason is education and propaganda. Even if our democracy is broken, we still know we should want it. Can't say the same for coops and state industries led by unions.
We have that in India. Its called UPI (Unified Payment Interface). Before Uber and Ola, we had private taxis but unfortunately they've been almost completely decimated by Uber.
How the hell could a company with seemingly such small costs associated with it be in financial crisis, they're just middlemen. What I don't get is just how AWFUL patreon pages are to navigate! Good god, they could not make browsing them less user friendly if they tried
It used to be much worse - there was no way to filter posts by tag, keyword, or date - all you could do was extend the infinite scroll further and hope your browser didn't crash.
I wrote to them about that problem and got back the response that they had "talked about changing" it. It was immediately obvious that all their decision makers were fools and I'm surprised Patreon has lasted this long.
Consider that they've been pushing anniversary billing for years - after both of their first two attempts almost killed their company, they're now trying it again - they apparently hope that if they obfuscate the fact that they're destroying their primary value added, that nobody will notice.
With my limited software development knowledge, it sounds like a scaling problem.
What looks like minor architecture decisions made for a small project can become exponentially expensive when you scale up.
Most humans are awful at spotting, and even worse at extrapolating, exponential functions in reality.
Patreon could quite literally have gotten themselves into a situation where every new creator was costing exponentially more to maintain, in server load, bandwidth, accounting costs, you name it, all before getting dollar one in income from that creator.
Let's not forget Patreon pulled a Tumblr and lost lots of creators to OnlyFans for scaling down support for adult entertainment (with OF losing a lot to other subscription services when they stopped supporting extreme content and threatened to stop supporting more).
This is a great point too because if I remember right, OnlyFans was another one that initially championed supporting and uplifting its creators only to stab them in the back for appearances' sake, and only after it had profited off of them.
I don't know how true this is, but I remember memes from earlier this year about how OF was going to get rid of the adult content to be more respectable and get the patreon crowd, and the jokes being that they were removing their only reason for existing.
Wait, isn't adult content direct support BIG?
@@catholiccontriversy It was true, but also an oversimplification as memes tend to be.
MasterCard and Visa regulations introduced in late 2021 pretty much forced all platforms to pre-approve all adult content, so OF was going to ban porn (not nudity), pretty much in the exact same way as Patreon did earlier. They didn't want or have the moderation capacity to pre-approve everything.
This was often reported as them banning adult content as a whole, while most creators only did and do nudity, with the ban not affecting them. However, it obviously was still to affect some of the biggest creators.
They managed to resolve it with their payment partners, hence the ban didn't end up happening last minute, but they did tighten their creator (and collaboration) verifications, and restricted some of the most extreme content.
OF was almost exclusively targeted, for being the biggest platform of its kind and wanting to do everything by the book. Quite a few creators left in fear or started using other subscription platforms on the side, while the new card regulations were universal.
"Investments should make a 10x return or they're not worth it" - It's industry standards like this and the demand for exponential profit growth year after year that are causing products to get worse and prices to get higher every year. Where does this all end aside from the rich owning the air and the poor paying to breathe?
It's a tragedy of the commons thing. Rich people use these services too, and it's just as shittified as it is for everyone else. Some people are getting richer, but no one's getting happier.
They want that in order to make up for the money lost on all the other failed startups
Funny that you think they'll let us buy the air
@@hive_indicator318 OK, rent the air
How much return do you need if the person asking for the money has a prima facie 90% failure rate?
Thats not greed youre complaining about, its basic mathematics.
I have a Patreon account and must admit I don’t know any of this - or even any of these “extra” features - great video!
I was a huge fan of Jack Conte and his music back in the day, so I still remember clearly when the "Pedals" video dropped. I remember hearing his pitch for Patreon and thinking "that's a cool idea" but NEVER for a second guessing it would be as big as it is. The greatest irony was that Conte, if I remember correctly, said that he wouldn't take a salary as CEO and would instead rely on his Patrons so he could continue making music. So much for that, eh?
Thanks for reading out headlines. As a listener (who only occasionally actually watches), it's much appreciated.
If you look at the mockups of merch, any Printful user will tell you that Patreon is just abstracting Printful's service and probably marking up, as a middleman, to a service that is essentially another middleman. And, as a fellow "grandfathered" 5% user, I feel like Patreon is constantly trying to trick me into switching into a different tier using aggressive/confusing language.
We have a completely different set of problems with Patreon in the open source world. We use it for software development, which Patreon themselves have never really liked or supported. But we also have alternatives like OpenCollective, LiberaPay, etc. but there are advantages to Patreon's current set of features and it's worth keeping hold of those even if we're forced to move. You know, for copying.
I think an explanation of Nebula’s business model with the same skepticism would be interesting. It doesn’t appear to be very aspirational.
Patreon is the perfect example that shows capitalism doesn’t mean the best ideas survive. It just destroys everything. “Success” just means it’s destroying you slower than everything else
Reminds me of agario, once you've reached critical mass and there's no competition left to eat, you slowly die or eat yourself
@@wtfboom4585 a nostalgic and quite simple analogy, but a welcome one indeed
Expecting a 10 times return on investment explains a lot of the problems our civilisation is experiencing.....Enshitification through insane greed seems responsible for the ruin of every good idea with almost no exception.
just ask yourself how much return you would need if the people asking for money had a 90% chance of failure.
This isnt greed, its basic maths.
@@elLootoconversely it's pretty justified for the audience of these platforms to be increasingly sceptical of adopting anything since 90% of the services they have (that haven't exited) are going to be knowingly pushed and prodded into either that 10x success or catastrophic failure
@@elLooto It's not basic maths, it's a Ponzi scheme. The VC transfers the risks he takes on the companies he has shares in.
There is no justification for that 10x number. No bank asks for a 10x ROI after 5 years, not even close, and the stock market has a ROI of 50% at best historically. That's 20 times less than the ROI demanded by vulture capitalists.
The Machine of Capital consumes everything, unfortunately. We can't just have nice things in this system, when everything is controlled by a handful of oligarchs, "venture capitalists"...
Nothing concentrates power and wealth into the hands of the undeserving few better than socialism.
The most depressing thing about the ongoing enshittification of platforms is how it's revealed the incuriosity and inertia of the majority of any given platform's users. They'll eat shit sandwiches for months rather than rouse themselves to find any other way to do what they're doing.
Great vid, thank you very much.
How do you propose normal people find alternatives to enshittification? We have grown reliant on these services and more importantly our network is what they have a strong hold on. Its really difficult to find alternatives to these platforms unless there is a mass migration.
“Nebula” is such a counterproductive name for a creator hub. Interesting to see how a company with a good idea loose track of the importance of “customer perception “.
I can't help but wonder if Enshitification comes hand in hand with a company going public. Public companies change their point of interest from making a good product to making money from shareholders.
Thats what the law says they have to do. Once again legislation is the problem.
@@elLootothey don't have to go public.
No, it's true ("for shareholders," BTW). Companies exist for the sake of their customers. Workers, management, shareholders etc. get their piece of the economic value pie. But the customers are the ultimate point.
TL:DR: venture capitalists are evil + never sellout your company
It's not primarily a problem of capitalism or capitalists, though. The problem is inflationary currency. If people had the option to just save money for later use, without it not-so-slowly losing its value, the rich wouldn't have to invent shittier and shittier ways of investing their saving.
@veejayroth: Man you're drunk on the money Koolaid. The same people who caused the inflation (FED printing trillions of dollars for wall street that was itself kicked off by the bailout scam) are these rich people who just "have" to constantly invent shitty ways to parasitize creators. Think for yourself.
@@veejayroth Imagine honestly believing that rich people would stop trying to get even richer if only they were in a deflationary economy.
@@veejayrothlmao deflationary currency is far worse than inflationary currency, instead of investing you would just have the richest people sit on their money and do nothing with it.
The economy would suffer recession as spending dries up, after all why buy things when you can get richer by just sitting on money doing nothing with it.
@@veejayroth The rich have enough capital to just sail over the inflation even by doing VERY safe and milquetoast investments
if only Hank Green didn't sell Subbable to Patreon 9 years ago...
The Vlogbrothers have so much they focus on already, it felt like they made subbable to help themselves and their friends, and all the channels they helped launch with the TH-cam fund, and at some point it seemed Patreon was doing it better...and they had other things to do, like solve maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone's Kono district, and access to the right testing and drugs to cure people of TB and MDR TB.
I think it would just be gone by now if they hadnt. Like Google+
In positive news, we'll probably get a new CEO video from Collegehumor
College humor no longer exists. They officially rebranded as dropout a couple days ago
Go find a video with Brenden in it and GET IN THE COMMENTS!
Having Nebula as the sponsor of this video makes it feel like a hit piece of a video as opposed to a well thought out and balanced observation of Patreon
Patreon is such a sad story because the very basic concept is a very good one that did a ton of help for creators. Like, we absolutely would not have the current content environment without Patreon and the fan funding it allowed. It *just* needed to keep doing what it was doing - maybe improve the app and website in terms of usability, but it should’ve just been something that could’ve safely coasted along as a simple, valuable service.
Instead, it’s this.
Why they would even consider hosting videos while struggling to find income streams is baffling. The sheer cost of running a video hosting site is insane on it's own without even a thought to how to set it up in the first place. Did they think they could somehow beat TH-cam without them noticing? TH-cam pays more running their service than Patreon is valued in its entirety. If they aren't going to do massively better, it won't even be a blip and would be enough to take them out.
Mission or not, this echoes the previous video about the gig economy so hard that I really got flashbacks. The lesson we learn once again is to never go to the venture capital. I always admired Gabe Newell for keeping Valve private to the bone; he really gets to do whatever he wants with the economy he created whether these are shitty ideas or genius ones (the latter being rather more common).
Yeah promoting gambling to kids is a real stroke of genius
@@CordeliaAurora if you mean kickstarting all the lootboxes story, no, I don't think it's gambling in the way it was introduced by Valve. One can as accurately call original Pokémon or MtG "gambling" then
@@paulrukavishnikov5171 one can and one would be right
Loot boxes are virtual scratch tickets. It doesn't matter that someone else thought of that shitty idea 1st, because 2 wrongs don't make a right.
Most CEOs lose interest by year 7 or so, some push it to 10 years before they completely drop out.
It's difficult for an individual to stick to a goal any longer. This is how VC's hijack their investments.
I've heard of nebula before but putting it as a competitor to patreon and less as just another streaming service changes my perspective a lot.
This video was so impressive. Granted, my ADD requires me to listen to it on a faster speed, but it's still a gripping listen and I'm absolutely wowed by your ability to reference the VC problem so well and to explain it without any issues for non-finance/economics-fluent viewers.
Have they considered that the reason why (almost) no one interacts with content posted directly to Patreon is because the website and app are both excruciatingly slow?! I only ever go to Patreon if there is no other way to access something and even then, I try to leave the site as soon as I can and it still takes me ages. (It's not my internet connection, other sites are fast.)
I'm subscribed to the Patreons of many many fiction writers to read chapters ahead of free. While there's probably platforms they can move to, Patreon becoming shit is very sad.
I'm sure Royalroad will be happy to take those creators
@@elevulroyalroad uses patreon for payment. Unfortunately, it looks like the ship is sinking and they'll need to find somewhere new soon.
This is what happens when Corporations care more about making their shareholders happy, rather than their customers.
Investors >>> Customers. Customer satisfaction is BS- they don't mean it when they say it.
That's always
The executives of corporations literally have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits. It’s literally illegal if they don’t, and they can be sued into oblivion.
This is not something can be fixed in our system as it is, but be making companies hurt when they do this shit, then it will mean the profit motive pushes them in the right direction.
That is what the law says has to happen. You wont fix it by blaming corporations when the problem is legislation.
Wasn't it Patreon that deplatformed users deemed "problematic" and kept all the money donated to them instead of refund it?
Yes. Yes it was.
Some patrons were billed for months after the creator was banned, iirc.
As a patron, I feel like some good changes are a no brainer. Twitter and TH-cam are experiencing enshittification. Create a chronological feed page. Let us follow creators without being patrons in order to see what we are missing. This could also allow public posts and updates which would make patreon interactions more meaningful because there is a reason to be on the site rather than checking once per month. Let us see recommendations for creators that are also patrons or followers. Let us see the entirety of who we could be supporting!
As for creators, I'm sure they could use more protections on people posting their content elsewhere.
I honestly believe that the very idea of a stock market is harmful to humanity as a whole.
It's parasitical.
Care to elaborate?
Startup money has to come from somewhere, but I agree that we need a better system.
I mean, isn't it obvious? Its main purpose is to pump the money to the rich, and that money doesn't appear out of thin air, it comes from the poor.
@@veejayrothStockmarket investment prioritizes short term gain over long term success. Investors only want to see the line go up to get the most possible dividends and don’t care how it’s done. Infinite growth isn’t possible but chasing it will eventually kill a good company or cause labour malpractice.
Patreon? More like Patreoff!
Really zatzed em
Beautiful.
When I first got on Patreon a few months ago to support my favorite creators, I was shocked at what a janky, old, limited website it was. And its app is even worse. I honestly still can’t believe how it’s been the backbone of this economic niche, relied on so heavily by so many creators for so long, without being replaced by a competing service.
Much like many legacy apps and websites, they exist because of the built in user base, widespread adoption, and reluctance of people to use another platform. Patreon's faults will inhibit future growth but it's existence stunts the growth of alternative platforms
.
Same.
How do you feel about using a service that has historically banned creators and confiscated their earnings?
Exactly, you get more content, but accessing and streaming that content is such a cumbersome experience compared to what you'd expect from 2023 tech.
It wasn't the only site of this type and it's not the only site now. Other sites like this have popped up and Patreon didn't manage to buy them all and they took some of its creators and some of the patrons. Creators should probably start advertising another platform and not Patreon anymore even if they have Patreon.
Honestly by banning artists Patreon did it to themselves.
@@leonfa259
Banning artists? What artists?
@@zaco-km3su Patreon banned countless artists and creators, controversial and uncontroversial ones. I am pretty sure it had a strong impact on the amount of money they generated.
It's really sad that a site created to benefit creators has lost sight of its original purpose in order to benefit itself.
Patreon for me, as a patron for a small handful of creators, is literally just a tip jar/banking service. I don't donate for the perks; I donate because I like the content and want them to know they are both appreciated and that they should keep making it. I only ever go onto the site itself if I've gotten an email from a creator about posting pet pics or to update my card information. I'd almost rather literally just mail a couple dollars to their PO boxes every month if Patreon wants to keep screwing people over.
It was always intended to profit themselves. The creators are just a tool they use to pull in money.
Na, I think it was to get Pomplamoose floating without signing in to Sony Music.@@ohsweetmystery
And why do you bother dontaing through Patreon when you could send a 'tip' dicectly through TH-cam?
hey, you're in Nebula, right?
could you propose to them the idea of having a cooperatively owned alternative to patreon, that functions solely as a payment processor?
Nebula has the audience to promote such a thing, and maybe succeed where others have failed
Nebula isn't cooperatively owned
Nebula has a lot of its own issues
@@TheSpacecraftXWhat are Nebula's issues? Out of curiosity, since I recently bought a yearly subscription lol
Nebula raised $6M - it’s VC backed. Not only that but it’s backed by CuriositySteam which also raised hundreds of millions and failed in the public market.
I used to say that when I get a job I want to be able to use Patreon for creators I like, but since 9/10 the creators I like are TH-camrs and TH-cam has their own membership program, I'd rather just sign up to their TH-cam membership than deal with Patreon.
Good point.
I can only imagine how much more stable everything would be if subbable had survived independently seeing how the Green brothers don't seem to chase money/valuation from their projects
Nebula is owned by Standard Broadcast LLC based in New York, they are a subsidiary of the Standard Broadcast Media Group and not "owned" by the creators.