For those of you considering starting something with Patreon, it's fully moved into late stage enshitification.
This poor creator was given $583 by their patrons, and Patreon took $109 of it in fees. 🤦♀️
Go use Ko-fi, they're still run by humans who actually care about creators and don't try and screw them at every opportunity. Also consider Ghost.org. They're working hard to make an Open Source Patreon style platform w/ NO fees beyond simple hosting cost.
@masukomi hey, have you actually used these before? We're looking into a potential partnership for our platform beyond just posting a link and were worried about this.
@laurenraimondi I've used Patreon. I just set something up on Ko-fi but haven't made it public yet. I explored Ghost before they started focusing on creator / business stuff.
I was planning on going with Ko-Fi but this video definitely helped convince me it was the right call. It's by a woman who LEFT Ko-Fi because she simply got too successful for its tools, and yet continued to sing its praises.
@TotesTanked THere's also a huge risk to switching platforms. Folks who WERE supporting you now have to ask themselves "do i still want to support them?" Even if the answer is "yes" then there's going through the effort of (probably) setting up a new account somewhere and then connect it to you and... ugh.
It's just guaranteed to screw you & everyone who's done it has the scars to show for it. I think folks already on patreon should stay there until it gets worse than the cost of switching.
I'm not ready to ask the internet for money at all, but, just in case I was or if I was trying to get someone else setup in there, question: Is Ko-Fi owned by VC money, or is it a private concern under the management of one or a few owners?
@jpaskaruk ko-fi is privately owned, not VC. They really seem to hold that as a value also. As I’m guessing you know, VC is why Patreon is just going to keep getting worse. It has to extract more “profit” in order to IPO or be bought.
@masukomi Just had a look. They don't allow nudity so that knocks MY comics out of the running. I can do most anything want at Patreon as long as it's paywalled when adult. A shame because it looks otherwise OK
@jlroberson I'm not sure what Ghost.org's policy is about adult stuff BUT the thing about Ghost is that it's open source and you can host it yourself.
However, there's always going to be the problem that merchant banks (the people you get the ability to accept credit card payments via) hate porn, and thus all adult stuff, because it has a MASSIVE problem with people charging it, and then going "it wasn't me!".
@masukomi I hate that word, and it only describes MAYBE 1/3 of my comics. That's another issue, that they can't distinguish so-called "porn" from other work with nudity.
@jlroberson i suspect that people willing to be patrons of adult comics are fundamentally different from your average horny guy looking to see nudes. But i really doubt credit card companies care about the distinction. ;)
I honestly don’t understand why we have our head so far up our butts about seeing the human body that we all have, and are expected to interact with other peoples in a naked fashion, in order to perpetuate our species.
@masukomi I know! I mean, at least 1/3 of my work, I can see why it would attract censorship because it's MEANT to be explicit, but I still do not agree. Especially since I think my stuff's pretty tame by present day standards, even the X stuff. But whatever...
@masukomi ...and at least it's about people who consent and in fact the woman is pretty much always the driving force.
I woulda thought that would count for SOMEthing but... ;)
@masukomi But it's not like it sells anyway.
Though I wonder how much of that was because 10 years ago I'd release and publicize things and then they'd be banned that day(Amazon and Google Play), so it always looked like vaporware. I feel it made me look unserious and people just stopped paying attention since they'd never see it anyway
@masukomi and none of these platforms would give the slightest shit about it if I were not also the publisher, there's plenty available far stronger than mine(the great BLACK KISS by Chaykin, say, or Crepax). But people like me have no clout, EVEN IF I've been doing this over 25 years.
Also, people who WRITE explicit stuff(you know, the ones with the terrible AI covers) are OK, but DRAW the very same stuff? Nope.
I call that discrimination by medium.
@jlroberson well it’s totally fine to describe the most horrific violent sexual acts in text, unlike a few pencil scratches that resemble a nipple! Sheesh think of the children who’ve never looked down!
patrons /chose/ to pay 62 dollars in fees, since that's a function of the method the patron chooses, and the proverbial [5$+VAT] is inclusive of the p. p. fee. the effective ~10% is double of the ~5% I see in my break-down, but if they have a lot of small donators and/or they tend to choose paypal instead of card then this seems to be in the "expected" realm if you factor in dealing with criminals instead of taking normal transfers/PoS card payments
patreon took, as itemised, 46 dollars, so 8%. admittedly this is 8% of the gross so it ends up being 8.8% but this is exactly as-described in the Pro plan. I see 5% (5.3%), which matches my Founder plan
the only thing that's egregious here is that the patreon fee is calculated from the brut, since the patrons paid those 62 dollars to their payment processors of choice and neither paypal nor anyone else had any chance of seeing that money ever
this does work out to 18.6% (10.4% for me) but more than half of this is fixed cost dependent on the patrons' habit (and paypal/stripe's greed). I'm sure they'd happily pay with recurrent free SEPA-zone transfer or 0.3% Mastercard interchange if they could, but not everyone has that luxury
@masukomi don't confuse this with me dick-riding patreon here, but per the creator-analytics-earnings CSV for February:
Your earnings - membership(%): 89.57%
Processing fees - membership(%): 4.84%
Patreon fee - membership(%): 5.01%
Currency conversion fee (%): 0.58%
The first time I see total earnings (first row) dip below 95% is when the processing fees jumped 0->0.24%, correlated with a user joining.
The first time I see it dip below 90% is when the currency conversion fee jumped 0->2.36% (at a time when processing became 3.37%).
Admittedly, the processing fee ratio is quite high but this is reflective of paypal/stripe greed and the patron structure.
Somehow I don't think you can get around the barbaric forex fees (unless, of course, you choose to pay out in the currency you get the most money in and bear the forex risk yourself). If anything, patreon is the least at fault here for never bumping its 95/5 (or 92/8) cut.
@masukomi admittedly, 5 p.p. (accounting for my plan being 3 p.p. better) is significant, but per https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039589091-Patreon-s-supported-currencies, if most users pay with a different-than-creator currency, 2.5 p.p. of this may straight-up be the forex fee (creator-analytics-detailed-earnings says the majority of my users pay with USD and I pay out in USD)
admittedly, this is still 16 p.p. worse than my liberapay rates (2.6%) but Stripe+SEPA is hard to beat in this regard. and liberapay takes a 0 cut
What you've provided are explanations not justifications. There was never doubt that the numbers could be explained, or that the creator didn't agree to the terms.
HOWEVER that doesn't make it 100% 🐄💩. In no world should Patreon be taking ~19% of the gross revenue.
Stripe fees are just $0.30 per charge + 2.9 percent. No small business gets meaningfully better rates than that from ANY merchant bank.
Patreon is now about extracting value form creators not supporting them.
@meticu I have been following Ghost since it’s initial creation years ago. The first version was very well done. It’s just been getting better since then. I can’t comment on the commerce and patron related features but I suspect they have done a good job.
The other thing to note is that they are not VC backed. They make their money by hosting the software they write. So they are motivation is to keep making their product better for their customers. It’s not to grow huge and IPO or be bought.
@masukomi Do you have a link to Ghost? Obviously putting just Ghost into search brings up a bit of a crowded space, and I'm not sure what terms to pair it with to best narrow it down to this project in particular.
@USSJoshuaNorton ghost.org they have done some rebranding recently on the website. The last time I checked was six months to a year ago and it was very much focusing on creators in the promotional material. I’m not sure what their objective is now, but the software still supports it as far as I know.
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