Reply To: To Patreon or not to Patreon

[limburger 21704xp 0]

Speaking strictly as a consumer I’d have to say : it depends on how frequently you’re going to be updating it, because at its most basic it is a blog with content that can be restricted to paying subscribers. Paying subscribers are going to expect monthly updates at the very minimum.

One thing to be aware of is their pricing, which you probably did look at already :

https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing
It looks like for a 1$/month pricing they take 15% (5% + 10c) …
At 3$/month they take +/- 13% (2,9% + 30c).
To reduce it to 3% you’d need to be asking a lot more of your subscribers per month …

Example 1 : Jim Sterling

https://www.patreon.com/jimquisition

Getting access to his blog/patreon costs 1$/month
Example 2 : Simone Giertz

https://www.patreon.com/simonegiertz

However both are high profile youtubers already with active (free) social media on other platforms like YouTube. And like BoW/OTT both mentioned that the unreliability of YouTube was one of the reasons they looked at a more reliable partner

Jim Sterling did mention in one of his youtube videos that Patreon tried to change its revenue model which would have made the cheap subscriptions next to impossible. I don’t know whether Patreon are going to try that again in the future, but IMHO it may be something worth worrying about. It’s almost as if any new social media platform tends to get really greedy/creator-unfriendly once they achieve a certain level of dominance on-line. It happened to YouTube and Patreon is showing signs of this too.
As such it may advisable to plan for the unexpected end.