Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Patreon and why you should care

On December 7th, a date which will live in infamy, Patreon sent a message to patrons announcing a change to the way pledges would be managed. I've attached a pdf copy of the email I received and I highlighted the most important part of the email. You can view that email here. At first I thought no big deal, it's only 2.9% +$0.35. That's about $0.37 for $1 pledges. Then I started doing the math of how much extra I'd have to pay. If I had 25 pledges of $1 each normally I'd pay $25 dollars a month but with this new service fee it will be more like $34.25 a month. That's $9.25 extra because of $0.37 per pledge. Now, I'm just small potatoes and I don't actually pledge $25 a month but that's not the point. Its abundantly clear that Patreon is targeting those who pledge smaller amounts of $1, $2, or $3. I don't know if they did any market research on this or if it was just a bold gamble on their part. It looks like they're getting greedy and patrons are starting to take notice.

Unfortunately, the only people getting hurt by all of this are the creators. With patrons dropping like flies, the already struggling creators are losing money. I am one of those people who have discontinued all of my pledges and I just wanted to say I'm sorry to the creators I used to support. It has nothing to do with you and has everything to do with Patreon's shady business tactics. I truly hope that Patreon takes a step back and re-evaluates how much damage they've done to their brand. To me, Patreon is dead. I won't support anything via Patreon from now on. I'm willing to bet that there's someone just around the corner ready to step in and provide a fair subscription service for content creators. I wouldn't be surprised if Paypal was already working on it. After all, most of peoples pledges already get routed through Paypal anyway.

I sincerely wish the creators the best of luck.