LAST EDITED ON Dec-07-17 AT 10:57 PM (EST)
 
So yeah, I'm not going to get into the details because frankly I haven't been arsed to achieve a complete understanding of them, but the short version is that Patreon jacked up their rates in a pretty nakedly grabby, vulture-capitalist-appeasing sort of way, and people were (quite justifiably) bailing, and I probably shouldn't really have opened one in the first place, so I closed it. GotW has been on sort of an unintentional hiatus anyway, so I was already a little uncomfortable about asking for money for it, and well, the hell with it.

I'm still going to go back to doing GotW in time (I hope!), I'll just go back to not getting paid for it while I'm at it.

Ironically, I never actually made a cent from it anyway! I was pretty much only covering 80% or so of the pledges I myself had made (and I'm going to have to re-evaluate that side of the process too, but that's not relevant here), which proves that I learned everything I know about making money on the Internet in the late 1990s. :)

P.S. Thanks to all who did pitch in, or, heck, even considered it, during the experiment. I may revisit the tip jar concept some other time, with some hopefully-less-sketchy mechanism.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Good luck!

I've been kind of watching the situation as it unfolded. There's a few different things that seem to be going on:

Patreon clearly wants at least sub $5 pledging to Go Away. (I have a hint: if you want it to go away, then just make it something that can't happen. No need to do this fee bullshit. They could even have done it just for video content, given that I've heard some scuttlebutt that was part of what brought this forth.)

They did NOT present it very well, and pretty much sprung it on people. When you're handling money for people, this is not a good level of transparency when you want to make such a sweeping change to the system.

I can certainly understand the level of pain both creators and patrons are now going through. Especially for those patrons on a budget, a hard budget, who now has to decide who no longer gets money because, say, $5 is their CEILING for how much they can pledge a month, and now they can't even support FOUR on that money out of the FIVE. And those creators that have been supporting themselves on 80% or more of the $1 a month donations.

Unfortunately, I've had to look at it, and already it's clear I don't want to join the Patreon ecosystem, either as a patron or a creator, because they've proven they don't really understand what they actually have, and who their clients REALLY ARE.

>They did NOT present it very well, and pretty much sprung it on
>people. When you're handling money for people, this is not a good
>level of transparency when you want to make such a sweeping change to
>the system.

The timing is really unfortunate, too, given that I've just spent the last month watching people on YouTube say things to the general effect of, "Don't sweat the adpocalypse too much, my Patreon is where it's at these days anyway."

In fact, now that I've said that, the air of undue haste hanging around the Patreon thing starts to look more explicable.

Hmm.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>They did NOT present it very well, and pretty much sprung it on
>>people. When you're handling money for people, this is not a good
>>level of transparency when you want to make such a sweeping change to
>>the system.
>
>The timing is really unfortunate, too, given that I've just spent the
>last month watching people on YouTube say things to the general effect
>of, "Don't sweat the adpocalypse too much, my Patreon is where it's at
>these days anyway."
>
>In fact, now that I've said that, the air of undue haste hanging
>around the Patreon thing starts to look more explicable.

It does make me wonder more and more. Especially since YouTube has already been making changes with regards to where you need to be to create links in the end-of-video bumper card, basically telling people they can only do things there if they've managed to get to a point of "success" in YouTube's own ecosystem (100,000 subs/views, part of their Creators program), basically trying to ensure that they have some "control" over the money making from content making (and incidentally making controlling who gets to show up in the feeds for the sake of advertisers' requirements far easier, since now if you want to make money, it's YouTube's ads or not at all). Yes, I did kind of think that was a "please don't make money outside of us until we give the say so (because the advertisers want us to control the content more), at which point you can diversify", since while they allowed links in the description still, those were far less likely to be a traffic generator because viewers had been effectively trained to just click the end bumper links instead (links in the description usually require a click to actually show up).

This happening does, in fact, actually reduce the ability to diversify. It doesn't eliminate it, but Patreon might well become at best, "nice extra pocket money, just don't build your career here."

>>>They did NOT present it very well, and pretty much sprung it on
>>>people. When you're handling money for people, this is not a good
>>>level of transparency when you want to make such a sweeping change to
>>>the system.
>>
>>The timing is really unfortunate, too, given that I've just spent the
>>last month watching people on YouTube say things to the general effect
>>of, "Don't sweat the adpocalypse too much, my Patreon is where it's at
>>these days anyway."
>>
>>In fact, now that I've said that, the air of undue haste hanging
>>around the Patreon thing starts to look more explicable.

And it looks like the screaming was too much to ignore. They've backed off, publicly apologized, and said they'll move forward with what they SHOULD have done from the first, which is to talk to creators and see what sort of changes they can make to solve the problems the "move fees to patrons and increase them" was "intended" to solve. Which I still kind of suspect is that they really want the $1 tiers to start going away.

nobody really wants to service the "small accounts", yet there is both a social good and a market niche there.
(IMO)

>I've been kind of watching the situation as it unfolded. There's a few
>different things that seem to be going on:
>
>Patreon clearly wants at least sub $5 pledging to Go Away. (I have a
>hint: if you want it to go away, then just make it something that
>can't happen. No need to do this fee bullshit. They could even have
>done it just for video content, given that I've heard some scuttlebutt
>that was part of what brought this forth.)

Interestingly, the scuttlebutt that I heard was more along the lines of "oh shit, a regulating body realized that we were acting as a type of bank, and we're not equipped for that, nor do we want to be so these are the things we need to do in order to achieve that."

>They did NOT present it very well, and pretty much sprung it on
>people. When you're handling money for people, this is not a good
>level of transparency when you want to make such a sweeping change to
>the system.

Yeah. Also they seemed to have a sort of fundamental misunderstanding of the value-add that they provided between the creators and patrons. We thought it was aggregation of donations for things the creators were already doing. They thought that they were providing a marketplace for selling.

>Unfortunately, I've had to look at it, and already it's clear I don't
>want to join the Patreon ecosystem, either as a patron or a creator,
>because they've proven they don't really understand what they actually
>have, and who their clients REALLY ARE.

I'm going back at my original budget, mostly because the flipside of holding a company hostage with your dollars is paying the ransom when they stop doing their stupid thing. But this really was, to me, their one strike.

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."