I recently switched from Patreon to Substack. It was difficult because as a small creator (mainly writing, but also podcasts, streams, and music releases) with not a lot patrons bc Substack’s minimum was $5/mo vs the $3/mo I sold them on. Ended up just giving them indefinite free SubStack subs. My blog on Squarespace (which got me Apple News/Google SEO integration, but cost $$ and their newsletter campaigns suck) was another thing to maintain and essentially copy/paste to. So it was a Substack newsletter that copied to a SquareSpace blog, that I also had to tell Patreon I made.
Now my website is simply my Substack and the paid tier is a private podcast & more frequent/intimate music updates and pieces. I’ve got hundreds of readers now and SubStack’s analytics help me understand my writing more than my marketing, which I think is ultimately what I want? But paid conversions have been difficult, so I still haven’t been able to fully focus on craft and audience all year. It’s been infrastructure
People really try to apply the 3 tier ecosystem (platform, advertiser, viewer) of YouTube to every other internet "thing" but not everything is the same. This is great analysis.
Totally and I would go further. The way I see it the crowdfunding platforms are in a terribly precarious position. The basic problem is that platforms like patreon lack intrinsic value. As tools, they are easily commoditized and mostly function as a means to an end for creators and audiences. The idea of crowdfunding draws passionate support but the platforms themselves… There is very little ‘there there’ for audiences or creators to be loyal to or build a community around.
What to make of that position? Well, as I said on your previous post, I think the idea that creators can actually hold *any* platform accountable is wonderful news. But, the danger in this arrangement isn’t the leverage that creators have over Patreon but rather the fact that YouTube (who I would guess accounts for upward of around >80% of Patreon’s revenue) has Patreon and its creators by the balls.
So, while it might be a bad PR move for YouTube to change the playing field in a way that invalidates Patreon as a business model it would be a) trivially easy for youtube to do (either intentionally or absentmindedly, like stepping on an ant) and b) youtube seems to be doing just fine despite their lack of PR wizardry*. Where does this leave creators? Well we all know by now how it goes for creators when they tango with platforms. And until we see creators able to migrate their audiences between content platforms (where alternatives may or may not exist) efficiently and at scale, I don’t know that there is much of an alternative. As long as the content platforms dictate the ‘rules of engagement’ creators and all their ‘dependents’ will still be subject to anxiety and the like.
*Worse still for youtube creators, the site *seems* to be moving away from the creator empowering and relationship building model of watch time back to pure engagement (maybe to help them recapture audiences from the new batch of video slot machines like tiktok).
I recently switched from Patreon to Substack. It was difficult because as a small creator (mainly writing, but also podcasts, streams, and music releases) with not a lot patrons bc Substack’s minimum was $5/mo vs the $3/mo I sold them on. Ended up just giving them indefinite free SubStack subs. My blog on Squarespace (which got me Apple News/Google SEO integration, but cost $$ and their newsletter campaigns suck) was another thing to maintain and essentially copy/paste to. So it was a Substack newsletter that copied to a SquareSpace blog, that I also had to tell Patreon I made.
Now my website is simply my Substack and the paid tier is a private podcast & more frequent/intimate music updates and pieces. I’ve got hundreds of readers now and SubStack’s analytics help me understand my writing more than my marketing, which I think is ultimately what I want? But paid conversions have been difficult, so I still haven’t been able to fully focus on craft and audience all year. It’s been infrastructure
People really try to apply the 3 tier ecosystem (platform, advertiser, viewer) of YouTube to every other internet "thing" but not everything is the same. This is great analysis.
This is really helpful, thanks Hank
Totally and I would go further. The way I see it the crowdfunding platforms are in a terribly precarious position. The basic problem is that platforms like patreon lack intrinsic value. As tools, they are easily commoditized and mostly function as a means to an end for creators and audiences. The idea of crowdfunding draws passionate support but the platforms themselves… There is very little ‘there there’ for audiences or creators to be loyal to or build a community around.
What to make of that position? Well, as I said on your previous post, I think the idea that creators can actually hold *any* platform accountable is wonderful news. But, the danger in this arrangement isn’t the leverage that creators have over Patreon but rather the fact that YouTube (who I would guess accounts for upward of around >80% of Patreon’s revenue) has Patreon and its creators by the balls.
So, while it might be a bad PR move for YouTube to change the playing field in a way that invalidates Patreon as a business model it would be a) trivially easy for youtube to do (either intentionally or absentmindedly, like stepping on an ant) and b) youtube seems to be doing just fine despite their lack of PR wizardry*. Where does this leave creators? Well we all know by now how it goes for creators when they tango with platforms. And until we see creators able to migrate their audiences between content platforms (where alternatives may or may not exist) efficiently and at scale, I don’t know that there is much of an alternative. As long as the content platforms dictate the ‘rules of engagement’ creators and all their ‘dependents’ will still be subject to anxiety and the like.
*Worse still for youtube creators, the site *seems* to be moving away from the creator empowering and relationship building model of watch time back to pure engagement (maybe to help them recapture audiences from the new batch of video slot machines like tiktok).