[dandermotj]

That's a P/E of 60... Also this:

> In exchange, Patreon takes only a tiny 5% cut.

I hope this is sarcasm, because if I had to pay 5% to make any other transaction I'd be fuming. With a marginal cost of facilitating a new patron near zero, I don't think creators or patrons will suffer this as Patreon grows.

[rcthompson]

If Patreon was doing nothing but a processing payments, I would agree with you. But it's also a platform for delivering the content that patrons are paying for, providing a space for discussion among patrons and creators, and other features that facilitate building a community. I have no idea if the actual costs of developing and maintaining that infrastructure actually approach 5% of total patron contributions, but I find it acceptable that 95 cents of my dollar goes to the creator and 5 cents goes to maintaining the infrastructure that makes the whole thing possible.

Yes, you could technically use Patreon as nothing more than a payment processor by hosting all your stuff elsewhere and just linking to it from Patreon. But you still have to pay for that hosting, either directly or indirectly via ads. And part of the point of Patreon is to move away from ad-supported funding models. Of course, you currently have no choice but to use external hosting for some types of content, like videos, that Patreon can't host directly. But even then you still get all the community-building benefits of Patreon (and with YouTube comments being notoriously bad, providing a separate comment section might be a significant value-add). I wouldn't be surprised if Patreon added video hosting in some form in the future, probably via a partnership as they have done with streaming video.

[falcolas]

Apple takes 30%. So does Google. Kickstarter takes 5%. Many online stock trading firms take somewhere around 10-15%. That fairly well justifies the qualifier of "tiny" in today's world.

Given that the basic cost for processing credit cards and other such minutia is already around 2%, the benefit of not having to worry about chargebacks, fraud, or PCI compliance... worth that extra 3% IMO.

[IshKebab]

It's actually 5% plus payment processing costs. Plus payout costs.

[s0rce]

Which stock trading firms do you use? Most I've seen are 5-10$ per trade and small % for currency exchange transactions. Paying 10-15% for a stock trade could easily cost $10s of 1000 in commisions which is clearly not the case. Also for small trading Robinhood has free trades.

[nilved]

Nobody should be okay paying Apple or Google 30%. That is highway robbery.

[wongarsu]

They essentially have a monopoly on App sales on their respective platforms.

At least in Google's case, antitrust-lawsuits in Europe and Russia are slowly working on making it possible to create viable competition to Google's Play Store. Maybe we'll see prices fall in the next decade or so.

[chrshawkes]

Google takes more than 30% on YouTube earnings, it's actually 45%.

[wongarsu]

Pretty sure he was referring to the Google Play Store, where Google takes 30% of everything (including in-app payments)

[arkitaip]

Creators accept Patreon's high transaction cost because they don't many other options. If you, for example, are a youtuber, chances are that Google will screw you out of video monetization because their subpar AI raises more flags than a signalman on acid. Other payment solutions like Pay Pal are a goddamn nightmare to set up and handle for micro businesses [0]. Patreon also acts like a landing page and even CMS for content creators, so you're paying for that too.

[0] Holy shit is Pay Pal the most dysfunctional organization I've ever dealt with. Just verifying my identity as a business owner has meant weeks of me sending countless copies of my bank statements, phone bills and photo ID to Pay Pal staff because apparently comparing the address on the submitted documents with the one on file is too difficult a task. In the end it was easier to change my address on file so it matches the one of the submitted documents character by character (yay security theater). Of course when they finally verified my address I got an email that the copy of the photo ID I submitted suddenly was "too pale and is illegible as a result" and now I can't even access the verification process page...

[jasode]

>if I had to pay 5% to make any other transaction I'd be fuming.

Fyi... for comparison, Kickstarter fee is also 5% of funds raised. https://www.google.com/search?q=kickstarter+fee

[olejorgenb]

The 5% is on top of visa/mastercard cost IIRC, so it's actually a bit more.