| Sure! Like, okay, Patreon has a staff of so many people for development, so many people for admin/moderation, and they have offices, and hosting, and whatever other costs I'm not thinking of. And all of those things need to be paid. I'm quite happy to give them a few bucks for every page of comics I draw in exchange for them making this lovely system to funnel money to myself and other creators, and keeping it running. But the core mission of Patreon is "nothing short of helping every creator in the world achieve sustainable income. We’re making this happen by building the best platform for creators to make money, run their creative businesses, and connect with the fans who matter most." (Taken from their careers page, https://www.patreon.com/careers) Once all those above costs are met by skimming off a small percentage of the money going through their setup, what do they do with that money? Do they start lowering their cut? Do they start donating it to charities? Fund other weird business ideas? Or just pay back the people they've borrowed money from, who won't be satisfied by anything but huge returns? I know Kickstarter's built itself into a "public benefit corporation", which makes it explicitly bound to consider things aside from "how much money will this make regardless of other costs"; Patreon makes similar noises but I don't believe they've taken the step of formalizing this yet. And I would be delighted to find out I'm wrong on that. |