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by zucker42
2118 days ago
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Liberapay is missing subscription tiers. But the main disadvantage seems to be network effects/lack of adoption. Creators who have accounts on Liberapay and Patreon make far less on Liberapay, which means that people are willing to ignore the extra fees because Patreon is convenient. |
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Patreon is indeed a billion dollar unicorn not because it's immediately going to funnel money to shareholders… did Amazon?
Patreon is clearly the PayPal of… being Patreon. The network effects and defining of the brand have already kicked in. I'm pretty happy about it (but then I would be as I'm one of the more successful people on it) but, like I personally told Jack Conte and Sam Yam, I am also happy about what Patreon means TO that 'long tail', because some of the qualities that benefit me also benefit the small fry.
You can't live off a steady and ever-so-slightly growing $50 a month. That's the long tail: people not being discovered, who have only their little crews of supporters. There is no plan to make them all earn thousands of dollars a month because practically, that can't happen to all of them.
BUT, if you have a predictable slowly growing $50 a month (because it's not tightly tied to new product releases of yours, there isn't the feast-or-famine cycle of being entreprenurial in the traditional sense, which I have also done) that becomes a small supplemental income that you can depend on. The value of that is incalculable… certainly worth a billion VC dollars that Patreon means THAT to people.
An extra $50 can mean life and death to someone who is really on the edge. The example I used to Jack and Sam is a single mom with just a cell phone, who can livestream telling bedtime stories to her child. And other moms tune in, and support her and her stories for $50 a month: they can spare it, and that is now food for her child. It doesn't HAVE to make her J. K. Rowling, to count. It matters at all scales.