Changes At Patreon

Considering where all this is going in the near future, I'm actually kind of glad this didn't work out for me after all.

See, I've always had this crazy dream, this wild hope, that one day I'd be a paid, somewhat professional writer. I've been this way since high school, really, and with a very few exceptions over the years, it just hasn't worked out for me. I'm... Well, I'm not going to say that I'm OK with it, because I'm not, really, nor should I be, but I'm better with it than I probably should be, all things considered.

Last time I made what one might call a serious attempt on my own was in fall of 2014. I'd just heard about this online service called Patreon. The general premise, as I understand it, is that content creators like myself had an option to ask our followers for free-will donations on an ongoing basis, be it on a monthly basis or on a per-post basis. At the time, money was short because hours at my day job were just as short. Seeing that I had not only the time and plenty of things I still wanted to write about, but more followers than I thought I would have at the time, I figured what the hell, I'll set one of these things up in what seems like the best way for me, and maybe it'll cover some of what I wasn't getting at my day job. Maybe I just overestimated myself somehow, maybe it was because setting it up as pay-per-post rather than monthly was a mistake, but either way, I didn't get any takers.

In the time between then and now, my situation has changed very much for the better. I had two jobs for awhile, and now I'm back to getting a decent amount of time and money from my day job. Granted, I'm back to not getting paid to write, but like I said above, I'm better with that than I should be.

The good news, I suppose, is that I, personally, don't have any patrons that will be affected by some unfortunate and likely ill-advised changes that Patreon is making to their fee structure. See, the way this worked for the longest time is that Patreon would take all its operating fees out of what the content creators were getting paid. As someone who supports creators on the service, I was fine with that, and from what I've read from those creators, they were fine with it, too. The creators I support through Patreon, as well as several others I follow but don't support through the service, still manage to make a good living this way, on roughly 80 to 90% of their fans' pledges.

The changes Patreon is making now allows the creators to keep 95% of what their fans pledge, but those same fans will now be on the hook for what Patreon is calling “processing fees”, from what I've read. The way these fees are calculated are at a rate of 35 cents plus 2.9% of every pledge. This stands to really screw over quite a large number of users, because there are creators who either get paid per post or have several high-dollar reward tiers, and there are also patrons who support quite a few creators, sometimes on the high-value tiers.

Because I'm not familiar with the numbers for those I support, I'll just use my own stats as someone who pleges to them. There are two creators I support at their lowest monthly level, which is $2 a month each. Under this new system Patreon is rolling out later this month, that means I'll be paying a total of $4.82, including “service fees” starting the first of the year. The breakdown on that is $2 for each of the two producers I support, 70 cents for the fixed fees on two pledges, and then I'm calculating the percentage as 3% to make the math easier for myself, which is something I would not be surprised if Patreon did as well, which is 12 cents for each pledge, based on the percentage.

Personally, I'm in a good enough place, financially, that I can afford to keep doing that, for now, but because of some rather nebulous things going on in the rest of my life right now, these changes make me more than a little hesitant to support any more of the creators I follow, which actually kind of sucks for the three others I can think of that I'd like to support but never quite got to.

But it also makes me glad I failed at this thing myself, as well, because if I'd actually succeeded in getting paid for this like I'd hoped to back in 2014, I'd probably be losing them now, simply because I don't think I'm good enough to ask folks to lay out the kind of money they would be under the new system.

I will say here that I'm just giving a nutshell explanation of how this all works, simply because it's more complicated than what a post like this needs, and it's not entirely relavent to where I'm going with this. But these stats will still demonstrate another way that supporters get screwed over by this new fee system.

See, my busiest month, blogwise, in 2014 was July, with 15 posts. Assuming that I had put all of those through Patreon, which was never my intent, but assuming I had, and assuming that anyone that might have decided to support me that way had said they were going to pay for all my posts, they'd have paid their $15 that month, Patreon would have taken their 15 or 20% for fees and expenses out of my total, I would have gotten whatever was left, and that would have been that, as they say.

Under this new system, that same patron would be getting screwed. Again, assuming that said patron was paying for all 15 of my posts in July 2014, they'd have paid the $15, of course, but then they'd get 35 cents per post tacked on because each one of those dollars would have counted as a seperate pledge, adding a total of $5.25, and that says nothing about the 3% thing they also do, which would have added another 45 cents, which would bring their total that month to $20.70, which is more than I think anybody should have to pay for my work, regardless of how much of that I get.

Also, one must take into account that the people supporting these creators on Patreon also have their own bills and budgets to think about as well. This means that even if I had monetized all those posts through Patreon and somebody was willing to shell out that much for me, they'd be either reducing their pledges or dropping me altogether, simply because they might have been able to give me the, say, $15 that month, they might not have been willing or able to drop almost $21 on such things.

This new system affects all Patreon users like this, be we creators or supporters. The creators are going to wind up losing money as a result of this because there are tons of folks like me out there who just can't afford to wind up paying more for this, especially when the people who the money is intended for aren't getting it.

There are other services like Patreon that are either out there already or are getting ready to launch and fill the void, should this wind up going badly for Patreon. I'll be watching and waiting to see where the producers I follow and support go so I can move my pleges accordingly. Depending on what I learn from doing better research of my own this time around, I may even be joining some of them as a content producer again. After all, I do still have that crazy dream of becoming a semi-professional writer one day, even if it means I still have to keep my day job.