Yes, people who make some stuff that takes a lot of time and effort might not get a lot of money on Patreon. But you know what? They're doing what everybody else is doing.
I feel that nowadays everything want to think of themselves as "creators". They'll create a few photos, some drawings, put it out there, and expect to get paid.
Maybe it's just my 3rd-world-country upbringing, but I think that's a BS expectation. Real world living is tougher than that; the online public is already drowning in "creative" content, and producing more of the same is not going to give you an income.
Some of these people might be pretty talented, but that's not enough. If you're simply doing what everybody is doing and bringing nothing of actual value to your sponsors, there's not much you'll get back. Spending 16 hours a day doing basket weaving and posting it on YouTube is not worth much.
This is a similar picture of what happens on Twitch, or Instagram. Everybody thinks they can be a successful streamer, or an influencer. The reality is, just a tiny percentage of people make money doing that, either by sheer luck, some almighty external influence, or because of a niche interest they seem to fill. This is not Twitch, or Instagram's fault either.
I applaud GitHub because this is a way for people to almost passively support developers they want to. I know there's plenty of devs whom I've benefitted from their work. I'd loved to have a way to support them, even if just a little bit.
I don't think most devs would expect to become professional-code-warriors-for-sponsors. That's the wrong rabbit to _chase_. But having a bit of an extra income for a beer or tea or two on some OS project they work on is nice.
Thanks for pointing that out!
You're just a lot more focussed on making us all believe it's the persons fault somehow.
Fault is awfully subjective so I'll leave that be. It is definitely their responsibility, though.
I've got a family friend currently making some dangerously stupid business decisions, where the best-case upside is that they'll make minimum wage or so, and the realistic worse case is bankruptcy and losing everything they've made in the past several years and dealing with the resulting financial fallout, when they have numerous other alternatives available including sticking to their ~$20/hr skilled job with decent career prospects and good long-term security. (I don't object to the risk itself; I object to taking for a max payoff worse than their current position. I'll also add to forstall the usual HN comments that this isn't being done for any other of the reasons that people around here might still make that decision; not a whisper of "being your own boss" or anything like that.)
There's no Silicon Valley whipping horses in this story, this is just plain ol' fashioned "not understanding business", or "not allowing your comprehension of the monetary situation to penetrate down to the actions you choose to make". Is it their fault? Oh, I can make all kinds of excuses for why that's not the case; there's all kinds of personal drama I'm not laying out here driving these decisions that I can deflect with.
But is it their responsibility? Yes, and there's nothing anybody can particularly do about that. Their name on the relevant mortgage. Their name on the relevant papers. Their credit score on the line.
It's your responsibility to make business decisions sensible enough to accomplish your life's goals, and there's just not much that can be done about that.
When Patreon says this to the press: "Finally, ‘starving’ and ‘artist’ no longer need to be joined at the hip"
...they're inviting scrutiny.
There's nothing wrong about setting that target, it just is really outlandish. If that motivates them, good for them. But there are millions of starving artists, and a company that makes a serious dent in that problem would have to be enormous.
Certain verticals have more whale patrons than others. The common story is that if you’re an artist and you want to go where the whale patrons are, that’s—for some reason—art targeting the furry subculture. That’s as true for patronage as it is for doing commissions.
It’s unlikely that you can just do what you’re doing and make a living off of Patreon; but if you want to shape what you’re doing based off of what will attract wealthy patrons, it’s pretty easy to find niches where your skills will translate to dollars.
You're unlikely to make a fortune on Pateron without "whales" but a living can be had if you can build a decent audience. Though, that isn't out of line with the "It’s unlikely that you can just do what you’re doing and make a living off of Patreon" sentiment at all, as LGR puts a lot of work into his videos.
But if you’re that much of an “influencer” already, with that large an audience, then you’re likely already making money off of ads run on your content, and you’re likely already being offered plenty of sponsorship opportunities that you could take advantage of in place of—or alongside—pursuing patronage. (At a certain size, you even get offered to just have your name stuck on products as a brand. I know there are a good number of beauty and fashion “influencers” who end up—with no more effort than signing a contract—getting beauty/fashion products co-branded, and make royalties off of that.)
I’m more talking about what you have to do to make money off of Patreon if you aren’t starting with a built-in audience of potential subscribers. If you want to build that audience, directly through Patreon (i.e. via word-of-mouth of your subscribers, with no public presence), then you need whales, and you need a niche. It becomes something very similar to making money off of commissions, except that you can make more than a 100% return on any particular commission, relative to what you’d have made if you just did it as a work-to-order for the person who suggested it.
You are right about the sponsorships, ad's, affiliates and merch deals being where the money is for YouTubers.
That said, it isn't their only source of income. They do live shows all around the world, in-person meetups (also around the world), sell books & DVDs and manage an online store. They work extremely hard, travel a lot & are extremely passionate about what they do.
[I have no special insight into their success, but I would guess that mastering social skills and relentlessly doing in-person meetups & meeting people after shows is part of it. They are definitely not hiding behind a laptop keyboard. I know I'm personally more likely to support a musician I've met and have a personal connection with.]
Average patrons might be willing to donate $100 a year if they understood they were allowing art or research to exist instead of just paying for market-rate viewership. This type of donation would allow 1,000 dedicated followers to support a niche cause instead of the lowest common denominator stuff creators like Pewdiepie has to put out to amass millions of fans.
Furry has a lot of people in well-compensated jobs who don't go for the trappings usually associated with having lots of money. So they spend thousands on commissions and conventions instead of gadgets.
I think that's the case with most of my own patrons. They'd rather spend $1/3/5 on some unusual music or reading new pulpy adventures instead of blowing it on something disposable.
Surprised no one else has mentioned this part of the comment.
I just want to give them some money, nothing more.
Accepting money at all is not a trivial decision.
However I think this implicit obligation you refer to would keep projects open.
People shouldn't be misled into have unreasonable expectations of how easy it is to make a living this way, but I'm not sure how much of that is Patreon's fault. It's a platform, you still have to create the value and attract customers.
For the kind of dollar values most github supporters are working in (probably in the range of less than $1000/year) - a single yearly lump sum would be easier to expense directly on a corporate card rather than getting accounting involved monthly.
This has been my experience, too. I suspect it has to do with how budgets are allocated.
A large expenditure request follows a different path and will probably get seriously examined and specially budgeted for.
A small one only needs the approval of the department manager, and it will come directly out of the budget that's already been allocated. This means that it is an expense that manager will actually feel, and is more likely to simply be denied.
"My dog is very cute, so I figured I should capitalize on that." Then the person launches into a rather simplistic rant about how patronage used to work.
"I was a freelance photographer in Chicago" Yep and so is every third person in Chicago.
There were these sort of reminders in the shareware, which was when I was young and didn't have much coin to chip in but it did present a good reminder every time I started the application. They'd even delay you 30 seconds before loading some of the apps if you were freeloading too often. Gosh, shareware, those were the days...
I don't think Github is here for the money but for fortifying their position as the place where software is.
I, and a lot of other people, cannot get accounting at where I work to cut a check for that kind of sponsorship. I can get accounting to cut checks for things that matter. Typically if someone asks what's the difference between paid and free, and you answer, it supports Active Directory, you're most of the way there if you can show a business need for the product. But just a straight-up donation? It's a hard sell.
Note also that the product lets people "choose from multiple sponsorship tiers, with monthly payment amounts and benefits that are set by the sponsored developer." That opens up much bigger pots of money. E.g., a premium support tier is totally justifiable for software that I'm building key code on. That could be $25-100/month, no problem.
And there's a reason conferences sell sponsorships: lots of businesses see it as good marketing to support things that are visible and important to a community. For example, I could totally justify a big-dollar project sponsorship ($1k-5k/year) as a recruiting expense if I want to hire people who already know something important to our work.
If you said the money is going to GitHub, and it's actually going through GitHub, that's lying.
I think it will probably show up differently on credit card statements anyway, so people won't be tempted to do this behind the backs of the accounting department.
GitHub will know two very interesting data points: the relationship graph between projects and dependencies and the sponsorship level of those dependencies. Combine that with Issue and PR activity, and it could therefore identify which highly-depended-upon projects need funds the most and nudge accordingly.
"Did you know that you and 2,500 other codebases depend on $lib.js? Why not pledge $25 to support its development?" That sort of thing.
More than that, it's an excellent differentiator for their business, so then can justify all the GitHub Sponsors expenses just as marketing budget. Other people have been replicating the "nice web front-end for Git" part of their business. But this turns GitHub's large audience into a potential revenue source, which will be very hard for other people to duplicate.
Sure, all experiences are not positive, especially when you view it through a micro lens. But if you view this through a macro lens on software development in general, just as if you view YouTube content producer monetization on consumable video at an industry level, you'll find that non-traditional financial monetization of these digital efforts has a significant impact on what was there previously.
https://opencollective.com/nest
https://opencollective.com/date-fns
What you're describing isn't a problem at least for open source developers. There's no significant extra work for them if they want donations aside from posting a line of text and a link. Now with Github, it's even easier since it's baked in.
Patreon by no means should be expected to guarantee you find backers. They (and services like them) make it easy to concentrate on your content/creation, and less on the nitty-gritty details of how to collect your patrons' money. That doesn't mean it's easy to get patrons (or even should be), because, you know, you have to produce something that they want to pay to support. It just means that the logistical details of how to collect money from people who want to give it to you, should not take up much of your time.
If you have realistic expectations about what Patreon (or any other crowdfunding tool) should be expected to do, I think it's working out just fine.
It'd be more lucrative for a patronage website to allow someone to go after big whales.
Just imagine if someone got a 1 million dollar grant. Even if it took a long time to secure it, it'd be a lot better than convincing 200,000 ppl for $5.
They make it look like the extra 3% is to build features for their platform, but the VC funding is for that, and other than developing the feature, having tiers doesn't cost them anything. Charging 8% just makes it a bit closer to being sustainable.
Isn't it only unsustainable for VCs who want 10e50% growth ever three days?
For a $1 payment, they actually take 20% (10c + 5% + 5%).
"After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time job itself. I’d spend hours combing through photos, looking back on notes I’d taken on the road, researching where I’d been. I’d post on Twitter and Instagram with teasers, free stories, anything to attract my followers to my Patreon page. I made friends on the site, I shared their projects on my own social media, and kept up with all my subscribers’ projects. It was a lot of work for little pay, but I was determined. A year later my monthly earnings on Patreon have grown from $120 to $163."
$163 a month in extra income? Cool, right? Not when you spend 5+ hours a week thinking about it.
If GitHub gets a lot of participation it will be unsustainable to only take a little on top of a credit card processing fee, and the fee it will be increased to be more like Facebook's 30% cut. There are plenty of articles on here about the costs and difficulties of running a payment platform.