File this under “not thinking ahead”.
Hey, do you use Patreon? Well you probably just lost a few patrons. Which happened in light of a recent overhaul to the pay structure of the site.
See, how it used to be was creators would get a lump sum at the beginning of the month. That is to say, a lump sum after processing fees and Patreon’s 5% cut. But that’s no longer the case.
The new structure passes those costs onto your patrons. And you no longer seem to get a lump sum like before, but instead a nightmare of little bursts of payment across a month.
Starting on December 18th, a new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 will be paid by patrons for each individual pledge. (To get into the details, existing per-creation pledges for posts made on/after Dec. 18th will be charged the new service fee; existing per-month pledges will first be charged a service fee on January 1.) Streamlining these fees for creators and patrons ensures that creators take home as much of their earnings as possible.
The change is supposedly to make things better for users. But to anyone else, it’s readily apparent that they’re not. As a matter of fact, they updated their blog post later to better explain the whole thing. I don’t know what kind of drugs you have to be taking to understand this insane moon logic, but I’m guessing they’re really bad for you in the long run. The new patron service fees are supposed to make it easier for creators to take more of their earnings home. But I can’t see that mattering when no patron wants to put up with the fees, which make the simple matter of pledging a dollar unnecessarily difficult. Especially since they pay on the anniversary of their pledge, rather than on a monthly cycle.
So, we chose to pursue option three, and spent nearly a year reviewing the numbers and running experiments to make sure the end result was creators either make more money, or keep their current earnings. We actually experimented with three different service fee structures, all of which were higher than the 2.9% + $0.35 we selected. As it turns out, patrons weren’t nearly as sensitive to the amount of the fee as we predicted, but we ultimately chose the lowest service fee that would offset the third party costs in all likely scenarios.
This was never (and still isn’t) about making more money for Patreon as a company. This is a strategic move to make our platform even better for creators and patrons in the future. We want a Patreon where all creators receive their money as soon as a patron pledges. We want a Patreon where your patrons never have to wonder when they’ll be charged, or how much they’ll be charged, and this is the first step toward the improvements we’re making so that Patreon becomes a better system for everyone.
You know, everyone except the people paying into the system. I don’t think how much the creators bring home is going to matter when nobody wants to deal with the hassle of paying them. And, no surprise, nobody’s happy with this change. But hey, there’s alternatives, like Kickstarter’s Drip, which already has a number of notable people on it by invitation:
Oh, God, everybody is screwed.
Source: Gizmodo
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