The idea behind the recurring crowdfunding site Patreon is good. Pay artists and other creators a small amount of money directly every month and support their work in a way that favours immersion into experiments and developing of the arts while still guaranteeing the creator a stable income.
Sadly Patreon does exactly what all other middlemen have done since the Sumerians, wedging themselves between artists and audience, making themselves an important part of the whole transaction. These last days their shenanigans went completely up in smoke. A double fee charging both the Patron and the artist was introduced in a laconic mail presenting the move to be a streamlining that would benefit the ones being charged more money...!
And then it exploded in their hands...
Patreon is a lousy website that does not make it easy to find you, not makes it easy to contact your followers and really do nothing much to earn them their 5% share.
Personally I am not sure if I want to continue using it, not as much because of all the drama, but because I think they are too expensive and offers all too little. I have an account on the open source site Liberapay that is much cheaper and fits my Cretive Commons art better. Also... I only earn 10$ a month anyway :)
Comments and discussion is more than welcome!
More reading here:
Comicsbet.com - The Patreon Fiasco: Jack Conte tells creators “We ****ed up.”
If you by any chance would like to support my free art with fiat-money I would be glad if you used:
Have you looked into Hatreon?
I understand much of the problems with having a site that takes credit card payments and disperses moneys to people. Basically, CCs have a huge laundry list of suspicious activities you can't do. Such as Pr0n, psychic readings, bitcoins. (Unfortunately, CCs have no qualms about fraud sites)
And as you have said, Patreon is really going the way of fleabay. They say they are giving an upgrade, when really they mean they are going to charge more.
Further, it would be in their best interest to provide searches. Get similar content in front of people that are paying already is lucrative.
There are many artists (mostly webcomics) that I would love to support, but using Patreon... the hoops to jump through, since I am unbanked are just too many. And in the end, too pricey.
I will be glad when more artists are easily donated to through cryptos. And wallets that allow for sending (mostly) automated payments per works produced.
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No, hadn't heard of Hatreon :) I'll take a look. The truth is though, that I have earned much more in Bitcoin-donations than on crowdfunding, so I am all for a crypto-equivalent if someone would create it. A working site with features that could help patrons find the content more easily would be a great thing.
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Careful, Hatreon is a Patreon for neonazis.
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I'm really bummed about it, because I found out a few days ago RIGHT AFTER setting up a Patreon finally :(
I didn't make it public, so... I guess this saves me the hassle of messing with it. Still frustrating, though.
Honestly thought about just setting up a DIY Patreon, where if people donate like $1 via PayPal or Crypto, they'd get a month's worth of access to a Discord server where I slap my WIPs and such... I mean that's basically all I was gonna do with Patreon anyway, just give people sneak-peeks and such :P
I was even thinking that there could be a Discord bot that keeps tabs on if somebody has paid this month or not, so you don't have to manually keep track of all that, and it'd automatically let people in or kick people out based on that.
It'd probably work like how Vid.Me did, where you deposit money and say how much of that you want to give the person every month.
I have no idea how to program something like that, though :/
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I think what they offered was too little. The website did not make it easy for patrons to find the interesting projects and you had to bring the followers yourself and then pay 5% to them. If they had a site like Kickstarter or Bandcamp I think it might be worth it, but as it is now I think I will be pulling from Patreon.
The thing you want to make could be done with a simple Paypal widget couldn't it?
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Kickstarter is working on a new system, Drip, that would be the Patreon Rival. They say it will be available in 2018
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Yes, I saw that - my original plan was to have a payment-system for each way of payment. If they offer a better public interface like the one on Kickstarter they might be interesting.
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Ah, I didn't realize all that. Just knew that all the pros were using it, so I figured it should have good tools. It's really bizzare that it doesn't :I
I'm not sure? Maybe I could do it with a widget, but I'm not sure how that would synch to Discord, and that'd really only be useful with PayPal - it wouldn't let people use Crypto.
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I set up an account but then never used it.
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I have had it with 4-5 patrons - not really worth the efforts I have put into posting updates.
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