Five Buck Fatigue

https://underjord.io/five-buck-fatigue.html

by lawik • 6 years ago

207 246 6 years ago

I usually donate a one-time, larger amount. I know it isn't recurring which is what people want but this is the way that I'm able to deal with it.

Applejinx2• 6 years ago

I make my living off Patreon and have many people doing exactly that. Also, I support quite a few Patreons myself but they're all ones that I can do $1 a month… forever.

I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget.

Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a 'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to plan for, as the creator.

hinkley2• 6 years ago

I thought Brave was going to go a different direction, closer to what Apple music streaming does, where they look at your traffic over the month and divvy up your subscription between them.

Or even: these are all of the things you support: which ones did you enjoy this month?

Pxtl• 6 years ago

You have to have a heck of an offering to get a $5 monthly out of me. Every $5 monthly gets measured against "half a Netflix" and comes up short.

Edit: I'll admit I'll gladly drop $40 on an ebook from the same creators I feel weird about funding monthly. I'm allergic to monthlies.

throwanem6• 6 years ago

What I hear you saying is, Netflix has swamped the market and driven down the price of quality content.

Well, I say "quality". It seems like every time I look at it, their catalog's dropped something else I wanted to see. My hit rate on searches there has to be hovering around 2%.

amelius• 6 years ago

No, really, no single human creator can provide $5/mo worth of content. If you don't like Netflix just think of a quality monthly magazine.

balfirevic• 6 years ago

If Netflix halved their price, would you go and cancel a bunch of other services you pay for?

nbaksalyar• 6 years ago

If we talk about Patreon and independent creators, I don't think it's a fair comparison because usually most of the content is already offered for free, unlike Netflix which you can't access without paying.

bpodgursky• 6 years ago

The Netflix cost-per-content is only sustainable in a world where everyone consumes the same content, because there are incredible economies of scale (where you can broadcast the same TV show to 2 billion people).

But that's not really a great world for individual agency or the creative arts. A writer with 1,000 readers can only write so much per month -- and $5 doesn't (or only barely) makes it possible. People who want a world which HAS niche content are going to have to cough up more -- I'd like to think most people here are in that camp.

jjeaff• 6 years ago

Ya, thinking that Netflix is the standard of price and quality is like saying no one needs anything more than Walmart.

There are lots of products and media that is niche/boutique/artisanal or whatever your preferred term is. And people are willing to pay much more for that.

Chris20483• 6 years ago

Or another metric: $5 give you a single digitalocean droplet, or a sub to CrunchyRoll.

juniper_strong• 6 years ago

I'm allergic to monthlies

Me too. The way I look at it, if I'm going to live off 4% of my assets a year in retirement, I need an extra $1500 to fund a $5 a month recurring charge.

So it's a matter of looking at how long it would take to save that $1500 and asking if I would commit to working that much longer before I retire in order to afford the recurring payment.

If "that much longer" is measured in days/weeks/months instead of minutes or hours, the answer is almost certainly going to be no.

zem• 6 years ago

I have the opposite feeling; very often I will contribute to someone's patreon or gofundme or whatever because I like their work and have gotten a lot out of it, but I almost never go on to read the members only writing. some part of me values it less because it isn't freely accessible.

mjayhn• 6 years ago

I do this and I feel bad about it when I'm not reading someones stuff. Please don't take it personally. There's a lot going on, my plan is to eventually get to it and support you along the way for making it. Also I'm hugely supportive to any devs going off and doing indie projects mostly out of wanting to make that a real source of income for the rest of us.

throwanem6• 6 years ago

I don't tend to take advantage of members-only content either, but for me it's purely a matter of convenience. If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely would use it, but I can rarely be bothered (or even remember, really) to actually visit the website.

It doesn't feel like a loss, though. I mean, if I'm supporting someone's work, it's on the strength of what I could already see before I started doing that.

techsupporter3• 6 years ago

If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely would use it

Patreon does have this feature for audio content, like podcasts, if the creator enables it: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enab...

But I think you mean for all content? I emulate this by enabling e-mail notifications for all posts from some creators and auto-forwarding them to Newsblur for newsletter reading. Maybe that helps.

tomcam2• 6 years ago

Same here exactly. And I always feel I've got more than my money's worth

IggleSniggle• 6 years ago

Yeah it's like, "it was an absolute steal at $0, and it's still an absolute steal at $10!"

Kye• 6 years ago

About half my patrons are like this. The other half do look at posts, but don't really care what I post since they have eclectic tastes. I thought something was wrong when I first noticed the phenomenon.

viburnum• 6 years ago

It's usually not very good.

cletus• 6 years ago

I agree with this. Just recently I watched a couple of videos from a Youtube channel I follow (and like). I get through the second one and it was basically "if you want to find out more, support us on Patreon to see this supporters-only content".

My reaction was basically to lose interest in the channel entirely. Like it's something I'm mildly interested in but not totally invested in.

The problem now is that before watching any more of their videos, my thought will be "will this be actual content or a just a teaser to sell Patreon support?"

Either put up content on Youtube or don't. But this bait-and-switch is a quick path to unsubscribing entirely.

stnmtn• 6 years ago

It's extremely hard, because they have to advertise their patreon somehow, and Youtube is clearly the best way to do it.

I don't have a problem with free content, and premium content, as long as the quality of the two is about equal.

account42• 6 years ago

It doesn't help that patreon's js-riddled atrocity of a website doesn't exactly make it fun to access that content.

usrusr• 6 years ago

"Worth supporting but not worth buying", that can definitely be a thing.

Supporting something that's available for free makes you a contributor, buying restricted access makes you a customer, with all the expectations of a competitive value proposition. Most buskers would not be able to sell a single ticket.

hguant• 6 years ago

I've found that I'm much more willing to spend a larger chunk of money in a one off payment than signing up for yet another "only 5 dollar" pledge. I recently signed up for a few substack accounts from writers I've admired, and, in a move that would have horrified my younger, eye patch wearing self, have bought a year long subscription to The Economist. They offer good writing, interning opinions that, though I may disagree with them, are well thought out and we'll constructed. Publishing in this day and age is easy - twitter and Facebook and friends have shown us how simple it can be to say, well, anything. Good writing is hard, has remained hard, and should be valued. I've done my level best to make sure that only the most dedicated institution can reliably get ad revenue from me - it's only fair that I buy and support the things I value.

reustle• 6 years ago

Let's call this the Five Dollar Fatigue, sounds catchy.

This is already commonly called "subscription fatigue" and has been discussed extensively

CarVac• 6 years ago

I'm willing to buy swag if it's particularly unique or interesting, but I won't subscribe unless it's something really really special.

627467• 6 years ago

What you can call "fatigue" in the first world, presents itself as impossible to overcome barrier to the rest of the world.

I get that if platforms and creators charged any less than 5 bucks they probably lose even more in payment fees.

Can't help but think that we still have so much to overcome with regards to cheap or free micropayments.

waheoo• 6 years ago

$1 seems to be the lower limit.

Transaction fees on low volume are usually like 30c or 1% whichever is higher.

Dylan168073• 6 years ago

Competent sites, like Patreon sometimes, will let you support multiple creators off one transaction fee.

Also if you deliberately set up for small payments, there's things like paypal micropayments offering a fee of 5 cents plus 5%.

teej3• 6 years ago

Frankly, I've seen little evidence that subscription fatigue exists beyond a handful of complains in HN links and comments. The meteoric growth of Onlyfans demonstrates the opposite - that there's huge demand for subscriptions and we're only starting to learn what subscription content folks will pay for.

I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.

free_rms• 6 years ago

I was under the impression that most subscriptions to OnlyFans were made in a.. less rational state of mind.

teej3• 6 years ago

That's absurd. Humans do not lose all executive decision making just because the pixels on their phone are in the shape of a nipple.

See also: NYT, Substack, Patreon.

Lammy5• 6 years ago

The "average person" in the US also couldn't cover a $1000 emergency expense before the pandemic so maybe there's something to this and we shouldn't be encouraging more: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/41-percent-of-americans-woul...

teej3• 6 years ago

This is an argument for UBI, not against the subscription business model.

twblalock2• 6 years ago

Saving $5 here and there is not going to substantially improve emergency savings for the average person. However, it will make their life a little bit less pleasant.

People frequently post on Reddit's personal finance forum saying they have tens of thousands of dollars in debt, they are upside down on their car loan, what can they do? And the first responses are always things like "cancel Netflix". That doesn't really help solve financial problems of that magnitude, it just makes people more miserable.

HumblyTossed3• 6 years ago

I don't think there's been enough time. I firmly believe that subscription fatigue will eventually hit enough people to show that model isn't sustainable for everyone. People will still have subs for some apps, but only a few.

I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they make.

I suspect people don't know just how little discretionary income for things like this the average person really has. Something like 3/4 of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

christiansakai• 6 years ago

I only contribute to two Patreons (each $5) monthly so far: - a friend of mine, because he is a friend of mine - a guitar teacher that I followed, because he constantly produce good quality materials that are only available on mmembership. worth it. I also bought some of his courses and sometimes schedule a 1 on 1 private with him.

But for open source, I never contributed to anything lol. Sorry, OSS maintainers. Thank you for the awesome work. The world needs more people like you. But if I can get it for free I'll get it for free.

For indie SaaS, I never pay anything as well. Sorry indie SaaS devs, but I am not an app/software heavy user even though I work as an SWE. I don't use note taking apps or any other productivity apps.

mywittyname• 6 years ago

You're pretty typical in this respect. It's why open source software needs to be sponsored by large corporations and why indie software is "free for non-commercial use". It's easier to swipe that business CC than it is your own one.

nine_k• 6 years ago

I want to support, I want to engage. But I also want to be mindful in how I spend my money. And $5/month adds up pretty quickly.

So basically the author cannot afford to buy all the content he would like to, but feels a pang of conscience when he has to take the content for free, even if it's made freely available by the authors.

It's an interesting internal conflict to have.

I think I might need to figure out what my actual budget is for supporting independent creators on a monthly basis.

I suppose there are multiple solutions that provide something like that.

I think it would be worse if they were as heavy-handed as Wikipedia

I'm totally fine with Wikipedia, and I usually give them $5-15 yearly. (They, in particular, are said to receive more money than they know what to reasonably do with.) This must be a case of personal sensitivity, which varies across the audience, and it sucks to be on the above-average sensitive end.

I personally buy stuff I find great / fascinating. I hear a great track or a great album on Bandcamp? OK, I pay for it. I see it on Youtube? I go to Bandcamp, or whatever other site the authors care to list, and pay there. If there's no such link, sad.

OTOH I don't normally subscribe to support a particular creator. I pay for the result. Great online creators usually produce good stuff anyway, they started with producing and publishing free (to view) stuff. The number of people who paid for a particular episode / track / post / whatever is an important piece of feedback, I think.

diag2• 6 years ago

When you say you're buying a product or result, you're still paying for the production indirectly.

techsupporter3• 6 years ago

Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected. But my read of this is that authors and other creators are in a no-win situation. People don't like ads (so they block them or simply don't interact with them, either way driving down the money made from the ads), but people also don't like subscriptions, and people definitely don't like one-off "plonk your credit card here" request, yet no centralized micropayment system has really taken off because people also don't take to those.

So...what next? How do creators get paid?

(FWIW, I am on the opposite end of this. I probably devote too much of my income--not a brag, it's likely a financially unwise thing to do--on recurring subscriptions on Patreon and Maximum Fun and other platforms because I'm very quick to "ooh, shiny" and click-to-subscribe.)

CM302• 6 years ago

Honestly, I'm not sure there is a practical solution. Patron style systems and donations seem to be the most plausible way for creators to make money, but the internet + high competition + ads have basicaly forced most content into a race to the bottom where people expect everything to be free and those things that aren't lose to free alternatives.

It's like what happened with mobile apps. People expect everything for free/maybe with microtransactions or ads, so it's basically impossible to monetise stuff in that market.

II2II• 6 years ago

While the problem is unlikely to have an ideal solution, I suspect that patron style systems are the most practical solution.

It is probably the system that is most likely to encourage people to contribute based upon their assessed value of the content and the least likely system to be gamed.

How do you ensure that creators are compensated equitably? You don't even try. Instead, creators depend upon the randomness of the decisions of contributors. It won't always be fair, but it is doubtful that it would create a race to the bottom.

int_19h6• 6 years ago

If so many people are voluntarily making so much of something that the market price is basically free, why is that even a problem that needs a solution?

throwaway0a5e• 6 years ago

So...what next? How do creators get paid?

Sponsored content that isn't totally abrasive to your audience. Lots of Youtubers seem to do it well.

Alternatively you can do old school sidebar ads that are relevant to whatever your niche is. I'm on a forum for a niche industry. Nobody complains about the banner ads for companies who are relevant to that industry because they keep the forum running.

peterwoerner2• 6 years ago

Yep, they sell a product of use/interest to their community. They make even more if they own the product they sell.

This does take away from them making content, but it currently is the only path towards salary replacement monetization.

drivingmenuts• 6 years ago

YouTube is starting to get annoying, though, with their constant pre-roll ads and the ads in the middle of videos that don’t appear at natural breaks. Now I find mysel focused on the Skip Ad button while tracking the countdown to its clickability.

int_19h6• 6 years ago

How useful are such ads to the companies? Are there forum members who discover products through them that they wouldn't otherwise? Old school stuff was genuinely useful, because we didn't have Internet to do product research before buying, but now...

david2ndaccount• 6 years ago

Merch. Merch is the answer.

totetsu2• 6 years ago

Its always seems like a bit of a waste of the carbon budget to get another t-shirt to me. Digital stickers?

sandoooo5• 6 years ago

Evidently some creators can make it work somehow, since there is more content than ever. It is difficult to convince people to pay more for stuff they're practically drowning in.

Maybe we should go in the opposite direction: tax the creators to decrease content generation in order to increase signal-to-noise on high-quality content. Or at least force marginally-profitable content to be released free or not at all.

totetsu2• 6 years ago

I find a lot of the noise in contemporary content is calls to action(payment). Your idea might just ensure content that is mostly about trying to get people to pay for it survives.

tjoff• 6 years ago

I believe in micropayments, and I don't think there has been a compelling service for it.

Granted it needs to become popular before people will be attracted by it, which is a problem...

Taikonerd• 6 years ago

So...what next? How do creators get paid?

I think Flattr has (or had) a model like...

1. you give Flattr a constant $X per month (you choose the X)

2. Flattr tracks the content you consume, using a browser plugin

3. Flattr divides up your $X among the creators you viewed, and sends it to them

I never used it, but it seems like an interesting model. I like the idea of spending a flat $30/month on "internet content", without agonizing about whether X webcomic deserves my Patreon support.

pbuzbee• 6 years ago

I like this model too. I don't want to see ads, but payment options always seem to require too many decisions. I don't want to manage subscriptions or choose whether to pay for every single piece of content, but I'll happily make a regular monthly payment if I feel it gets distributed fairly.

I'm not sure what incentive there would be to increase the amount contributed though: seems like if users can pay any $X > 0 then it's not enough. Maybe there would need to be a bare minimum.

avian2• 6 years ago

Flattr sounded good on paper, but had a lot of practical problems. This comment sums it up pretty well why basically only Flattr was making money with Flattr:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15558406

If there was one thing I was expecting to come out of the cryptocurrency craze, it was a better Flattr. Yet even that failed to materialize.

205guy• 6 years ago

I pay about $50 a month for internet, and none of that goes to the creators. The ISP transmits the bits but profits from others creating something that makes me want to be connected.

My idea: ISPs become regulated like utilities (fixed rate subject to public utilities commission), there is some flat fee for service and then a content fee that gets divided up based on what you consume and paid to the originating IP address. Figure out some categories of content (audio, video, image, text), enforce something that prevents inflating of bits, and then everyone gets paid based on their content. My blog earns a few pennies a day and my account with my hosting provider gets credited monthly or something—which offsets my hosting bill. A YouTube channel gets paid to YouTube who take a cut for providing the severs and the rest passed on. Software and hardware for self-hosting becomes a thing again.

chillwaves3• 6 years ago

On Twitch, they use subscriptions (for ad free), ad revenue, merch, donations directly and donations via Twitch.

Working really well for a lot of streamers. There is pretty much zero friction on the user end once a payment method is set up.

Of course, this is a live entertainment type service and they are basically selling interaction with the audience, but I don't see why that type of payment scheme can't transfer to other products.

On Twitch you can literally donate $.01 at a time.

cercatrova3• 6 years ago

They don't. Or rather, there is some nuance to this. People value things that have high signal to noise ratios. I will read books (given they have a good review) over articles, or audiobooks over podcasts, both of which I pay for because I know that the signal is high relative to the noise. Creators, should they wish to make money, will move into these higher value productions.

One might say that this may not work for all types of content, to which I say, there is always an analogue. Upcoming are paid newsletters where before they were usually free, for example, or in the worst case, people will offer money via Patreon.

benrbray• 6 years ago

I'm almost the complete opposite. I find that most people with a following don't understand at all what their audience finds compelling about their work.

A book or an audiobook represents months or years of intentional thought put into compiling information that they think will sell. Before it reaches my eyes/ears, it has been meticulously edited to remove anything the author / editor _thinks_ I won't be interested in.

In contrast, an article/blog post or podcast is much more casual, like the author's stream of consciousness. I get a real glimpse of what their life/experience/work is like, not just the version of themselves that gets past the editing phase.

As an example, I'm loving the Trash Taste [1] podcast even though I have zero interest whatsoever in watching content made by the participants individually.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtlC9Sl4_Q

jldugger2• 6 years ago

So...what next? How do creators get paid?

A decade ago, I bought a used textbook on statistics, published in 1998. Highly recommended by many, written by a UCB Statistics professor (now deceased).

Total Book Price: US$ 3.94 Shipping: US$ 3.00

For just a smidge over $5 dollars, I got a world class textbook written by one of the best educators on the planet. In the era of coronavirus, I've finally sat down every night with it and have put in about 40 hours reading it (mostly doing the exercises), checking out some of the citations and references, making Anki cards, etc.

As best I can tell, creators get paid by putting in high quality work of relevance and lasting value. Your average Youtuber ain't it.

yathern• 6 years ago

By buying used, and spending $5 for content that you've used for 20 years, I wouldn't suggest you're providing better income to that professor than YouTubers get from Ads or Patreon

xosmel• 6 years ago

What was the name of the book?

lmm3• 6 years ago

So...what next? How do creators get paid?

I think we're in a "creator" bubble and a crash is coming. There are simply too many people expecting to be able to live off their hobbies and not enough actual value being created. Many, perhaps even most, of these creators are going to have to go get a job. It may not be a popular opinion, but I don't even think that's such a bad thing; there is way too much "content" out there, we don't actually need anywhere near as much as we're currently creating.

Lammy5• 6 years ago

I wonder what's the ratio of people who genuinely expect to be able to live off their hobbies vs people who don't even get to enjoy a hobby due to The Fear forcing them into "The Hustle" in a world where success and even survival are not defaults?

Digory• 6 years ago

Aren't we seeing the bubble bursting right now in academia? Hobby PhDs let you into the college content-creation club, to teach the next generation of content creators.

glenstein• 6 years ago

I think you might start seeing netflix-like consolidation into content packages.

We're already kind of seeing that with podcast networks, and I think something like that may be coming for other content creators.

shostack• 6 years ago

It will be interesting to see what happens when the shattered US economy fully hits the end of its cash infusion rope.

Many unemployed people are jumping on the creator bandwagon created a supply glut and also a noise problem.

This will drive down prices and what people are willing to pay, particularly as people's ability to pay for anything in general craters if the jobs don't come back.

There will probably be some companies that make a quick buck selling the dream to those investing their last few dollars trying to eek something out, but perhaps we will also see some disruption of the models and general content creator and curator space.

meheleventyone• 6 years ago

Don’t most have jobs? All these creator platforms end up with a power law distribution of attention and money. The vast majority are not making a living already yet here they are.

dimgl• 6 years ago

I actually completely agree with this statement. I tend to follow the gaming industry pretty closely and lately I've noticed that there are simply too many low-quality gaming YouTube channels.

I was recommended a video the other day "The Downfall of Blizzard" or something like that, started watching it and was surprised at how incredibly bland the content was. Even more surprising was the amount of views and likes the video had. The jokes were bad, the production quality was low, there was no critical or opinionated analysis, etc.

There are tons of channels like this, full of videos where it's just some some guy or gal talking to a camera with some uninspired editing and generally run-of-the-mill content. And this is just one slice. I see this kind of content everywhere now.

Of course, everyone wants to be happy doing what they like doing, but it simply isn't sustainable that everyone lives off of their hobbies. Not only are they providing little value in general, but they're just not really good at it...

sukilot2• 6 years ago

That's not a creator-only thing. Thanks to automation and technology, most people have no way to add value, even at a "regular" job.

Lammy5• 6 years ago

One thing I see some artists do is sell commission slots and then post the finished artwork for everyone. Some commissions are kept private, of course, but for many of them it's win-win-win to share:

- The artists get paid and still get to display stuff publicly, attracting more fans and more commissions.

- The fans get a chance to have their favorite artists draw their favorite things.

- The vast majority of silent passersby get more reasons to keep coming back and maybe turn into paying fans too.

Dealing with fans and managing expectations becomes even more of a can of worms when money gets involved, of course, and people tend to under-value creative work in general, but I've seen some people make that work for 10+ years now even before the era of Patreon and Gumroad and friends.

wutbrodo• 6 years ago

Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm open to being corrected.

This was my read of the post too, strengthened by the complaint about Wikipedia. There are reasonable thoughts about one of the pitfalls of the subscription model, but the motivating complaint behind the post seems to be "compensating creators is annoying". It's possible there's a method for doing so at scale that's a Pareto improvement over all existing options, but I think it's just as likely that "paying" for things in any manner is going to cause friction. The payment isn't meant to be the pleasant part of the exchange for you; the content is.

jks• 6 years ago

I would like to see ads on websites, just not the terrible ads that almost all of them are. So far I have unblocked ethicalads.io, which has ads mainly on readthedocs.io but I recently noticed their ads on some blog site. Perhaps as browsers implement tracker blocking, there will be more space for this kind of ad networks.

Aeolun2• 6 years ago

I don't know. Personally I very much like subscriptions. As long as they're $5 a month, I can support an awfully large amount of people

To be fair, unless I would give someone 25$ a month for the same thing I generally do not bother subscribing.

kalleboo• 6 years ago

I support around 20 creators on Patreon, and at that rate I can't really afford more than $1/creator. But they have thousands of patrons, and with those numbers even $1/mo from everyone makes for a livable wage

galoisgirl2• 6 years ago

It's not that I don't like paying.

I don't like deciding whether I can afford another 5 bucks. The article mentions "$5/month adds up pretty quickly", well, it adds even quicker in other countries. See decision fatigue.

I don't like tipping. I don't like feeling the responsibility of someone's livelihood on my shoulders. Maybe I'm a selfish bitch for putting my likes and someone's livelihood in the same sentence.

I do like sharing, though, when I'm feeling financially secure.

I like buying stuff. I love getting myself a nice big fat book of content. I love getting a bargain: lie to me that it's 50% off and I'm yours. I like Scribd for that reason.

Not that I have a business model from this. The day I've paid my bills, or at Thanksgiving, talk to me about gratitude and giving to creators?

Maybe there's no easy way around the fact that people don't like paying. If the money is valuable to creators, it's probably valuable for me too, and therefore I can't give it away easily.

whywhywhywhy2• 6 years ago

Being a YouTube creator and expecting to just be able to make a living off making your videos is as naive as a band expecting to make a living off record sales.

If you're a band then the real money is made with merch and performance. If you're a YouTube creator then you need to start thinking of your videos as promotion and provide some sort of high margin product you can shill every video.

Example of a youTuber doing this right is GreyscaleGorilla which started out as just a guy doing very basic 3D software tutorials but once he built an audience then spread out into making 3D software plugins and resources. It works perfectly because you can use the product you sell in your tutorials.

tomcam2• 6 years ago

Doesn't seem to be a problem for purveyors of high quality content. Often they only get a small percentage of people to contribute, but they make do. And IMHO more of them make out like bandits than one might think, especially Youtubers with multiple ways to make money. I think that number is closer to the low thousands than the high dozens.

sandoooo5• 6 years ago

For me, the only reason I'd be willing to pay $5/m for a single creator is because of information disparity: it is difficult to find content I like, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. If I have to spend a lot of time looking this costs far more than just paying for incrementally more of the same, even though the perfect content for me is probably out there somewhere for free.

AI will probably solve this problem eventually, though recommender services are in general pretty crap right now.

I think there is a lot of value in a service that can go through the Amazon catalog and just cull the 99.9% of stuff it thinks I'm not interested in, then give me advanced search / preview / indexing on the rest. Problem is, it would have to do this without taking ad dollars to poison the list. Also privacy concerns.

lelandbatey• 6 years ago

I get the fatigue, but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic. It's such a breath of fresh air from the world of advertising. TOTALLY off topic, but I want to get this advertising analogy/story/parable/fiction out of my head, so I might as well write it down here:

In the advertising-based revenue world, you see really odd businesses. Imagine a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!"

As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy."

"But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't give away the pizza?" moans the employee.

Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." And with that you walk to your car and drive home.

The frustrated employee would, by 2030 move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer sits with their eyes held open and stares into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would recieve a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments".

Meanwhile in 2025, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.

Applejinx2• 6 years ago

"but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic"

But that would be Universal Basic Income :)

think about it, that's exactly what UBI is. Pay enough people and someone is gonna come up with something amazing. They might share it, they might profit by it, but they will want it to be known as that will be the new 'need' in the Maslow hierarchy.

This has more or less happened before by accident. For instance, Silicon Valley, which came out of a period of significant wealth and leisure.

11235813212• 6 years ago

The big difference is that Patreon/Memberful subscriptions are optional and not burdensome.

bjoernw2• 6 years ago

Companies like https://coil.com are solving this by giving you a single $5/month subscription and then streaming micropayments to the content creators as you consume their content. It builds on the WebMonitization standard https://webmonetization.org

9nGQluzmnq3M• 6 years ago

There have been countless attempts to create a micropayments ecosystem during the last 20 years, and they have all flopped. What makes this different?

bjoernw2• 6 years ago

Coil and Mozilla working on a web standard together, the fact that we now have a couple of years of examples of digital content creators being de-monitized on ad-supported platforms, and the fact that crypto currencies are more approachable now.

hamstercat• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm wrong. I do hope the model works. But all I can think of when I see their business model is Spotify. Where content creators are being paid cents, and have to rely on alternative streams of income like concert and merch. Except in this case, there is no alternative, the patron model was supposed to be the alternative to ads and sponsorship.

I do wonder how much can be contributed to the content creator, even without considering the cut they take for their services. If I'm watching more than 5 content creators in the month, then they're getting less than a dollar each.

fidelramos• 6 years ago

This seems similar to what Brave is doing. I would like to see a side-by-side comparison of the two. For example I know that Brave pays users for watching ads, for example.

There are alternatives being built around direct micropayments to authors, such as https://read.cash. It's a click to send any amount from $0.01 and up, and the wallets are non-custodial, so money goes straight to the creator, minus a fee for the website. This might be a solution to the fatigue described by article, as you pay especifically by the content you like, and you decide the amount.

olah_12• 6 years ago

This seems similar to what Brave is doing. I would like to see a side-by-side comparison of the two. For example I know that Brave pays users for watching ads, for example.

Personally, I've never earned enough BAT in a month to pay out creators what I would actually owe them. In fact, I've tried to research why I'm not earning BAT even though I theoretically should be. I don't know what's up. I guess I'm just not being shown ads. That's one thing about BAT that's bad. It all depends on this one centralized ad ecosystem. If people aren't buying ads on the BAT network, then you won't get served ads and you won't make money.

In any case, I don't know if the Coil economics work, but at least all these $5 subs are sustainable and reliable.

jeremiahlee• 6 years ago

I was just coming here to make this comment.

The Web Monetization standard is the solution to the problem described of wanting to support a lot of creators effortlessly. There are many creators I want to support, but don't want to deal with managing a unique subscription to them—and also don't want to support them with a minimum $5/month.

olah_12• 6 years ago

My only issue with Coil (and I suspect why it hasn't taken off) is because XRP seems extremely scammy (pre-mined, centralized, etc).

I'd love to see WebMonitization work with at least 1 other coin besides XRP. Supposedly Interledger works with any coin, but I'll believe it when I see it.

ggm• 6 years ago

I offered a newspaper $60 for a years hassle free reading but they still nag me.

I definitely feel the $5 fatigue here, because its a $5/mo payment threshold.

CarbyAu2• 6 years ago

One HN comment mentioned the value of a magazine subscription, which can be ballpark similar monthly costs.

For me a patreon (or whatever) subscription to a whole GROUP of specialists in a field would be valuable.

As it stands: Patreon person:This thing I did/reviewed is great! Me: Is it though?...search more internet for validation

hinkley2• 6 years ago

I had the thought, "why doesn't PBS or a PBS-like organization do stuff like this?"

PBS doesn't exist without the local affiliates, though, and chasing after web content too vigorously would betray that relationship, if you didn't handle it very, very carefully.

sandoooo5• 6 years ago

Are the members-only content higher or lower quality, in general? The incentive seems to be for lower quality, because the vast majority of time and effort is spent on the free part that convinces you to pay. It's a reverse iceberg.

RhysU• 6 years ago

Back when we bought music albums (on vinyl or tape or whatever) we didn't subscribe to a content creator. We bought a product. If we liked it, we watched for the next release. I loved $NINETIES_BAND but I sure as heck wouldn't subscribe to them in the modern sense. The old model allowed monetizing outsized genius (or fashion) as demonstrated by dribbled song releases on the radio. This new model rewards consistently-better-than average content. It is a big divide. Perhaps what is missing is the modern DJ.

AlexeyMK• 6 years ago

My mental model lately has been, if I'm enjoying the content, I should try to figure out how to pay ~$1/hour.

If I'm not enjoying it, I should find a better way to spend m time.

alexashka• 6 years ago

And $5/month adds up pretty quickly

Does it?

If you can't spare fifty bucks/month on whatever on top of your other expenses, you're doing it wrong :)

twic2• 6 years ago

It adds up if you like fifty different things.

cercatrova3• 6 years ago

People value a product or service more when it is priced higher, so in my opinion, good content needs to be priced a lot higher than it is now, an order of magnitude higher, even (~$50/month), for people to value it properly.

johnpowell• 6 years ago

Back in the day the internet for normal people was 3 bucks a hour over a 14,400 modem. I didn't consider myself a "creator" for posting my recipes for making mashed potatoes in a crock pot. I just wanted to make the world have better mashed potatoes. I did it for free. There was no "like" button or comments or monetization. Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter. That is not a joke. I had a crock pot cooking site. I didn't have a counter or anything. Maybe it was popular.. I will never know.

The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.

scalablenotions• 6 years ago

That's cool, but I want people to be able to independently create content for me to enjoy, which is a bit less of a crock. That will probably takes all their time and they need to pay for ingredients for their pot. Bring on universal basic income I guess.

irrational2• 6 years ago

But there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Do we really need to support people to create more? I feel like we can enjoy what we already have and don't need to continuously look for something new. If people really really really want to create something, they will find a way to do so.

CaptArmchair3• 6 years ago

But... they can do exactly that. You can whip up a few pages in HTML with pictures and put on Github or shared hosting. Heck, you can even use a publishing platform like WordPress if you're not technically inclined. Each time you use your pot for a family dinner, you jot down the recipe and you publish it. Boom: you've created content!

So, what's the problem then?

It's how the goalpost for defining success have shifted. You're only successful if you are a full time writer of crock pot recipes, and you can leverage your content as a jumping board for wider fame. Which means you spend your days in the kitchen, churning out recipes, you market your content, you strike a branding deal with a crock pot manufacturer, etc. etc. etc.

This is an impossible and unrealistic standard. It's also the standard by which influencers, streamers, Instagram models and so on hold themselves and each other.

The other implied assumption here is that a source on crock pot cooking is only reliable if supported by a professional expert who does just that full time. But if you use this bar to assess quality of content, you risk missing really valuable and great crock pot information out there. Moreover, that expert? Maybe they are paid to push a brand of expensive crock pots; whereas the next hobby cook does the exact same thing in a pot that costs a quarter of the price.

"Oh! But creative creators ought to be paid for their hard work!"

Tough luck. This was a challenge long before the Web was conceived. Few artists, painters, writers, playwrights, sculptors,... were financially independent. Either they were wealthy themselves (nobility,...), or they were lucky to work for wealthy patrons (historically, patronage was a way to display power). Plenty of creators scraped - and are scraping - by with odd jobs. Plenty of now famous writers had other means of income at the start of their careers.

Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, was manager of a Saab dealership, a public relations officer for GE and volunteer fire fighter. Harper Lee was a reservation clerk at Eastern Airlines while she wrote in her spare time, until her friends gave her, aged 30, a note on Christmas 1956: "You have a year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." They all had pitched in and gifted her a year's wages. That's what allowed her to write To Kill A Mockingbird.

So, when you look at the body of famous artists, and how things worked out for them, you want to be aware of survivor bias.

Sure, UBI would support many more creative endeavours such as they are. But it's no silver bullet. If anything, there's this prevailing idea that it's somehow easy, and preferable, to make a full time, financially independent living by publishing digital content (text, video,...) on the Web. This is a gross overestimation of what the Web can do for you. It just creates unrealistic expectations and sets people, especially young people, up for disappointment if it doesn't work out.

By no means does that mean one shouldn't be creating content and publishing on the Web. But please do it for the right reasons: because it's something you deeply enjoy doing above all anything else.

jmkerr• 6 years ago

In my experience professionalising content creation (on youtube) hardly helps quality.

Usually they end up filming their cooking lessons hanging the latest Canon from a drone in their Dubai studio kitchen with nothing substantial left to say. Maybe people will stick around because they are still able to afford to outspend other creators on exotic ingredients and they're just looking for a familiar face to entertain them. I'm not familiar with cooking channels, but you'll see a lot of 'professional' music teachers on youtube eventually making an 'A=432 Hz' video. It's downright tragic how the urge to publish takes a hold of them.

They also usually will become clowns. Since people will stick around for the entertainment rather than educational value, I've seen a lot of professional content creators trying way too hard to be casual and approachable, incorporating idiosyncrasies and bloopers on purpose, then making fun of them. Eventually their video thumbnails will be them actually making funny faces.

It doesn't always have to be like that, and I'm not judging you for enjoying their content, just be aware that in the age of youtube you're soon dealing with basically corporations who couldn't care what they're selling, as long as they can keep selling it.

ceilingcorner2• 6 years ago

Perhaps there wouldn't be so many "content creators" if tech/the Internet hadn't destroyed their livelihoods over the past 20+ years. Authors, journalists, photographers, the list goes on and on.

"I wish people just made content for free" comments always seem to come from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.

vermilingua• 6 years ago

That may perhaps be because some of the best content also comes from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.

When people create content they are passionate about for a living, they a) often quickly lose that passion, and b) are more willing to compromise on the quality of their content in order to turn more profit (often through no fault of their own, but as a result of the exploitative nature of most content platforms).

onion2k• 6 years ago

The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.

It's all very well lamenting the Good Old Days of the web when the content was free and the adverts were few as if it's disappeared but it really hasn't. There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day. They do it for the love of publishing their thoughts. People still do that.

Two other things are different now though.

Firstly, our expectations changed. Unless someone is an "influencer" or a "thought leader" many people deem them not to be worth their time. We have a measure of quality and anything that falls below it gets ignored (or even ridiculed.)

Secondly, we stopped searching for content. Today people don't search the web for content. They go to a website where an algorithm curates "the best mashed potato recipes ever" in to a playlist or a listicle for them. It's not surprise at all that's the content produced by professional content marketing companies, and it's the stuff that has adverts on it.

bluntfang• 6 years ago

There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day.

I really don't think that it's possible given the engineering of those platforms. They are literally spending millions, if not billions, of dollars on addiction technology. To think that an individual can overcome that is naive and hubristic.

galoisgirl2• 6 years ago

That's nice, but this thread isn't about you then.

I'm following creators whose content takes days of research and making. They're not greedy for wanting to monetize this work, they just need to earn a living sometime.

dan00• 6 years ago

Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter.

Sure, it’s always the butter, there can’t be too much.

lukas099• 6 years ago

Want to share your mashed potato recipe?

npunt• 6 years ago

I wish we could just set a fixed monthly budget (e.g. $40/mo) and divide that among all the creators we wish to support. Then when we come across someone whose work we like, the question is simply "do I want to support this person's work?", and if so, they get a fraction of our budget.

Right now, rewards effectively make every membership a custom membership that requires users spend extra time considering their support and dollar amount. This type of decision doesn't scale when we all want to support dozens of creators.

I wrote a more detailed breakdown of this design here: https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-pla...

Dylan168073• 6 years ago

$5 adds up quickly but $1 adds up a lot slower. So far I haven't hit my budget for $1/month support, and over a big group it's enough to fund a lot.

11235813212• 6 years ago

$1 is not enough to qualify for the extra content many of these services are offering.

scrollinondubs• 6 years ago

@lawik not sure if you caught this the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563 <- that person proposes an interesting solution specifically in the context of supporting open source software that would seemingly address this fatigue phenomenon you experience: a monthly pool that you can apportion so it dilutes and supports the projects you choose. That way you set the total monthly contribution and then you're just carving that up. Assuming there was a simple enough one-click interface for doing so that could be one way to address this. Of course you'd have to get a critical mass of makers to adopt the standard in order for it to take off (or convince the Patreon's and Github's of the world to adopt it).

lawik• 6 years ago

Ah, yeah, I saw that. It could definitely be good for some cases. I think it would be good for GitHub and such. I think the incentives for fairly successful creators just isn't there. They'll get more from their dedicated fanbase. But I hope something like this shows up for and from GitHub, especially for businesses. I think a lot of dev-teams would like to portion out some stipend from their company on a monthly basis to support their dependencies. I'd do it privately too, for sure.

irrational2• 6 years ago

The only subscription I have is to Disney+ for the kids and even that I'm considering dropping. I have friends who have Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, whatever the paid version of YouTube is called, whatever streaming service has Star Trek, etc. It's gotten to the point where they are paying as much for those services as they do for cable.

makecheck• 6 years ago

It’s kind of depressing how some business models can just siphon money (like cable bills going up a few dollars every month forever until it’s hundreds), while others practically have to beg.

Apps that took literally years to write can ask for donations and get nothing, while a single bank’s overdraft fee probably nets more.

And now of course, we passed legislation to “help” businesses that somehow couldn’t even get money (despite applying the first day) because of greedier or more well-connected applicants.

This is a huge mess and it should be a massive priority for society to stop letting the leeches get away with this theft.

aj7• 6 years ago

Yeah, but just in time, the five-dollar-foot-long is back.

mrhektor• 6 years ago

"You are fighting uphill against a cultural expectation for things to be free on the web."

A great solution to this problem of "free", is to make things that are "better than free". Kevin Kelly explains it really well in his essay (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/), but TL;DR is that traits like Immediacy, Personalization and Interpretation play a very important role in getting people to pay for stuff. Software: Free, The manual: $10,000

jcun41283• 6 years ago

Kind of curious if there's a way to batch support... you put in a fixed amount of money/month and you can subscribe to multiple people, but your contribution gets divided... probably not viable due to transaction fees and somebody's like "oh great I got a penny"

lbotos• 6 years ago

I think this is what Brave is trying to do with attention tokens? I don't use it but I think that's what it's called.

jcun41283• 6 years ago

I see. I was thinking about Patreon/support like YouTubers but maybe they do something like that already/reason not to.

Freak_NL• 6 years ago

It would be a model I'm more comfortable with. Just set a fixed monthly fee, and let it be distributed automatically; with an option for me to review the monthly split to blacklist sites that try to game the system.

Lots of issues to solve before that becomes possible though. Either some company manages to deliver the dominant solution and skims their 30% off, or the technology behind it is too easy to abuse (great, now FAANG gets another letter), or it just leads to more mountains of crappy content that exist just to lure you in and hold your attention without actually delivering (leaving you dissatisfied).

palsir2• 6 years ago

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004503

jcun41283• 6 years ago

I can see the potential convenience of divisibility with crypto

octoberfranklin• 6 years ago

There is a lot of consideration in committing that recurring payment for .. indefinite duration.

It's (yet another) negative externality of the Anti-Money Laundering / Know Your Customer mania.

If it turns out that a drug cartel used one of these crowdfunding platforms, the government will kill/bankrupt the platform. Requiring recurring payments is the only reliable way to screen out prepaid gift cards, because prepaid gift card issuers are no longer allowed to process fixed-amount recurring payments.

Any other approach is EXTREMELY labor-intensive and still doesn't work 100% -- for example look at Amazon AWS, which devotes a huge amount of effort to playing this whack-a-mole game and yet still isn't 100% successful. AWS bills aren't the same dollar amount every month so they can't go this route.

Basically AML/KYC is Why We Can't Have Nice Things like micropayments or even one-time minipayments to individuals without something like Paypal where they randomly lock up your money for 180 days while demanding "papers please". AML/KYC simply does not scale down to micropayments or even near them. It's not about the payment processing technology, it's about the legal/regulatory burden.

thathndude• 6 years ago

Was just thinking of this yesterday as I listened to ATP (Accidental Tech Podcast - ATP.FM).

They're adding a members component to their podcast. Just $8/month. And they don't do the hard sell, but there are little perks.

I listen to at least 5-7 podcasts regularly. If they all do the same thing, it's close to my cable + Internet bill from just 10 years ago.

Now let's do streaming: Netflix + Disney+ and you spent another $20/month.

I just don't think this model is going to work in the long term. Who knows!

jdechko• 6 years ago

I listen to ATP as well, and I did end up joining their membership program. The author mentioned CGP Grey specifically, and Cortex, his podcast with Myke Hurley on relay.fm recently announced a $5 membership. Upgrade, with Jason & Myke also announced the same $5 membership. So I see where the author is coming from. At the same time all 3 podcasts for now say that just by listening, it supports the podcast through the old channels. I do get a little of that FOMO, but I don’t feel any guilt for not paying.

AnonC• 6 years ago

Tangent: I don’t have access to a computer right now to analyze this website more, but it’s blazing fast! Great work, author. I’d love to know more about the technology stack (seems like it’s hosted on AWS with CloudFront).

habosa• 6 years ago

I often try to support a creator and find out that monthly support is my only option ... which I am not willing to do.

Here are some ways we have always supported creators without subscriptions: I can buy a book, watch a movie in a theater, get a CD, attend a play, buy a painting, etc.

I'm still willing to do those things, I do them all the time. I'm still willing to spend a lot of money on those things. I am not willing to lay you $5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give you $100 one time for something really great.

HenryBemis• 6 years ago

What I am writing may not a good idea, but it works. Let's assume you like 12 patreon content creators. You can subscribe one month per year to each (1st-Jan, 2nd-Feb, and so on), binge consume the contenct they made for the past 12 months, and unsubscribe to them. This way you kick your FOMO habit, get to see what you enjoy.

I do this with TV series (in a way). I stopped watching Lost, HIMYM, and a few more, and then I binge watched in the end (in the very end). I watched the last 3 seasons of HIMYM and last 2 season of Lost like this. It was more an exercise to kick the FOMO habit, and avoid the 'agony' of waiting for the next episode to drop .

Most content creators give you access to all their past stuff.

Again, I know this may not be ethically "good", but it's part of the game of using patreon and other content sharing management services the way it better suits ME/YOU, than them.

In the scenario of enjoying 12 creators, you spread them out in the year, you spend $5 per month instead of 12*5= 60 per month. In the span of a decade, that adds up to a lot. And don't get me wrong, it's not about being cheap. If you feel bad, go and donate that saved $ in a charity. It's about controlling your time and your FOMO habit.

jillesvangurp2• 6 years ago

What's missing here is a netflix style model where your donations are distributed among people you want to support instead of having to micromanage donations.

I pay about ~30 euro per month for netflix, spotify, and amazon prime. So, it's not a stretch of the imagination that I would be willing to pay for (some) of the free content I enjoy on e.g. Youtube.

However, I follow dozens of youtubers asking for donations and while I like most of them, it's not going to add up to me handing out multiple dollars to each of them on a monthly basis because it would add up to vastly more than I spend on commercial content. And it's kind of unfair to single out just a few of them.

But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.

It would probably add up to just a few cents per personn I donate to; but if lots of people do that, it adds up. The deal with patreon is that you rely on a handful of people supporting you while you give away most of your content for free. IMHO most of that is unrealized potential for monetization.

Several youtubers I follow have numbers of followers and views that would put some tv channels to shame and they also get revenue from sponsorships. Several others are a bit more modest but still rake in tens to hundreds of thousands of views easily.

I'd love a platform that gives me a simple predictable cost per month combined with a fair, no hassle way to ensure that money gets funneled to artists, writers, coders, and other content creators I care about. Donating 10cents per month is not a thing and donating 1-10$ per month means I have to cherry pick people out of group of dozens to hundreds I might consider donating to but currently don't.

Nullabillity• 6 years ago

But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.

YouTube Premium?

addandsubtract• 6 years ago

flattr does exactly that. I never really caught on, though.

palsir2• 6 years ago

you will likely be interested in this comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004503

kelvin0• 6 years ago

This exactly.

You could pay your money to some entity that curates the creators and content you enjoy. This entity would then redistribute the payments among the creators.

You would go on that platform and create your own content 'bundle'. You could also choose from various pre-bundled categories : tech, science, self-help, cooking, music ...

You also would have the option to simply consume some content and pay for that 1 item (song,video,podcast,print or other content).

I would definitely go for that!

charwalker2• 6 years ago

Some media groups have done this but only for content under their umbrella like Rooster Teeth FIRST. If you follow a few RT groups, ten it likely pays for itself vs youtube premium as you get live and locked shows on the RT site.

I bet Patreon could take on a similar model, but I'm not sure how it would be curated. Who would bundle creators? Patreon, the creator(s), or the user(s)? I don't think Patreon would want to show bias by grouping anything. To support creators working together it might be really cool to see them create alliances and tag team projects. But I'd probably want to bundle them myself to hand pick who I support.

I only follow 1 Patreon user, a good (very talented) high school friend with a knack for explanation of musical concepts. He's brilliant on a guitar and I want others to see that.

ZephyrBlu• 6 years ago

I am not willing to lay you $5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give you $100 one time for something really great

What about indie hacker-type services?

GekkePrutser• 6 years ago

I'm exactly in that category.

I often donate fairly large amounts to open source projects I really like, or that are responsive to issues raised by me. Especially the small single-dev ones. Most of them also have patreons but I usually contact them on IRC or whatever and just wire the money directly to them (saving payment platform fees as well). Even though they don't offer this as an 'official' option, they never say no to $100 ;) Of course none of these have any 'paid members only' stuff as it's open source already.

However small regular amounts I'm not willing to do. My interests tend to fade quickly and I tend to forget about such subscriptions, leaving them to run much too long. It also stimulates never-finishing projects.

The same with good causes/NGOs, trying to sign you up on the street. They don't want money anymore, they want your bank details. They'll never get them. In their case I think the problem is just that they're becoming too commercialised. They're thinking and acting as big corporations, CEOs making too much money, having big marketing departments etc. They're not the 'grassroots' movements they once were, and as such I don't feel like sponsoring them anymore.

everdrive• 6 years ago

I don't mean this as a critique of the article, but it seems this is just the burden of so much choice. There is amazing, wonderful, life-changing content out there today. And, there's so much of it. It feels so overwhelming. It's just like the calorie problem that shot up in the 80s and 90s. There's too much of everything, and the only filter is ourselves.

And, much like the calorie problem most people never solved it. Most people are anywhere from a little fat to very fat. And, so it will be with content and distraction.

shadeslayer_• 6 years ago

Human beings need to understand that it is simply not possible for a large portion of people to live off their hobbies - there's a reason why they're called hobbies or passion projects to begin with.

bullen• 6 years ago

There is a malaise in the world and no matter what you call it money will flow in other directions now. You need to force the payment; optional or piratable walls are meaningless, that means you need to provide a service the people expect to pay for and some parts have to be closed!

I think 1$/month should be the goto value that we sponsor each other with.

The only way to get velocity in a deflation is to spend, but you need to get spent on more than you spend which requires inflation! Let's wait and see how the money will be distributed after the "easy dead tree" has been burned, just make sure you are prepared, things are going to get hard and accelerate down for the first time!

mnky9800n• 6 years ago

why cant the guy making videos just like sell tickets or something instead like for a normal movie?

jjice• 6 years ago

I've been trying to loosen up with my small subscriptions like this. Back when I became a consistent member of the internet and multiple communities on it, I was a middle school student with no money, and when I did have pocket change from mowing lawns, I had no way to exchange it online. I gravitated towards free content because of this. Even once I was working and had a bank account at 16, I still felt weird about committing to a subscription. Now that I keep my costs low and work full time, I have a disposable income that could be spent on these creators, but there are so many that I don't know where to put it. Should it go to the long time creators I've followed since those middle school days, or should I throw it towards the real underdogs right now?

There is only so much to go around from my pockets, and just like the author says, it adds up quickly.

praptak• 6 years ago

I can relate. If I were to imagine a perfect system for this it would be something that tracks whatever I subscribe and drops unused things, with some sensible safeguards not to drop something I don't actually want to drop.

rossdavidh• 6 years ago

I think it would be better if people allowed a Patreon "any amount you choose", which gets you...nothing. Just allows me to contribute however much I want, in exchange for the already freely available content. The advantage of it being Patreon is that the per-charge expense is spread among several creators who I am a patron of. I rarely take advantage of any of the "special content" for Patreon supporters, anyway, I'm just doing it to support people I like. Some of them, it's $1 a month, some it's $3 a month, and I don't want or expect anything from it except what they are already providing for free anyway.

gwbas1c• 6 years ago

I prefer crowdsourcing incomplete but defined works. I'm always happy to crowdsource an album on Kickstarter.

IMO, I'd prefer if Youtube / Spotify / ect had some kind of integration with Kickstarter or similar.

Five Buck Fatigue

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