On Patreon, you can pay Bob Dylan $5 a month to read his lectures, short stories and imagined “letters never sent” between historical figures, such as Fred Astaire and HG Wells. So far, so Dylan.
You might wonder why on earth a world-famous musician who sold his publishing catalogue to Universal for a reported $300m in 2020 is charging fans for his ramblings? Have the writing, narration or promotional material been created with the help of AI, as many have speculated? Perhaps the most pertinent question, however, is for the crowdfunding platform itself: do you need to be a superstar like Dylan—or other high-profile Patreon users like the artist and musician Amanda Palmer—with an existing mass audience to make a living on the platform these days?
The majority of Patreon accounts with the most paying members are still not run by celebrities, but these creators are experienced operators who followed a well-worn route to success that is now foreclosed to many new entrants. That trajectory looked like this: grow an audience organically on other platforms, such as YouTube, Spotify or Twitter, by giving away content very cheaply or for free. Then, once you’ve cultivated a loyal audience, upsell the most die-hard fans with the promise of exclusive paid content on your Patreon. This allowed some weird and wonderful niche creators to grow viable businesses—the accounts with the most-paid members on the platform contain everything from video essays to video game mods, to Dungeons and Dragons community podcasts, “adult VR games and simulations”, music reviews and much more.
The Patreon accounts that I have subscribed to over the years have all followed this formula. The podcast If Books Could Kill, for instance, has the fourth-most paid members on the platform, which it largely garnered organically via socials. Its co-host Michael Hobbes is very active online, and previously built another top-ranking podcast on Patreon—You’re Wrong About. The podcast Know Your Enemy, another favourite of mine in the top 100 for paid members on Patreon, bubbled up through the weird and wonky corners of the platform formerly known as Twitter before Elon Musk ruined it.
This formula worked for a while. When Patreon’s CEO Jack Conte and his co-founder Sam Yam launched the platform in 2013, it really did revolutionise the “creator economy”, giving musicians and podcasters a vital, and new, revenue stream. The subsequent podcasting boom would have been unlikely without the platform. Patreon was valued at $4bn when it last raised funding in 2021. Now it works with more than 300,000 creators and has paid them more than $10bn in total to date. And its imitators have proliferated—consider Substack (more on that later) and OnlyFans, which was originally intended as a cross-genre competitor but has since become a highly successful “Patreon for porn”.
But Patreon’s old business model is now severely threatened, as listeners no longer need to navigate to a different app to access a musician or podcaster’s exclusive content—Apple and Spotify now offer creators this option too, and often at a lower price point. Some of the world’s biggest podcasts, such as Goalhanger’s The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics, have opted for such in-app monetisation.
And it is now much harder for creators to cultivate consistent audiences on social networks in the first place. Conte, a member of the bands Pomplamoose and Scary Pockets, was motivated to found Patreon to help fellow artists make a living online. He made a video essay for the New York Times in November in which he argued that the websites and apps that once helped us find new music, journalism, podcasts and art have become increasingly unhelpful.
Consider the quiet death of the “follow” button. Once, your social media feeds were mostly posts by people you followed, with a smattering of additional posts the algorithm would suggest based on content you were consuming. Now the balance has reversed. Our feeds are dominated by what the tech giants think we’ll like, instead of what we’ve told them we want to see. They push some content because they’ve been paid by businesses to do so, and other posts because they think they will keep us on the platform, viewing more ads.
As anyone who has spent time on a feed recently knows, this suggested content doesn’t necessarily seem important or useful, but it can often be shocking or salacious enough to activate our addictive impulses. Instead of jukeboxes, social media platforms have become slot machines. As Conte told Wired: “what you end up with is stuff that you pay attention to, instead of stuff that has value… hacking the human limbic system and A/B testing your way to the bottom of someone’s brain stem and figuring out what will suck them in.”
The decreasing visibility on feeds of the accounts that people actually follow has made it much harder for creators to sustain their businesses. Even when they establish a connection with a new fan, it is increasingly difficult to sustain that connection on mainstream platforms, as their content shows up in a diminishing proportion of their fans’ feeds. As a musician himself, Conte fears that, if left unchecked, this algorithmic change could kill culture.
To provide an alternative, Conte now wants Patreon to be a place where people can discover new creators too. So the platform is rolling out new features such as tweet-like posts called Quips, which are now available to most of the site’s creators and nearly 80 million users.
Could this ultimately make Patreon emulate the very platforms Conte has criticised? Perhaps, but it’s not likely, because the company operates with different incentives than most major social media platforms. Whereas Facebook, Instagram and X try to keep you scrolling so that they can show you more ads, Patreon doesn’t run any advertising—it only gets paid if users choose to purchase subscriptions from creators (from which Patreon takes a 5 to 12 per cent cut, depending on a creator’s chosen plan on the platform).
Patreon is hardly the first company to go down this route—indeed, it is playing catch-up with its biggest rival, Substack. While the former has traditionally dominated among musicians, artists and podcasters, the latter has become the preferred home of writers. But each company is now competing for the other’s turf—Patreon has recently announced new newsletter features for writers, for instance, while Substack has been steadily improving its audio and video functionality.
Substack’s additional advantage, however, is its discovery features. On the platform is a sizeable community of readers (and listeners and viewers) who can discover writers’ work there, via the X-like Substack Notes feed and the newsletter recommendations system. Such features have become especially important since Musk took over Twitter (now X). He suppressed the visibility of posts with links to external websites (particularly Substack), making it much harder for writers to grow an audience there and then convert them into newsletter subscribers elsewhere. (X has purportedly backtracked on its suppression of external links, but many users still report lower engagement and click-through rates compared to before Musk’s takeover.) Similar to Patreon’s business model, Substack only gets paid if its creators do (it takes a 10 per cent cut), so the platform’s algorithm is also geared around helping you discover things you might engage with more deeply.
Substack is, however, vulnerable to challengers, especially Patreon. Some writers, for instance, feel uncomfortable about the platform’s minimal approach to moderation, with far-right and neo-Nazi content allowed to remain on the platform (albeit with suppressed visibility). Conte has raised this point of comparison directly, telling the Ankler last year, “Patreon doesn’t allow that kind of stuff, which I’m very proud of. That’s been one selling point.”
Accordingly, Patreon is now directly poaching some of Substack’s top talent. Writer Anne Helen Petersen, for instance, whose newsletter had been a high performer on Substack, has moved it to Patreon, saying, “I don’t want to make money for founders who refuse to draw a line about platforming hate speech.” And she had other criticisms: “I don’t want to serve as a one-person IT department for my readers and listeners who can’t resolve their account problems because Substack’s ‘support’ has been reduced to a bot. I don’t want to constantly fight Substack’s inclination to turn ‘readers’ into ‘followers’ who live on their app.”
Patreon has also secured a partnership deal with media company Vox, which will use its platform for distributing its existing podcasts and videos, as well as new subscriber-only Vox content.
Not all of the platform’s user feedback is positive, however. Tech writer Taylor Lorenz, who distributes her newsletter on Substack and Patreon, has complained that Patreon’s “community guidelines” are too strict, inhibiting the ability of writers to discuss controversial topics. “How is any tech journalist supposed to build an audience online when the topics we write about like porn, violence, politics, etc are deemed ‘unsafe’?” she posted on Substack.
So Patreon has little choice but to try to beat the social media giants—and Substack—at their own game. Across platforms, artificial intelligence is now supercharging the worst impulses of the algorithm, presenting highly engaging but ultimately meaningless slop content at an unprecedented scale. Some users will be sucked into their TikTok and Instagram feeds like never before—but others will become increasingly disillusioned and look for alternatives.
