Patreon Reversing Its Fee Decision, Yay!

Not sure I understand why it was such a huge deal to begin with, but as long as everyone is happy. 👍

So happy, this news actually gave me the kickstart I needed I thought I had pledged ages ago haha so while I was listening to this weeks podcast I was able to sign in and join the community :)

For the record Jim I would've kept supporting you anyway. Merry Christmas!

Repledged because I don't want to hurt the creators I support. But Patreon really should understand that they are not just providing a service to creators but also to the patrons who are looking for avenues to support them - and that they can't just pamper to creators and think we patrons are going to eat everything. For the creators it's about income - for us patrons is about aggregation.

Sperber

The free market has spoken! Whoo hoo!

Lance Snead

Repledged as well. Good thing that consumers that talk with their wallets are the loudest.

Good.

Repledged.

Jan Henning Peters

Thank you for great content and videos. I'm a new pledger. :)

Thunderella

"Thank you all, so very much, for your continued support. " - or, in my case, repledged support ;) Hooray!

Alexander Moon

Just signed up to support you because I was worried you may lose subs for your honesty and for frankly who you are, but you have my support now none the less. Thanks for showing integrity in everything you do.

I say not to trust these Patreon shits. Jim, the second you jump ship, I will follow you. Once more unto the breach!

Its a shame some creators already lost patreons due to this service's incompitence. Will the creators get their patreons back? Who knows. Its already hurt ppl and that pisses me off

If you open an account on MakerSupport, I'll support you there. I guess a whole ton of other people who already left will also do the same. It wouldn't hurt to have two accounts going anyway. I think it would be unwise to have all your eggs in one basket. Having two baskets open not only increases your chance of getting donation, but well. It's obviously safer having options open. The constant threat of creators jumping ship, should hopefully keep Patreon to its word since it is no longer a monopoly on donation services. Now if only the same theory could be applied to youtube....

like semi-feral barn cats in a dairy i am sure

zosa

golly, dude i am glad they reversed it for sure though, several of my favorite creators are either only on patreon or are using a service that i can't use as well(aside from twitch, i just don't understand twitch), for sure though i know i personally did not have happy things to say with my paltry few pledges so i am sure there were people out there who really tore int them for much bulkier hikes

zosa

The whole thing was very strange. ...It's like they got successful by accident and didn't understand how.

Andy

Being someone who works for a Silicon Valley company, they probably did ask people, but had a NDA on them. That'd be the smart thing to do. In fact, I bet you dollars to donuts this concept probably arose from some Patreon creators wanting a bigger slice of the pie, causing the PM of finance to consider cutting the cost at the expense of the consumer. It's a move that specifically targets the end-user, and when faced with the decision, cutting out the smaller spenders probably seemed like a good idea at the time. They knew that it wouldn't be a hit with the folks spending $1 a month on porno creators, so they wouldn't, couldn't, and shouldn't ask the fanbase what their takeaway would be.

Orphansmith

This. I don't think Patreon is a company that was out to scam people out of extra dollars. They also knew that changing the formula would make people uncomfortable, but they probably assumed the bigger spenders would stick around, meaning more money for creators and Patreon in the long run. I don't think there should be all this hand-wringing and grimacing over a bad idea by good people. I wouldn't be surprised if too much schadenfreude creates a chilling effect on Patreon towards its creators in the future. It's all a two way street.

Orphansmith

I get the hazard of banking fee transactions, and all those one dollar transactions would be a killer in fees. But the thing is..... this came out of nowhere, with nobody having had any input. Patreon is a community. They like to know what's going on and maybe even have some discussion. Nobody likes being blindsided.

Trevor Bond

Yes! Thank God for that (& Jim Sterling). There was a bright side to this whole thing though. This whole situation caused a few creators to show their true colors. YouTubers who I respected, who are all too happy to rail against the anti consumer practices of companies like EA and Activision suddenly became sleazy used car salesmen when their money was on the line. One genuinely surprising and disappointing revelation was Gareth from Pretty Good Gaming. They were the first creator I ever donated to on Patreon. Gareth spends 10 minutes at the start of their most recent podcast video (#42), defending, obfuscating and White Knighting for Patreon. He wants to make sure to “clear up the misconceptions that Patreon is greedy He “explains” that the real reason Patreon did this is to “solve the problem of Patrons getting double charged when they sign up and at the first of the next month.” He doesn’t want people canceling “based off false information that Patreon is being greedy”. He even sits there and tries to convince all the $1 patrons that to “save money” they should just donate $12 at once. He says, “If you think about it, it makes it worth your while to donate more. Why bother with $1, you might as well donate $5 now eh? or $10? We have the $1 and $5 tiers but you could donate $100 a month if you want.” I’m sure he’s mostly kidding about the $100 but everything else is just gross. The whole time he’s doing his used car salesman routine, Mike is looks absolutely pissed off. Then Mike says “I completely understand if anyone decides to stop donating.” Gareth then says “but it really does help support the channel and it alleviates the pressure of us having to rely on the YouTube AdSense. It’s like a fallback.” He keeps stressing that how much they rely on their Patreon money and how “It’s only 0.35 added to your $1 donation.” Mike goes on to say, “Thank you so much if it’s ever even crossed your mind to donate. That’s the bottom line innit? Thank you to everyone who does do it. Thank you to everyone who’s donated and left. And thank you to anyone who sticks around despite the changes.” The video is only available to Patrons until Thursday, but it’s worth a watch if you already watch their stuff. It’s not even the $0.35, it’s more the sleaziness that this whole thing brought out of people. That’s one of the reasons I respect people like Jim Sterling so much, even if I disagree with him on a lot of things. He never tries to guilt or manipulate his viewers into giving him money. I see creators threatening their viewers all the time with “I’m going to stop making videos if I don’t make more money” line.

This episode was pretty weird, but I think Patreon is actually a pretty small business, and probably cannot afford a whole lot of employees, and so may only be thinking in small terms; It's good (for the future) that co-equal relationship has been established early on. What's truly sad is that its model hasn't taken off into the stratosphere, and that's on us all. Still--WTF. There's something wrong with Silicon Valley culture. I work in computers and want nothing to do with the place. Even if Patreon's imagination is really so small, this should have resolved itself on Friday.

Michael

Un-subbed due not to anything you did, but to protest their fee change (and state that as a reason). Re-subbed immediately, and am very glad it didn't hit a single billing cycle. Thank god for Jim Fucking Sterling Son!

According to something I heard earlier, Kickstarter is planning their own pateron-esque thing. Might be something to look to.

Faelyke

@Jonathan Green. Another medieval/HEMA channel that I missed. I hope I will be able to support you on patreon in not too distant future. For now I am following you here and have subscribed to your channel on Youtube. Will keep watching your so far great videos :-) Keep up the good work

TheNetsrac

Happy for everyone including myself. They listened to reason!

Legeden

5 people in a boardroom saying no doesn't compare to 500,000+ people saying no with their wallets. :/

Zeroabsl

It was a bad move, and perhaps a bad move that they should have recognized before they made it. But at least they listened. Within tolerances, I'd rather work with a company that made a few more mistakes but was willing to listen and recognized their error and moved to correct it than one that made fewer mistakes but insisted they were infallible.

Kraken

I know I'm likely being a softie here, but I genuinely believe that Patreon actually just screwed up. The issues Patreon raised in the original fee post are quite valid. Whatever analytics they based their decision on were *Skeleton Warriors* though. I know with EA and Bungie and such, we are all dismissive of apologies from companies, and rightfully so! However, I'm willing to give Patreon the benefit of the doubt on this one. As Spiderman so elegantly puts it, "Everybody gets one."

Translation of the Patreon announcement: "Sorry, we didn't anticipate an actual backlash on a nearly 40% transaction fee on the majority of our transactions. We didn't expect you all would be willing to go some place else. We thought our content providers would be lazy and not set up alternatives. Shitshitshitshitshit... please come back. We really need those $1 and $2 microtransactions..." I'm waiting for the next iteration of a Patreon pay to pay scam to come out. Likely it'll be in the form of some sort of service fee on donors. Don't expect this to go away. The Patreon execs have smelled the allure of easy money and are not going to back down from finding some way to milk as much as they can from these microtransactions.

Really great news. Joining your Patreon today as thanks, Jim! Here's to hoping that Patreon doesn't try something like this again in the future!

Yeah, Jim, I feel the same way. It's shaken my faith in them, but I still _want_ to use them as a service.

"I am disappointed that once again this information is coming to me first from a creator that I support rather than Patreon itself" ... Patreon sent an email on December 7, but of course the wording they chose was an attempt to spin it in a way that made them look like the good guys.

WhiskeyJoe

This is why creators should diversify and have more than one donation platform. I for one would be happy to leave patreon with some of its controversies this year as soon as creators start giving another good option.

I'm glad they decided to roll this back (should've never happened in the first place), though I am disappointed that once again this information is coming to me first from a creator that I support rather than Patreon itself

Nicholas Poer

Back on the boat. yeah!

So glad to see them come to their senses. I may n ot contribute much to those i follow, but it woukd feel like abandoning some very nice folks when they need us to just stop contributing.

Ravin

I am glad it all worked out. I bumped up my pledge another $1 a month because I figure that those could help a little extra probably should, given that a lot of people would pulling back their pledges. Even given the news I won't be pulling back.

I was literally JUST about to cancel all my $1 monthly contributions when I read this.....

Well thank God for that! I'd rather lose some of my income to fees than see small scale patrons run away screaming.

Pc Genie

I didn't speak up with words, but I did delete all of my $1 pledges, which was about half of my total pledges. I'm sure I was not alone. As they say, actions speak louder than words.

WhiskeyJoe

Just checked my profile. It has been three years now.... I... I think you were my first Jim ;-D

TheNetsrac

Looks like I would have been back shortly anyway if I did protest cancel lol. Hopefully people are aware and come back to support. Hell, it might even get you more with patreon being a bit further in the lime light due to their stupidity.

Glad that they changed their mind (for now anyway). If they had gone through with the changes, I would have needed to stop supporting quite a few of good people here. As someone living in the EU, I am already paying a +25% VAT for each pledge. The added fee would have been to much for someone in my financial situation. Cheers and keep being awesome Jim

TheNetsrac

Absolutely! And Patreon now knows that they can be replaced. No one supports an artist because they have a Patreon; they use Patreon because they want to support an artist.

Ray Cornwall

Awesome! I sent a carefully worded message to Patreon letting them know that while the changes don't impact *me* significantly, I understand that they impact others (and creators) enough that I would happily follow creators to other funding platforms: I made it clear that I am loyal to the creators of the media I love, not the funding platform itself.

Dan

There are definite problems that Patreon will need to solve. But they now know of the unique connection Patreon campaigns have with their supporters, and that HAS to factor in their decisions going forward or they'll fail.

Jim Sterling

To be fair, the issue of how to deal with credit card processing fees will eventually have to be dealt with. I wasn’t in love with their solution, but I understood the motivation. I expect there will be a further attempt to deal with this issue at a later date.

Ray Cornwall

YAY! Now I can support one of my new favorite YouTubers!

Zeke

Always, ALWAYS have a plan B. My entire career has survived off of B plans. There's a reason I didn't move 100% of my content to Patreon.

Jim Sterling

I guess a lot of people will start looking into having a Plan B now...just in case.

barefootwalk