Patreon Problems | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

This week, we’ve been making incredible progress on the next video.

As I mentioned towards the end of my last Friday Update, the video is going to be about Patreon, its rise and (potential) fall.

The platform on which you’re currently reading this post has had a huge impact on what’s sometimes called the “creator economy”. It has no doubt made huge swathes of cultural works (particularly online cultural works) possible which otherwise would have been financially unviable.

But, lately, it’s been in some trouble.

Ever since it first launched, Patreon’s founders, Jack Conte and Sam Yam, have enthusiastically embraced a Silicon Valley start-up model in which companies take on huge sums of Venture Capital investment with a view to achieving an astronomical stock valuation and selling their stock off during a sensational IPO (an Initial Public Offering, the event whereby a start-up first becomes publicly-traded on a stock exchange).

This did particularly well for the company during the pandemic, when lots of people being sat at home either consuming or creating work online saw the company boom in popularity. But, since the worst stages of COVID-19 passed, the company’s growth has slowed significantly.

With the company having lost 80% of its value and far fewer new creators joining the site, it’s found itself in a bit of a tailspin where it needs to look for more (and more effective) ways to extract revenue from the creators (and supporters) already on the site.

The video aims to take as complete a look at Patreon as possible, starting from the very beginning with its launch, through to the present day. It aims to not only provide a critical look at Patreon, but also at how Venture Capital institutions alter the course of how online platforms develop.

I think it’s a fun little piece and will hopefully lead to some interesting conversations!

And outside of work?

The update from Wife-Guy Era-Tom is that my sourdough starter is now home to some pretty active natural yeasts and I’ve successfully made both a loaf of sourdough bread and a bunch of sourdough crumpets. It’s been incredibly hot in South West England these past few days which has made judging proofing times etc. a little bit tricky as the warmth just massively accelerates the speed at which the yeast acts. But both my wife and sister-in-law who lives with us are, I think, appreciating getting to eat my bread-y experiments.

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

Over the past few years, I’ve not read quite as much fiction as I once did. Work always tends to very much take over. Either I spend my evenings reading books for videos I’m planning on making or, if I’ve spent the day reading documents and taking notes, I don’t really have the same mental capacity for reading in the evening!

However, I’m trying to build-in a bit more time to read fiction over the next few months. I actually find that it often provides a surprising amount of inspiration for my work. Rather than loading-up on more facts (as non-fiction often results in me doing), I find that spending some time with a well-written novel provides me with new perspectives which encourages me to take new analytical views on the world.

This week, I devoured John le Carré’s A Murder of Quality. The book is the second in the George Smiley series of books (which later includes the more famous Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). I read the first last year at some point and had been hoping to continue on to read them all. But the best laid plans…

Anyway, the book is on one level a murder mystery and, on a deeper level, an exploration of the British class system; and particularly of the fading dreams of the 20th century ruling class.

A perfect example of how fiction can not only be enjoyable but also an insight into the structure of feeling at a given historical moment.

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!