Not so fast. People have said this about gittip (now Gratipay), Patreon, Twitch, and now YouTube and Facebook. All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly: https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-pa...
"After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time job itself. I’d spend hours combing through photos, looking back on notes I’d taken on the road, researching where I’d been. I’d post on Twitter and Instagram with teasers, free stories, anything to attract my followers to my Patreon page. I made friends on the site, I shared their projects on my own social media, and kept up with all my subscribers’ projects. It was a lot of work for little pay, but I was determined. A year later my monthly earnings on Patreon have grown from $120 to $163."
$163 a month in extra income? Cool, right? Not when you spend 5+ hours a week thinking about it.
If GitHub gets a lot of participation it will be unsustainable to only take a little on top of a credit card processing fee, and the fee it will be increased to be more like Facebook's 30% cut. There are plenty of articles on here about the costs and difficulties of running a payment platform.
I think that whole article is a pretty shallow take, accusing Patreon of things that are not Patreon's fault (and I say this as someone who thinks Patreon is shady).
Yes, people who make some stuff that takes a lot of time and effort might not get a lot of money on Patreon. But you know what? They're doing what everybody else is doing.
I feel that nowadays everything want to think of themselves as "creators". They'll create a few photos, some drawings, put it out there, and expect to get paid.
Maybe it's just my 3rd-world-country upbringing, but I think that's a BS expectation. Real world living is tougher than that; the online public is already drowning in "creative" content, and producing more of the same is not going to give you an income.
Some of these people might be pretty talented, but that's not enough. If you're simply doing what everybody is doing and bringing nothing of actual value to your sponsors, there's not much you'll get back. Spending 16 hours a day doing basket weaving and posting it on YouTube is not worth much.
This is a similar picture of what happens on Twitch, or Instagram. Everybody thinks they can be a successful streamer, or an influencer. The reality is, just a tiny percentage of people make money doing that, either by sheer luck, some almighty external influence, or because of a niche interest they seem to fill. This is not Twitch, or Instagram's fault either.
I applaud GitHub because this is a way for people to almost passively support developers they want to. I know there's plenty of devs whom I've benefitted from their work. I'd loved to have a way to support them, even if just a little bit.
I don't think most devs would expect to become professional-code-warriors-for-sponsors. That's the wrong rabbit to _chase_. But having a bit of an extra income for a beer or tea or two on some OS project they work on is nice.
I jumped right into that, didn't it? Goes to show my ignorance about the world of basket-weaving and its aficionados, and what I consider to be "niche". I'll need to adjust my examples in the future...
You're kind of agreeing with them though aren't you? It might seem like a really useful feature but, like Patreon, it might not be worth the time and effort for anyone.
You're just a lot more focussed on making us all believe it's the persons fault somehow.
"You're just a lot more focussed on making us all believe it's the persons fault somehow."
Fault is awfully subjective so I'll leave that be. It is definitely their responsibility, though.
I've got a family friend currently making some dangerously stupid business decisions, where the best-case upside is that they'll make minimum wage or so, and the realistic worse case is bankruptcy and losing everything they've made in the past several years and dealing with the resulting financial fallout, when they have numerous other alternatives available including sticking to their ~$20/hr skilled job with decent career prospects and good long-term security. (I don't object to the risk itself; I object to taking for a max payoff worse than their current position. I'll also add to forstall the usual HN comments that this isn't being done for any other of the reasons that people around here might still make that decision; not a whisper of "being your own boss" or anything like that.)
There's no Silicon Valley whipping horses in this story, this is just plain ol' fashioned "not understanding business", or "not allowing your comprehension of the monetary situation to penetrate down to the actions you choose to make". Is it their fault? Oh, I can make all kinds of excuses for why that's not the case; there's all kinds of personal drama I'm not laying out here driving these decisions that I can deflect with.
But is it their responsibility? Yes, and there's nothing anybody can particularly do about that. Their name on the relevant mortgage. Their name on the relevant papers. Their credit score on the line.
It's your responsibility to make business decisions sensible enough to accomplish your life's goals, and there's just not much that can be done about that.
> There's no Silicon Valley whipping horses in this story
When Patreon says this to the press: "Finally, ‘starving’ and ‘artist’ no longer need to be joined at the hip"
...they're inviting scrutiny.
There's nothing wrong about setting that target, it just is really outlandish. If that motivates them, good for them. But there are millions of starving artists, and a company that makes a serious dent in that problem would have to be enormous.
Who’s making a living on Patreon? The same people who make a living on Kickstarter, or via “gift” transfers through PayPal (before that was clamped down upon): people who can pull in whale patrons/backers.
Certain verticals have more whale patrons than others. The common story is that if you’re an artist and you want to go where the whale patrons are, that’s—for some reason—art targeting the furry subculture. That’s as true for patronage as it is for doing commissions.
It’s unlikely that you can just do what you’re doing and make a living off of Patreon; but if you want to shape what you’re doing based off of what will attract wealthy patrons, it’s pretty easy to find niches where your skills will translate to dollars.
I patronize several people who literally make their living on Patreon (and YouTube), and it doesn't look like "whales" are necessary. Take LGR: currently making just over $6k/mo on pateron which is $72k/year, or $68k with an assumed 5% cut for Patreon. Depending on where you live that's already a reasonable income for a single person household, and he presumably makes some YouTube money on top of that. That money comes from 2808 patrons, making an average contribution of just over $2 each.
You're unlikely to make a fortune on Pateron without "whales" but a living can be had if you can build a decent audience. Though, that isn't out of line with the "It’s unlikely that you can just do what you’re doing and make a living off of Patreon" sentiment at all, as LGR puts a lot of work into his videos.
If you already have a million YouTube subscribers (LGR apparently has 1.3MM), you can certainly translate that fanbase into patronage, vis. “wealth by a thousand cuts.” There’s existing, pent-up demand (guilt?) to give you money for all the stuff you’ve already provided for free.
But if you’re that much of an “influencer” already, with that large an audience, then you’re likely already making money off of ads run on your content, and you’re likely already being offered plenty of sponsorship opportunities that you could take advantage of in place of—or alongside—pursuing patronage. (At a certain size, you even get offered to just have your name stuck on products as a brand. I know there are a good number of beauty and fashion “influencers” who end up—with no more effort than signing a contract—getting beauty/fashion products co-branded, and make royalties off of that.)
I’m more talking about what you have to do to make money off of Patreon if you aren’t starting with a built-in audience of potential subscribers. If you want to build that audience, directly through Patreon (i.e. via word-of-mouth of your subscribers, with no public presence), then you need whales, and you need a niche. It becomes something very similar to making money off of commissions, except that you can make more than a 100% return on any particular commission, relative to what you’d have made if you just did it as a work-to-order for the person who suggested it.
I'm a YouTuber in the IT field. Nearly 20 million views in all, 40,000 students on Udemy and 122,000 subscribers. Anecdotal, but I don't mess with Patreon, it doesn't work for me.
You are right about the sponsorships, ad's, affiliates and merch deals being where the money is for YouTubers.
I was friends in high school with someone who now makes a full-time income from Patreon. It absolutely can be done.
That said, it isn't their only source of income. They do live shows all around the world, in-person meetups (also around the world), sell books & DVDs and manage an online store. They work extremely hard, travel a lot & are extremely passionate about what they do.
[I have no special insight into their success, but I would guess that mastering social skills and relentlessly doing in-person meetups & meeting people after shows is part of it. They are definitely not hiding behind a laptop keyboard. I know I'm personally more likely to support a musician I've met and have a personal connection with.]
We are ignoring something between whales and normal people. I believe the $2 trend is due to the expectation of subscription services. People see $2 as a reasonable exchange of what Netflix or Spotify would charge (for an individual show).
Average patrons might be willing to donate $100 a year if they understood they were allowing art or research to exist instead of just paying for market-rate viewership. This type of donation would allow 1,000 dedicated followers to support a niche cause instead of the lowest common denominator stuff creators like Pewdiepie has to put out to amass millions of fans.
>> "that’s—for some reason—art targeting the furry subculture."
Furry has a lot of people in well-compensated jobs who don't go for the trappings usually associated with having lots of money. So they spend thousands on commissions and conventions instead of gadgets.
I think that's the case with most of my own patrons. They'd rather spend $1/3/5 on some unusual music or reading new pulpy adventures instead of blowing it on something disposable.
"Furries make the internets go", as the saying goes. I've met more furries accidentally through software and infosec projects than through anything else, to the point that I don't really bother separating it from my professional identity anymore.
I don't know how everyone else uses patreon, but I don't even look at the garbage people post on their patreon. I'm subscribed literally only to support the work they are actually doing. Not their progress updates.
I only support two people through Patreon, but this is how I use it, too. I never actually go to their Patreon pages, or bother with any of the special "Patreon benefits" they may offer.
I just want to give them some money, nothing more.
I've noticed that when a side project becomes a Patreon project, suddenly more time is spent with community involvement; blog posts, live streams, etc. Even $100 a month creates this implicit reporting obligation to keep the community in the loop, which might end up eating time that might be spent doing something else. It might also burn out a more introverted developer.
You'd deal with the same problem if you received $100 through a donation button. People would start saying things like "I didn't pay $5 for you to take a leave of absence for a month!" or "I paid $5 and you aren't going to implement my request?"
Many developers, IMO, actively ignore their community (close issues, ignore pull requests) and take their project the direction they want to without external interference. (and this is their divine right)
However I think this implicit obligation you refer to would keep projects open.
Stats like "2%: The percentage of Patreon creators who earn more than the federal minimum wage through the site" are pretty meaningless when there's zero barrier to signing up and asking people to fund your hobby.
People shouldn't be misled into have unreasonable expectations of how easy it is to make a living this way, but I'm not sure how much of that is Patreon's fault. It's a platform, you still have to create the value and attract customers.
I am wary of the excitement as well, but there's a bit difference: corporations. Spending $20/month on a patreon is entirely different than spending the same on a library I make heavy use of at my job. I can easily convince my boss to do that; that type of money isn't even "noise" for most companies!
$20 is less than a drop in the bucket, but $20 dollars for essentially a donation is another matter. For the companies that already contribute monetarily to open source, I don't think much changes. The unfortunate reality is that for companies who don't, not much changes.
In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month.
For the kind of dollar values most github supporters are working in (probably in the range of less than $1000/year) - a single yearly lump sum would be easier to expense directly on a corporate card rather than getting accounting involved monthly.
> In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month.
This has been my experience, too. I suspect it has to do with how budgets are allocated.
A large expenditure request follows a different path and will probably get seriously examined and specially budgeted for.
A small one only needs the approval of the department manager, and it will come directly out of the budget that's already been allocated. This means that it is an expense that manager will actually feel, and is more likely to simply be denied.
Fully agree with that. And that's why I love github that much. I got two sponsors from github-as-official-company already. It's apparently easy there to get that microbudget approved.
Perhaps that person's content just wasn't very good. Just because it took a lot of work doesn't make it quality worth paying for. The individual failed at creating a travel blog capable of financial support.
"My dog is very cute, so I figured I should capitalize on that." Then the person launches into a rather simplistic rant about how patronage used to work.
"I was a freelance photographer in Chicago" Yep and so is every third person in Chicago.
Don't really know how a single anecdotal experience can be used to extrapolate the value of the concept. This is about pay per value. If enough people value something and have enough ethical principle, they'll contribute. You can make a lot money if you add value to people. I pay $5 a month to a Fitness coach who posts amazing videos on youtube for free. It's valuable to me, so I return the favor. If someone falls on the street, we rush over help them up. The same concept needs to start applying for development.
I'd be up for automated payment suggestions in the corner of the page based on how much I've viewed or used the content, since I've so far sporadically chipped in a few bucks to youtubers. I'd like to be more even handed with my support.
There were these sort of reminders in the shareware, which was when I was young and didn't have much coin to chip in but it did present a good reminder every time I started the application. They'd even delay you 30 seconds before loading some of the apps if you were freeloading too often. Gosh, shareware, those were the days...
> If GitHub gets a lot of participation it will be unsustainable to only take a little on top of a credit card processing fee, and the fee it will be increased to be more like Facebook's 30% cut. There are plenty of articles on here about the costs and difficulties of running a payment platform.
I don't think Github is here for the money but for fortifying their position as the place where software is.
The difference here is that companies are already paying GitHub to host private repos, so it's part of their monthly payment flow. With simple nudges toward sponsorship, many companies will chuck in an extra few bucks toward the projects that they build their codebase on top of.
I, and a lot of other people, cannot get accounting at where I work to cut a check for that kind of sponsorship. I can get accounting to cut checks for things that matter. Typically if someone asks what's the difference between paid and free, and you answer, it supports Active Directory, you're most of the way there if you can show a business need for the product. But just a straight-up donation? It's a hard sell.
It's only a hard sell if you have to run it by accounting. But this is the kind of thing that I would have happily just expensed. It's a known vendor, and if I'm dropping $20/month on some vague software expense, nobody will care.
Note also that the product lets people "choose from multiple sponsorship tiers, with monthly payment amounts and benefits that are set by the sponsored developer." That opens up much bigger pots of money. E.g., a premium support tier is totally justifiable for software that I'm building key code on. That could be $25-100/month, no problem.
And there's a reason conferences sell sponsorships: lots of businesses see it as good marketing to support things that are visible and important to a community. For example, I could totally justify a big-dollar project sponsorship ($1k-5k/year) as a recruiting expense if I want to hire people who already know something important to our work.
> It's a known vendor, and if I'm dropping $20/month on some vague software expense, nobody will care.
If you said the money is going to GitHub, and it's actually going through GitHub, that's lying.
I think it will probably show up differently on credit card statements anyway, so people won't be tempted to do this behind the backs of the accounting department.
Could you imagine getting audited and your boss finding out you donated $xxxx dollars in donated patronage to others? I would not want to be the one in that room...
As with any expense, you should have a good business reason for it. But I think there's a strong business case for businesses supporting open source software that's key to that business.
Either way, it's $20 on some vague software expense. Nobody will care. Worst case, the boss somehow says, "What's this $20 charge" and I explain why I though there was a good business reason for us to support that project.
You're thinking in terms of this first announcement (large sponsorships). I'm thinking about the next step in the process, which is more like Patreon.
GitHub will know two very interesting data points: the relationship graph between projects and dependencies and the sponsorship level of those dependencies. Combine that with Issue and PR activity, and it could therefore identify which highly-depended-upon projects need funds the most and nudge accordingly.
"Did you know that you and 2,500 other codebases depend on $lib.js? Why not pledge $25 to support its development?" That sort of thing.
Exactly. I was looking a creating a business that was something like Patreon for open source devs. Github already has 98% of what they need for this business. The marginal cost of this is a rounding error for them.
More than that, it's an excellent differentiator for their business, so then can justify all the GitHub Sponsors expenses just as marketing budget. Other people have been replicating the "nice web front-end for Git" part of their business. But this turns GitHub's large audience into a potential revenue source, which will be very hard for other people to duplicate.
> All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly
Sure, all experiences are not positive, especially when you view it through a micro lens. But if you view this through a macro lens on software development in general, just as if you view YouTube content producer monetization on consumable video at an industry level, you'll find that non-traditional financial monetization of these digital efforts has a significant impact on what was there previously.
Most developers for popular open source projects are already engaged with their audience. I don't feel that their level of engagement with their community is going to change based on my 1st hand experience with something like OpenCollective. Both of the projects that I've tipped haven't changed the way they communicate. It's the same whether or not you donated.
What you're describing isn't a problem at least for open source developers. There's no significant extra work for them if they want donations aside from posting a line of text and a link. Now with Github, it's even easier since it's baked in.
I have seen shifts from Youtube to Patreon as the primary means of support (Adpocalypse), so I'm surprised you list Youtube as a successor to Patreon instead of the other way around.
Patreon by no means should be expected to guarantee you find backers. They (and services like them) make it easy to concentrate on your content/creation, and less on the nitty-gritty details of how to collect your patrons' money. That doesn't mean it's easy to get patrons (or even should be), because, you know, you have to produce something that they want to pay to support. It just means that the logistical details of how to collect money from people who want to give it to you, should not take up much of your time.
If you have realistic expectations about what Patreon (or any other crowdfunding tool) should be expected to do, I think it's working out just fine.
I've observed a bit of a shift from YouTube Ads => Patreon => YouTube Sponsorship/Membership as the main way some of the creators I follow support themselves, so that might be why it was listed as the successor.
It'd be more lucrative for a patronage website to allow someone to go after big whales.
Just imagine if someone got a 1 million dollar grant. Even if it took a long time to secure it, it'd be a lot better than convincing 200,000 ppl for $5.
The benefit of a website like Patreon is reducing friction for small transactions like this. If you're going to put in lots of time and effort to convince one person to give you a million dollars, you can probably get them to write you a check more easily than you could get them to pay through Patreon But For Whales.
Things like Patreon and Twitch were definitely watershed moments for their respective industries. It's true that, as before, most people doing the thing still won't make much money. But still, a lot of people are now making a living in a way where they are directly responsible to the people they serve, without intermediaries like record companies or publishers.
They make it look like the extra 3% is to build features for their platform, but the VC funding is for that, and other than developing the feature, having tiers doesn't cost them anything. Charging 8% just makes it a bit closer to being sustainable.
It's unsustainable for handling small payments. Things like fraud detection, customer support, legal and financial services, and credit card chargebacks add up to more than 5%, if it's truly crowdfunding (lots of small contributions). There's a lot of failed startups in the crowdfunding space.
5% is their cut after payment processing, which is another 3% or 5% extra (depending on the size of payment, with smaller payments being more expensive to process).
For a $1 payment, they actually take 20% (10c + 5% + 5%).
I'm aware of that, which is why I didn't mention it in my list. It's about what Stripe charges. The micropayment rate of 5% is effectively lower because its per-transaction fee is $0.10 rather than $0.30. A $3.00 donation would have a $0.25 fee and a $3.01 donation would have a $0.39 fee.
"After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time job itself. I’d spend hours combing through photos, looking back on notes I’d taken on the road, researching where I’d been. I’d post on Twitter and Instagram with teasers, free stories, anything to attract my followers to my Patreon page. I made friends on the site, I shared their projects on my own social media, and kept up with all my subscribers’ projects. It was a lot of work for little pay, but I was determined. A year later my monthly earnings on Patreon have grown from $120 to $163."
$163 a month in extra income? Cool, right? Not when you spend 5+ hours a week thinking about it.
If GitHub gets a lot of participation it will be unsustainable to only take a little on top of a credit card processing fee, and the fee it will be increased to be more like Facebook's 30% cut. There are plenty of articles on here about the costs and difficulties of running a payment platform.