On Payment Declines (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I want to send out a quick message about payment declines. Some of my patrons have a tendency to get declined every month on payments, either because their credit cards are declined, or because they decline to pay for certain months out of inability to afford it. I understand there are many circumstances for why this can happen, but I'd like to ask that if this happens to you, please delete or reduce your patronage until you are able to afford it again.

I ask this for a few reasons: firstly, because it's hard for me to plan around/figure out how much I'm going to be making at the end of the month if a bunch of people get declined. Secondly, because it inflates the amount of money that people think I'm making off of my videos, which can effect the way they make their pledges.

For a while now, I've been deleting patrons who get declined for several months in a row in order to make my numbers better reflect their actuality; but even still, patreon is very uninformative about what I actually make from each video. Between the huge drop-off from everyone having a monthly limit set, and then the second drop-off between everyone who gets declined (not to mention the cut taken by patreon), what I make isn't nearly as much as what patreon reports, and is even less when a lot of patrons get declined. Allow me to illustrate:

For the entire month of August, my patreon hung around $400 a video. I patron-marked 4 videos in August, which would mean about $1600.

However, because of the (perfectly understandable) limits that each patron has per month, the actual pledges for those four videos were $396, $353, $322, and $249. Ordinarily, the drop-off might be worse than this, but I tend to gain a number of new patrons throughout the course of the month. This totals $1320.

Now, we take into account the number of declined/unprocessed pledges. Sometimes, this number improves a few days later into the month as certain pledges take longer to process, but there are usually a number of people who consistently get declined. The total amounts which were processed for these four videos were $355, $326, $296, $223. This totals $1200. Out of that, the total amount that I actually receive after patreon takes their cut is $1,024. (This doesn't take into account the taxes which I'll be paying on this at the end of the year, since patreon doesn't pay my taxes for me.)

Here's an image of what all this data looks like in my dashboard: http://i.imgur.com/fkNxG4F.png

Because I know as I post each video exactly how much I'm going to be pledged for it, I can easily plan and set my expectations around what I'll be making based on how much is pledged; but I have no way of knowing how many people are going to get declined each month, or who I can expect to be declined, until those people get declined for several months in a row. Therefore, I'd simply like to ask that if you expect to be declined, or if you have consistently gotten declined for months in a row, then please remove your patronage until you're able to afford it again. I'll be deleting a number of patrons who have been getting declined consistently for months already, but if you're someone who is more newly in this position, then I have no way of knowing your situation as well as you do.

Thanks again everyone, and I'm sorry to bring up something like this which feels lame to talk about. I just want it to be clear to everyone exactly what goes on behind the scenes of patreon support and what kind of things effect the way that the platform works for me.