Patreon, New Fees, CLS, and You (Patreon)

I hope you're doing great! I'm sitting in my hotel room in San Francisco after another day of recording new episodes of CLS: Fireside Chats (you can look forward to great podcasts with Brian Altano, Daemon Hatfield, Destin Legarie, Mark Ryan Sallee, Alexa Ray Corriea, and Ryan McCaffrey rolling out in the coming weeks, with more still to record). So I'm just now finally getting to sit down and chat with you about what's going on here on Patreon, and how a fundamental change being made on the service may affect you.

You can read about the entire ordeal here: https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/

And here: https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005631963

But in short...

Traditionally, Patreon has taken a completely reasonable 5% rip of the money made on the site's thousands of accounts. On top of that, however, are credit card and transaction fees that don't go to Patreon and that are traditionally paid by the creators. Patreon says that these fees can run as high as 10%, meaning a creator could potentially lose 15% of his or her money. For what it's worth, neither on CLS nor back on Kinda Funny did we ever see anything approaching that. For both CLS and KF (at the time), we were making more than 90% of our pledges after fees. But I’ll take Patreon’s word that this isn’t necessarily the common (and obviously only) experience for other creators.

The new change essentially puts the onus of fee and transaction payments on Patrons, and not creators. I won't pretend to understand the entire breadth of why these changes are being made (the links above explain it, and some of it makes no sense to me at all). But here's what I do know: Creators will now get a clean 95% of the money pledged (because we'll only be paying the 5% rip without transaction fees), and Patrons will now front the fees we used to pay, to the tune of 35¢ + 2.9% of your pledge.

For many people, this will be (and is) completely inconsequential, especially at mid-and-high tiers, but it's not inconsequential for everyone, particularly for those on a budget who donate small amounts of money each month (like a dollar or two). Your dollar pledge now costs $1.38 a month. Your $2 pledge now costs $2.40. That may not seem drastic, but for some people, it is, especially if they, say, have 15 dollar pledges on 15 Patreons, bringing their monthly cost up from $15 to $20.70.

I don't like this change, and neither does a portion of my audience. I've shed more than 1% of my support base in the last 24 hours, exclusively as a result of Patreon's decision to do this. That's especially unfortunate (and incredibly discouraging) considering that the meteoric success of my Patreon early on meant it's been in a correction since launch, and was finally stabilizing. I've voiced my displeasure with this decision, and am speaking with Patreon CEO Jack Conte tomorrow about it. So, perhaps I'll have more (possibly good) news for you then. But it doesn't sound like they're going to change course. This seems like it's going to be the new normal, regardless of the rather vocal and visible outcry.

This (possibly) new normal is far from ideal. I don't want you to pay more for the content than you already do. I had and have no problem paying those fees, and every big creator on Patreon seems to feel the exact same way. I think this is a mistake, and has the potential to erode away the "low-end" structure of Patreon support, where people simply won't give $1 or $2 a month, either on principle, or because it hurts their wallet. Either way, I don't begrudge you that decision. All I can say is that I hope you choose to continue to support CLS.

Ironically, even if I shed some low end support, I stand to make demonstrably more money as a result of Patreon's decision. But I don't care. I don't want more money per user. I want you to be happy. I want you to pay a flat fee for supporting me, and let me and my wallet worry about the bullshit that's now being put on you. When Patreon says in their post about the change, "We want you to know that we approach every change with a creator-first mindset, aiming to help creators grow their businesses," know that I totally disagree, and think Patreon should be engineered with Patrons in mind first. This decision was not made with you in mind first -- clearly -- and for that, I apologize.

I'm truly sorry for any inconvenience this decision may have caused, and I promise to advocate on your behalf to try and fix this unforced error. Moreover, I hope you continue to support Colin's Last Stand here on Patreon, and find value in your contribution, and in the content. Without you, CLS will not exist.

I appreciate you, your time, and your support. Sincerely, -Colin