We’ve heard you loud and clear. We’re not going to rollout the changes to our payments system that we announced last week. We still have to fix the problems that those changes addressed, but we’re going to fix them in a different way, and we’re going to work with you to come up with the specifics, as we should have done the first time around. Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income. No apology will make up for that, but nevertheless, I’m sorry.
It is our core belief that you should own the relationships with your fans. These are your businesses, and they are your fans.
I almost want to continue reading this as: “Yet, you’re all still stuck on our silo and we intend to keep taking a percentage for keeping you in business…”
If they were really all-in on helping the way they’re signaling here, they would be building it in a decentralized way that allows creators to take their patrons with them to another platform. They would also be expanding on features, which they don’t seem to be doing much of. I get the need to watch the bottom line and work on scaling, but they should also continue innovating and experimenting, particularly for the smaller fish who could become bigger fish.
Patreon’s change of heart is indeed welcome, although I am withholding final judgement until I see exactly how things pan out. In a sense you can of course take your patrons with you, as a download of the basic details, and with all the other tools available I suspect it would not be too difficult to reconstruct a similar experience that might even be better for managing privileged content. I’ve yet to do that myself, but it is in my plans. I’m also having a little trouble with Stripe, which was easy enough to set up, harder to get working efficiently.
Overall, I’m glad to have been goaded into doing something to make it easy for people who don’t want the hassle of signing up for Patreon, perhaps because they only have one person to whom they want to donate.
The sad part is that Patreon is able to act as a bank of sorts on behalf of thousands of creators so that patrons can donate to several dozen causes and reduce the transaction fees overall by bundling them into single transactions rather than dozens of transactions with higher fees. It helps to overcome the problem of micropayments in a sense.
I saw your note about taking payments directly and I’m considering switching over to that, though It may be easier to do either quarterly or annual payments so that you get a larger chunk of the payment compared to smaller ones on a per episode basis.
In addition to the payment side, you may have noticed that I “fixed” the support announcement side: http://boffosocko.com/2017/12/22/a-supporting-page/ This reminds me that I still ought to reset my iTunes password (which I never use) to log in and send you a positive review there. If only iTunes would support webmention so you could own your reviews…