Tag: Patreon

Read Andrew Sullivan: See You Next Friday (Intelligencer)
If the mainstream media will not host a diversity of opinion, then the nonmainstream needs to pick up the slack. That’s what I’ll be doing next.
This is interesting, though sad to see he’s going to Substack to run his new blog incarnation. I suspect he’s following the model of Jonah Goldberg who is doing roughly the same thing. The “newsletter trend” as a means of running a blog and attempting to monetize it is certainly an interesting one. I’m curious how valuable readers find it? I wish there were some better open web versions that were easier for individuals to run in an IndieWeb fashion. The pattern is a lot like Patreon and some others, but here there is the appearance of more publishing control as well as the removal of the appearance of begging for money to fund something.

👓 In which I finally stop using Patreon | fluffy

Read In which I finally stop using Patreon by fluffyfluffy (beesbuzz.biz)
So, hey, Patreon is a pretty popular site for funding the creative people you follow. A lot of people rely on Patreon as their primary source of income. More power to them if they do; it's where everyone goes to do that sort of thing and it's really enabled a lot of people to do what they love for a living.

👓 Kibbles for My Patreon Bowl? | CogDog

Read Kibbles for My Patreon Bowl? by Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)
Here is my shameless shameful plug. More than two years ago a colleague I respect emailed and started a back and forth exchange. He strongly urged me to set up a donation campaign so I could be supported to do more tool and resource building. I gave it some thought, but then landed a good long term contract, so shelved it. Recently a few others have asked me why I am not patreon-ing, and my answer was more or less a shrug.
Here’s someone with a track record of creating some cool things that actually got delivered. If you’re looking to support helping to get interesting things made and put into the education space, here’s your chance.

👓 We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change. | The Patreon Blog

Read We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change. (Patreon)
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.

Reply to The Patreon Fiasco: Jack Conte tells creators “We ****ed up.”

Replied to The Patreon Fiasco: Jack Conte tells creators “We ****ed up.” by Todd Allen (The Beat)
The creative community is still waiting on Patreon to officially address the new policy of passing transaction fees on to the patrons (backers), but it appears that co-founder and figurehead Jack Conte has been calling some of creators to discuss the situation with them. Jeph Jacques, the cartoonist behind Questionable Content (over 5,300 patrons as of this typing. though the number of patrons as been… fluid… for many Patreon creators in the last few days) tweeted about his conversation with Conte
Perhaps coincidentally, there was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin yesterday (12/09/17) entitled Payments, Pledges, and Donations, Oh My!. The link includes the video of the session via YouTube as well as notes.

The premise is that many creators already have their own websites/platforms for promoting or featuring their work. In some sense Patreon is only bringing a payment gateway (and apparently not a great one) as their sole feature. The conversation within the session was geared toward attempting to make it easier and simpler for creators to not only host their own work, but to accept payments and recurring payments directly. Some of the discussion was geared at making the payments systems seamless so that one could move them from one platform to another without losing hard won supporters and needing to start over again.

While we’re still in the very early days for improving the technology for this, hopefully some of the demos coming out of the camp later today will move the ball forward. Those should be posted on the IndieWeb YouTube channel later today as well.

For those looking for alternates (and particularly when they’ve already got their own websites), I suspect it’ll definitely be worth a look. Alternate platforms and methods were certainly discussed. The means of control for creators to inexpensively keep all of their workflow in-house is very near.

I love Eat This Podcast

Many who follow my blog recently will know that I’ve been binge listening to Jeremy Cherfas‘ wonderful podcast series: Eat This Podcast.

I’m now so many wonderful episodes in, that it was far past time to give something back to Jeremy for the hours of work he’s put in to give me so much entertainment, enjoyment, and even knowledge. So I just made a pledge to support him on Patreon.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Eat This Podcast is a fantastic series on food, but it it uses the “foods we eat to examine and shed light on the lives we lead, from authenticity to zoology”. Food becomes his “vehicle to explore the byways of taste, economics and trade, culture, science, history, archaeology, geography and just about anything else.”

It’s unlike much of anything I’ve seen or followed in the food space for some time. As someone who is a fan of the science of food and fantastic writers like Harold McGee, Herve This, Alton Brown, Tom Standage, Michael Pollan, Nathan Myhrvold, Maxime Bilet, Matt Gross, and Michael Ruhlman (to name only a few), Eat This Podcast is now a must listen for me.

Not only are the episodes always interesting and unique, they’re phenomenally well researched and produced. You’d think he had a massive staff and production support at the level of a news organization like NPR. By way of mentioning NPR, I wanted to highlight the thought, care, and skill he puts into not only the stunning audio quality, but into the selection of underlying photos, musical bumpers, and the links to additional resources he finds along the way.

And if my recommendation isn’t enough, then perhaps knowing that this one person effort has been nominated for the James Beard Award in both 2015 and 2016 may tip the scales?

If you haven’t listened to any of them yet, I highly recommend you take a peek at what he has to offer. You can subscribe, download, and listen to them all for free. If you’re so inclined, I hope you’ll follow my lead and make a pledge to support his work on Patreon as well.

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