this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
620 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
60033 readers
2738 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The problem is that the patreon model inherently only supports the big creators. Many of whom only BECAME big because they had alternative funding sources for so long.
For example: Giant Bomb more or less imploded a few years back. Nextlander (Alex, Brad, and Vinny), Remap (Formerly Waypoint but Patrick Klepek, Rob Zachny, Cado Contreras) , and Jeff Gerstmann (hmmm? I wonder who that could be) and even Giant Bomb (Fandom) are doing great. But people like Abby Russel or Renata Price very much immediately fell into that "Well, I like her but she is one person and I am already blowing 20 or 30 bucks a month on patreons..." hole.
And we see that on youtube/twitch. Creators will mostly not care and then suddenly do a year long subathon because they understand... they are in that threshold where they make just enough off of ad and sponsor revenue that they can just keep their resume updated but are fucked if Youtube/twitch change ANYTHING. They need to get to that threshold where people will subscribe to a patreon.
And the "Well, I will just subscribe to the creators I think are worth it" inherently fucks them over.
I'll add on that, for all his many flaws, Ludwig Ahlgren (?) has done a lot of good discussion on this topic. Because as twitch and youtube stop giving streamers giant signing bonuses, it gets harder and harder for the next crop of big streamers to come into existence. Because if there isn't money to get people out of that O(100) concurrents mid-tier... yeah.