While I don’t have any set plans for new episodes, some folks have been in touch lately with the aim of getting me to record a chat with some pretty awesome people – so before any new episodes come out, I just want to make sure you folks are aware of some recent changes to Patreon‘s donation structure.
The gist of Patreon’s statements regarding the changes are that they’re aimed at ensuring creators get more of the donations from patrons. I can understand this somewhat as it took me a frustrating while to realise that the income I got out of Patreon wasn’t steady, even when my patronage was. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places, but I feel they could have done a better job of communicating the monthly fluctuations in processing fees to creators in the first place.
The main problem with Patreon’s chosen solution to this, and the source of the upset I’ve been reading about from both patrons and creators, is that they’re now asking patrons to shoulder the burden by charging them processing fees for each backing – so while creators now get 95 cents in the dollar, patrons have to pay an additional flat fee plus percentage per creator that they back. One oft touted example is that if you back 10 creators for $1 each – and you’ll often find that the $1.00 per month/creation is the largest proportion of a Patreon creator’s support – you would now have to pay $13.79.
I wanted to make sure you’re aware of this before I go putting any new episodes up so that existing patrons can review and adjust their pledges and potential new patrons can assess whether they want to chip in under Patreon’s model. If you want to find out more, start with this article on Patreon’s blog.
And if you’re aware of any alternates, let me know – I’m working on the resurrection of the Only In Death podcast and would like to give potential fans an option to be patrons that works for everyone.
Update 9 Dec 17 2:40AM:
My thinking on this matter suddenly clarified a couple of hours ago, and I did a pair of Facebook Live streams which I’ve put up on YouTube:
