Patreon

Based on Wikipedia: Patreon

In 2013, a musician named Jack Conte had a problem that would have seemed absurd to artists of previous generations: millions of people watched his videos, but he couldn't pay his rent.

This was the strange new economics of the internet age. Conte made elaborate, high-production music videos that racked up views on YouTube. But views don't pay bills—at least not enough of them. The advertising revenue from a viral video might buy you dinner. Maybe.

So Conte teamed up with a developer named Sam Yam, and together they built something that would change how creative people make a living online. They called it Patreon, a name that deliberately evokes the Renaissance-era patrons who funded artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The idea was simple but radical: what if fans could pay creators directly, like modern-day Medicis, but instead of commissioning marble sculptures, they'd fund podcasts and webcomics and video essays?

The Patronage Model, Digitized

Here's how it works. A creator—let's say a podcaster—sets up a page on Patreon. Fans who want to support them become "patrons" by pledging a recurring monthly payment. In exchange, patrons typically get perks: early access to episodes, bonus content, behind-the-scenes material, or sometimes just the warm feeling of supporting work they love.

The amounts are usually modest. As of 2017, the average pledge was around twelve dollars per month. But those small contributions add up. A creator with a thousand patrons paying ten dollars each suddenly has a ten-thousand-dollar monthly income—enough to quit their day job and create full-time.

Patreon takes a cut, somewhere between eight and twelve percent, plus payment processing fees. That's their business model: facilitate millions of small transactions and skim a percentage off the top. By 2017, just four years after launch, they'd funneled over one hundred million dollars to creators. By 2022, they had more than a quarter million creators and eight million active patrons spread across two hundred countries.

Who Uses This Thing?

The short answer: almost every type of creator you can imagine.

Video makers represent about a quarter of all Patreon profiles—YouTubers who produce everything from educational explainers to comedy sketches to video game analyses. Podcasters make up another seven percent or so. Musicians, game developers, webcomic artists, and writers round out the roster.

And then there's adult content.

Patreon has had a complicated relationship with Not Safe For Work material since its early days. The platform allows nudity and suggestive content as long as creators mark their pages as adult-only and everything depicts consenting adults. This policy has made Patreon a significant platform for adult content creators who were kicked off or restricted on other platforms. It's also created ongoing headaches for the company, which we'll get to.

The Economics of Creative Independence

To understand why Patreon matters, you need to understand the problem it solves.

For most of human history, artists had limited options for making money. They could find wealthy patrons (hence the name), work on commission, sell their creations directly, or starve. The internet seemed to promise democratization—anyone could publish their work and find an audience. But it created a paradox: reaching people became easy, while getting paid became nearly impossible.

Social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook optimized for engagement, not creator income. Advertising revenue got split so many ways that most creators earned pennies. The platforms controlled the algorithms that determined who saw your work, and those algorithms could change overnight, devastating your income without warning.

Patreon offered an escape from this trap. Instead of relying on fickle algorithms and fractional ad revenue, creators could build direct financial relationships with their most dedicated fans. Even if you only had a thousand true fans willing to pay a few dollars a month, that might be enough to sustain you.

This is sometimes called the "1,000 True Fans" model, a concept popularized by Wired magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly. The theory goes that you don't need millions of casual followers—you need a smaller number of people who genuinely care about your work and are willing to support it financially.

Growing Pains and Security Nightmares

Patreon's growth wasn't smooth. In October 2015, hackers breached the company's systems and made off with nearly fifteen gigabytes of data: passwords, donation records, source code, and more than two million email addresses. Millions of private messages between creators and patrons were exposed.

Some patrons received extortion emails afterward, demanding Bitcoin payments to keep their information private. It was a brutal reminder that supporting creators online meant trusting a startup with your payment information and personal data.

The company continued expanding anyway. In 2015, they acquired Subbable, a similar subscription service founded by John and Hank Green—the brothers behind the educational YouTube channels CrashCourse and SciShow. Popular creators like CGP Grey and Smarter Every Day came along with the acquisition.

In 2018, Patreon bought Memberful, a company that helped creators build membership programs. In 2023, they acquired Moment, a platform for ticketed livestreams. The strategy was clear: become the one-stop shop for creators building subscription businesses.

The Moderation Minefield

When you build a platform that lets anyone collect money from anyone else, you inevitably face uncomfortable questions about who you'll allow to use it.

Unlike YouTube and Facebook, which use automated systems to flag problematic content, Patreon relies on human moderators who investigate complaints. This makes their decisions more deliberate—and more controversial.

In 2017, they banned Lauren Southern, a right-wing YouTube personality, citing her involvement with a European group that tried to block ships carrying migrants in the Mediterranean. Patreon's letter said she was "raising funds to take part in activities that are likely to cause loss of life."

Sam Harris, a philosopher and podcaster who used Patreon to collect listener support, objected to the decision and left the platform in protest. Shortly after, Patreon also banned It's Going Down, a far-left news site, for allegedly publishing personal information about people without consent—a practice called doxing.

The bans kept coming. In 2018, they removed Milo Yiannopoulos just one day after he created an account. They banned Carl Benjamin, a political commentator, for using slurs in a YouTube interview—even though the offending content wasn't on Patreon itself. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and author, announced he would leave Patreon and create an alternative platform "safe from political interference."

Each ban sparked accusations of political bias. Critics on the right saw a pattern of silencing conservative voices. Defenders argued Patreon was simply enforcing terms of service that prohibited hate speech and dangerous activities.

The Arbitration Avalanche

One banned creator found an unexpected way to fight back.

Owen Benjamin, a comedian removed for alleged hate speech, filed an arbitration claim against Patreon. Then he encouraged his fans to file identical claims, exploiting a clause in Patreon's terms of service that required disputes to be resolved through individual arbitration rather than class-action lawsuits.

This might seem like a strange strategy, but there was method to it. Arbitration sounds like a simple alternative to court, but it's expensive. Companies typically have to pay substantial fees to initiate each arbitration proceeding—potentially up to ten thousand dollars per claim. If hundreds or thousands of fans filed separate claims, Patreon could face millions in arbitration fees before any actual legal issues were resolved.

Patreon tried to stop this by suing seventy-two individuals who had filed claims and seeking an injunction to halt the arbitration proceedings. The injunction was denied. Patreon then rewrote its terms of service to prevent future mass-arbitration tactics: now only the person actually banned can file a complaint, and they have to pay their own arbitration fees.

It was a vivid illustration of how internet platforms, for all their power, can be vulnerable to creative legal warfare from motivated communities.

The Problem That Won't Go Away

Patreon's most serious ongoing controversy involves child sexual abuse material.

The platform has faced persistent criticism for allegedly being slow to remove illegal content depicting minors. In 2018, nearly thirty-seven thousand people signed a petition demanding the company prohibit animated and drawn content depicting child abuse. In 2021, Australian journalists reported finding sexual content of minors filmed in a psychiatric hospital in the Czech Republic being sold through the platform.

In 2022, a social media influencer named Michael McWhorter published videos claiming to have found sexually provocative images and videos of prepubescent children on the site. After Patreon laid off members of its security team that September, McWhorter released a follow-up featuring someone who said she had reported such material to Patreon staff and been dismissed.

Patreon called these claims "dangerous and conspiratorial disinformation."

But the reports kept coming. In June 2023, a BBC investigation found artificial intelligence-generated sexual abuse images of children for sale on the platform. Patreon removed the accounts in question and announced a partnership with the Tech Coalition, an industry group focused on combating child exploitation online.

This is the dark side of building a platform with minimal gatekeeping. The same openness that lets independent artists bypass traditional publishers also creates opportunities for the worst kinds of content.

Geopolitics and Payment Processors

When you operate a global payment platform, you inevitably get tangled up in international politics.

In 2018, Turkey threatened to block Patreon entirely unless the company removed the account of Kamil Maman, a Turkish journalist living in exile. Patreon complied, telling Maman in an email that "this was not an easy decision, as we are huge proponents of free speech, but it was a decision we made to best protect access to Turkish creators."

Maman condemned the decision as capitulating to an autocratic regime. It raised uncomfortable questions: how much leverage do authoritarian governments have over global platforms? If Turkey could force Patreon to ban a journalist, what about China? Russia? Saudi Arabia?

During Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Patreon faced criticism for maintaining operations in Russia while other Western companies pulled out under international pressure. More controversially, at the start of the invasion, they shut down a major Ukrainian account called Comeback Alive, a charity raising money to support volunteer fighters and veterans. Patreon said the account violated policies against funding military activities.

In 2024, they deleted the account of Artur Rehi, an Estonian military blogger, citing "hate speech" for referring to Russians in occupied Ukraine as "occupiers" and "funding military" for donations routed through the Rotary Club.

These decisions reveal the impossible position platforms occupy. They're not governments, but they make decisions that affect who can speak and who can be funded. They're not courts, but they render judgments about what constitutes hate speech or dangerous activity. They claim to support free expression, but they also want to operate in countries that don't.

The PayPal Dance

Patreon's relationship with adult content has been shaped largely by payment processors, not their own preferences.

In 2014, Patreon told creators of sexual content they could no longer use PayPal for subscription payments. Two years later, that changed—adult creators could accept PayPal again, this time through Braintree, a PayPal subsidiary. Then in 2017, Patreon tightened restrictions again with expanded community guidelines and a broader definition of sexual content.

Why the back-and-forth? Because payment processors like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal have their own rules about what kinds of transactions they'll facilitate. These companies face regulatory pressure, reputational concerns, and potential legal liability. When they decide certain content is too risky, platforms like Patreon have to either comply or find alternative payment methods.

This gives payment processors enormous power over online speech. They're not subject to the First Amendment. They're not democratically accountable. But their decisions about what transactions to process effectively determine what content can be monetized.

The Fee Fiasco

In December 2017, Patreon made what seemed like a reasonable business decision. Instead of taking all fees out of creators' earnings, they would start charging patrons directly for payment processing costs.

The backlash was immediate and fierce.

Under the new system, a one-dollar pledge would cost patrons one dollar and thirty-eight cents—a thirty-eight percent increase. A five-dollar pledge would cost five fifty, a ten percent jump. For patrons making many small pledges to different creators, the cumulative cost was significant.

Creators watched in horror as patrons began canceling pledges, especially small ones. The whole point of Patreon was to let fans support creators with whatever they could afford, even just a dollar a month. Suddenly, that dollar was becoming a dollar thirty-eight.

Within days, Patreon reversed course. They apologized to users and abandoned the fee structure changes. It was a reminder that even platforms with millions of users can't ignore their communities. When your entire business model depends on the goodwill between creators and fans, alienating either group is existential.

The Pandemic and Beyond

COVID-19 was, paradoxically, both a crisis and an opportunity for Patreon.

In April 2020, as the pandemic tanked the economy, Patreon laid off thirty employees—about thirteen percent of its workforce. But the pandemic also drove people online in unprecedented numbers. Creators who had lost income from live events, in-person teaching, or service jobs turned to digital content. Patrons stuck at home spent more time and money on the online creators they loved.

By 2021, Patreon had grown enough that they laid off another thirty-six employees—still thirteen percent of the workforce, but of a larger workforce. In 2022, another eighty people were let go, about seventeen percent, along with the closure of offices in Dublin and Berlin.

These seemingly contradictory signals—growth accompanied by layoffs—reflect the volatile economics of tech startups. Patreon has raised hundreds of millions in venture capital and is perpetually chasing both growth and profitability. Sometimes that means hiring aggressively; sometimes it means cutting costs dramatically.

In October 2023, the company unveiled a complete redesign with new features like community chat. In June 2025, they announced a simplified pricing structure: creators would pay a flat ten percent of their earnings to the platform.

What Patreon Means

Patreon didn't invent the idea of fans paying creators directly. Street musicians have been passing the hat for centuries. But they made it work at internet scale, creating infrastructure that lets millions of people support hundreds of thousands of creators through recurring payments.

The platform exists in a strange middle space. It's not a traditional employer; creators are independent. It's not a marketplace like Etsy or eBay; patrons aren't really buying products. It's closer to a tip jar or a subscription, but with more structure than the former and more flexibility than the latter.

Competitors have emerged. Liberapay offers a nonprofit alternative focused on unconditional donations. OnlyFans became infamous (and hugely successful) by leaning heavily into adult content. Various platforms offer similar subscription tools for specific niches.

But Patreon remains the default, the name that's become synonymous with creator subscriptions. When someone says "support me on Patreon," most internet users know what that means.

For Jack Conte, the musician who couldn't pay rent despite his viral videos, the platform he created solved his problem. He's now the CEO of a company that's facilitated billions of dollars in payments to creators. The Renaissance patrons funded masterpieces that hung in private collections. Modern patrons fund podcasts and videos and webcomics that anyone can enjoy.

Whether that exchange is noble or transactional, revolutionary or just another tech platform extracting fees from human creativity—that probably depends on which side of the transaction you're on.