Backbone of the Backer Economy: Patreon, Substack, backed.by, ko-fi, OnlyFans, Fansly, Subbable, etc.
Read them like the hook from Feel Good Hit of the Summer
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career was misunderstanding Myspace Tom in my DMs.
Fan-funding has come a hell of a long way since the blow-up of Kickstarter and its clones at the start of the 2010s. When I lost monetization right after quitting my day job to do YouTube full-time at the start of 2013 (right when YouTube retooled every aspect of the site to create the contentID lockdown under which we’ve lived since, and also the subscriber-focused design philosophy that its culture has revolved around), I had no idea what to do. My first YouTube friend, “Bronycurious” Tom 'Oliver,’ and I, were planning to create a website that offered a subscription service through email or something; but there an alternate hosting source to Youtube that could even handle the viewcounts I was pulling on my videos about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic at the time. We‘d looked into Subbable, which was a monthly subscription service that also let fans make one-time donations like a combination of Kickstarter and what Patreon would do—but it was invitation-only, reserved for the Vlog Brothers, CGP Grey, and the like of hand-picked edutainment YouTubers.
Luckily, Tom discovered the nascent Patreon that summer; and the infamously deep-pocketed Brony community discovered this new avenue to dispense their income first through us. I was an early Patreon success story, such that I was even sent a care package about a year in from someone on the staff rooting for me. I’m not sure how they feel now, but I never got something like that again after I started talking shit about Patreon very openly with my friends who’d also built careers on the platform.
Let me be very clear that NONE of these platforms would have any fucking shot at success in the long term at all (they have not achieved success yet in the short term) if not for the desperation of artists like myself who want to make money without having to be incorporated by someone who’s going to tell us what we have to cover and what we’re not allowed to say. I know people who are in those positions, or who’ve left those positions in the YouTube sphere, and it seems like it fucking sucks.
When I started on Youtube I was excited at the idea that I would never have to charge anyone anything and would just be making free content for people and getting paid by faceless ad corpos with no idea what I was talking about in the videos whatsoever. I never wanted to create a transactional relationship with my audience surrounding my art at all. And holy fuck, the results of doing so have guided my life in some fucked up directions over the years.
I don’t blame Patreon for any of its systemic faults in regard to audience relationships, considering it’s practically a pre-alpha experimentation level social development tool; but I had a LOT to say about its performance of its most important, base-level function of taking money from people and distributing it to other people. Considering the easy time that other platforms have had doing stuff like this out the gate, I really don’t understand what fucked up programming rigamarole Patreon has been going thru; it’s hard to explain, though.
Patreon is set to automatically bill your patrons at the start of each month. How much it charges depends on if you have your project set to a per-month or per-project basis, and how many projects each person has signed up to support in a single month. On the first day of the month, the platform starts attempting to collect funds from the pledgers; but inevitably, a bunch of them fail, or have to be re-processed, or just don’t start right away; and so usually you will not see the full amount the platform has promised on the first day (or possibly anything at all if something is really fucked up, which can be circumstantial to individual users for reasons unknown).
By default, Patreon will withdraw whatever is in your account to your bank on the fifth of the month; implying that they expect it to take about 5 days to solve all the problems with payments usually faced at the start of the month. I usually get 95% of my payment on the 5th, and then end up with some extra that gets processed later in the month by the time it’s over in addition to whatever is charged to new patrons on signup. (I should mention that you *can* pay out whatever is collected to your patreon account at any time, pending 2 days to reach your bank; so I have many times pulled out something like $250 on the first when I really needed money, and then received another $200 on the 5th when the auto-payout happens.)
Substack, meanwhile, just pays me every fucking day. I think there might be one day of delay between payment and payout, but if you sign up on January 2nd, I get paid on Jan 3rd, and then Feb 3rd and so on; meaning that because of the staggered signups of different accounts, I get paid nearly every day. I don’t make as much right now on Substack as I do on Patreon (and honestly I don’t even know how much that is because of how many people signed up for a whole year up-front versus the number that pay monthly); I just know that I get paid a very-expected $400-or-so from Patreon on the 5th every month, and then a totally-unpredictable $5.77 or $57.70 every-other-day when people make payments to my Substack.
Both of these platforms process payments through Stripe, by the way—so I have no idea why the result is so different.
Besides the payout structure, I prefer Substack to Patreon simply because Substack is a blog, and I am a blogger. Patreon ostensibly has many of the same blogging capabilities that Substack does, but every subtle difference which Substack focused on caters specifically to people like me who’ve been writing on the internet since long before converting blog-style prose to video content was a popular medium. My analysis videos have always been blog posts first essentially adapted into video form, and Substack knows that my formative years were spent structuring my brain around Wordpress blog formatting.
However, I have one of the same problems with both of these sites, which is that neither of them seems to understand what the fuck they are doing. Both of them are built by people trying to make money—taking a lot of money from venture capitalists and not really understanding that they are the channel of money to people who conventionally should not be making money.
They built their shit way too top-heavy, and they try to run it like the rest of the silicon valley horseshit (through meetups and events and conversations with high-rolling people looking to cash into these platforms in ways that push their personal agendas and brands, which go way over the average user’s heads); and meanwhile, the entire foundation of the platform is built at the grassroots level of independent creators making shit and connecting it to an audience.
Patreon finding itself in a position that it competes with YouTube instead of having integration with it is insane on the part of both platforms. It’s insane that Patreon never invested in its up-and-coming creators, while sending us shit like invitations to parties in LA instead of, you know… plane tickets. Patreon always acted like it was the way for already-rich people to get that fan-backed excuse to work on their passion project, instead of as the means for people who never had a shot in the conventional market to establish something completely new. (Meanwhile, to those rich people, it was a flavor-of-the-week passing curiosity—while people like myself who built our entire lives on the platform and tried opening a dialog with it directly were ignored, sidelined, and never given the support needed to compete in the big leagues with people that were getting their backing from competitive ventures.)
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career was misunderstanding Myspace Tom in my DMs. He reached out to me on Twitter in 2018 regarding a video I’d made complaining about Patreon, and asking whether I’d looked into alternatives. This was before OnlyFans had really developed any kind of reputation, and he told me about it, saying that it was “mostly a place to talk to girls.” I misunderstood this, thinking that he meant he’d mostly used it to talk to girls himself—not having heard of the website at all yet—and later realized that Tom was basically reaching out to me with the opportunity to alter the course of crowdfunding history.
OnlyFans was never specifically meant to be used for pornography; it just so happened that its system which allows you to charge users for DMs lends itself extremely well to that type of audience. That said, at the time I was constantly interacting with my audience in comments, chats, discord, and through paid rant requests, and so I have no question that I would’ve made a lot of money if I’d bothered to look into OnlyFans based on this interaction instead of wondering why Myspace Tom was telling me where to go to talk to girls. I’m actually that stupid.
Anyways, OnlyFans blew up like six months later, and its reputation became so irrevocably linked to pornography that I apparently once traumatized a younger family member by mentioning the fact I have a friend who does OnlyFans too loudly around her. My bad.
Fansly is a direct competitor to OnlyFans in the porn-funding category, which I understand to have done more to coerce early adopters into using it with deals to sweeten it over OF; but I don’t think it’s grown nearly the same level of cultural cache that OF has. My aforementioned friend, Mint Salad, actually built her career on Fansly, but eventually started making more money on OF after she actually had viral videos driving massively more traffic to her page.
SO! HEY! What’s my favorite of all this payment platform nonsense??
Well, of course it’s the one that my friend and iconic distance-mentor Dick Masterson designed just for dumbasses like me, called backed.by. This is Dick’s second attempt at a payment processor with an absolute free-speech policy; the first having been New Project 2 (this name of a first project made a second one inevitable), which was shut down when Dick was personally blacklisted from being allowed to process payments by basically every bank in existence by way of Master Card, and enacted via Stripe.
What this means is that ANY payment processor backed by Stripe (and the banks) can disarm ANYONE’S ability to be paid based on… really, anything. In Dick’s case, one person complained to one other person, and that person decided that ending his operation was easier than dealing with whatever problems would be caused by doing so. Most people have no reason to care that any of this happened at all, and so Dick had his thumb up his ass in a dystopian nightmare… if he wasn’t a dedicated engineer.
A team was developed to create a platform that couldn’t be blacklisted, couldn’t be interrupted, and couldn’t even be governed. Backed.by is blockchain-backed and creates a permanent webpage owned by the user when they start a project, which couldn’t be removed by Dick even if it was about murdering his family. My We Watch Anime and Comments on Comments pages are unassailable by any entity other than myself (and whoever murders me to steal all the keys to my online accounts); and even though all of it is crypto and blockchain-based, it’s set up to process normal credit cards and pay out normal money without a bunch of crypto wallet management shit.
The only major problem faced by backed.by is that it’s actually pure and good. There isn’t a shitload of venture capital flowing into it (whether it’s used to actually improve base functionality or be frivolously blasted on LA parties). Dick and his guys do it because they want it to exist, and they ask a minimum 1% fee to management, basically meaning that it’s free work until someone makes it successful.
Backed.by is not as functional on the user or the publisher end as its major competitors, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and safer. It’s like the difference between keeping your money in an untrustworthy bank and keeping it an underground vault that no one knows about. For the audience, the only reason to use it is belief in what it stands for, and a desire to see it succeed for the sake of the creators using it; which is pretty slim motivation for getting a worse experience than what’s findable elsewhere. On my end, though, it’s such a worthwhile long-term investment that I’ve discounted all of my bonus content on there considerably as compared to the other sites I have backers on, just to give the audience any reason to consider the competition over what they are probably already signed up for.
I know that there are a number of other platforms I’ve forgotten to mention here, but the only one I feel compelled to mention is ko-fi. I think it’s been the most successful implementation of what I’ll call ‘deliberately diminutive’ fan support, even though it functionally isn’t very different from the other platforms. The concept of ko-fi is to pledge about the amount a month that would afford your creator a single cup of coffee (which assumably fuels their creation). This is a clever way to lure in the huge demographic that romanticizes the ever-presence of coffee in their lives; but I am not one of those people because I don’t drink coffee, and so I’ve only ever set up an account there for my fiance, ko-fi.com/birdstorc, because he is that kind of guy.
Diminutive donation platforms seem to be most-popular with creators who aren’t known to produce huge, memorable and heart-stopping content, but rather who regularly deliver funny, witty or charming content to places like Twitter and Tumblr, or shorter-form Youtube videos. What I’ve never seen, though, is someone who successfully connected their short-form content to a ko-fi while also connecting their heavier content to a heavier payment platform like Patreon. The sentiment among backers has always generally been that, unless they are specifically paying to receive a certain backer reward, they are sending money in support of an artist’s general existence and their continued ability to make whatever content they feel like, rather than paying for one specific type of content that this person makes.
This can get muddy when a creator has multiple projects involving different people; for instance, Dick Masterson has separate Patreon accounts for his personal podcast The Dick Show (which also pays Shoun the audio engineer and assorted artists, producers and segment creators), and also for The Biggest Problem in the Universe (which is co-run by Vito with a 50-50 revenue split). Even still, with the shows sharing a lot of the same fanbase, the ones who aren’t paying for both shows are making their decision to pay for one or the other based either on which show they enjoy more, or whether they would prefer that more of their support go to Vito or to Shwen.
I don’t personally know of anyone with successful accounts on multiple fan support platforms, nor really anyone that promotes more than one of them in the way that I have for the last few years (especially between Patreon and Substack). The theory driving me to use them both has been a hard divide between the segment of my audience that appreciates my written content, and those who don’t. Because of the bonus articles only available on Substack, there has usually not been any good reason to sign up for my Patreon over my Substack, because you’d get more reward out of using this site; however, if you’re already signed up as a patron and you don’t care about the bonus articles, you would see no reason to switch over. My patreon remains more successful than my Substack, but I am nonetheless fascinated by the fact that I can make money on both platforms at once, with somewhat different audiences.
Fan-funding remains a nascent field, and I think it’s going to take a while for expectations on both the creator and audience sides to become reasonable about how this should all work; but a big part of evolving that in my mind is going to be the evolution of these sites that enable it and the way that audiences interact with them. I think backed.by represents a kind of platonic ideal of a bank-front for fan funding, and it’s kind of wild how specified sites like ko-fi and Substack feel, or how random and chaotic Patreon feels, in their approach to making that kind of thing accessible. I know I’ll be always investigating all of these avenues and the relationships they create, and dumping my thoughts to whoever will listen.
Will I still be able to access the articles here if I switch to backed by?
I´m planning on asking for money for my 3D models on Printables, have an eshop on my Squarespace website and probably creating an Etsy store as well.
Backed.by sounds like a good platform to get supported on the basis of the person of the creator, rather than for specifics. Probably also gonna give it a shot.