Can Businesses Do the Business They Do, Please?
Can Businesses Do the Business They Do, Please?
By the time I signed up with Patreon, I’d had about thirteen years of fundraising experience. Having started a theatre company in 2001, I’d explored all kinds of ways to fund our work. In the beginning, it was just writing letters and asking for help. (Weirdly, still the most successful method.) Then, as the internet became more integrated into our lives, we watched Charity Donor Portals come and go out of business and then crowdfunding kicked in. We ran campaigns on CrowdRise and Indiegogo and probably a few others I’ve already forgotten about. These were all for my non-profit theatre, not for me personally. These were funds which only rarely benefited me in a financial way. But in those days, there was not yet a reliable way to get support for me, as an individual artist.
I could raise funds for projects but not for my ongoing support, not for my writing, for example.
Patreon came along as a way for folks who were making things on the internet to get paid for the things. It was started by a guy in a band having trouble monetizing all those views his band’s videos were getting. So they invented a thing that would pay them for every thing they made — a song a video or whatsoever. It was also a way to create a support system. It meant a monthly dose of support rather than a new round of fundraising every time you wanted to make something. For me, the prime value was a system that I could explain to people who wanted to support me and then just let roll. The main value was that the system collected folks’ credit card details and charged them for me once a month.
In the intervening years, Patreon has shifted and changed in what it thinks it is. It added a membership model to its charge-for-thing model and now the charge-for-thing model is mostly a relic — a relic that I still use and is largely unsupported so I know they see it this way. There are a lot of glitches and I lose patrons all the time because of how complicated fixing a declined card can be. And it may not even be that my grandfathered account is a different model. I’ve heard of many other artists, with newer models, who have also had big payment issues. Whatever is behind the platform curtain, I have only one third of the income than I had last year at this time because of it.
I’ve lost two thirds of my income because of declined credit cards due to expiration dates or over-active fraud protection and Patreon does nothing to help keep this from happening or remedy it when it does. The one thing I need Patreon for is becoming less and less effective. Instead of making what they do more effective, they’re trying to expand and re-brand what they do.
Every few months or so, I get emails about new “products” and ideas and services Patreon is thinking about. I participated in a survey recently where it was clear they were considering rolling out a campaign where they pitched themselves as the place to “Grow your creative business.” They want to provide tools, education and stuff to help “creatives” do their thing. And I gotta say — first — I don’t think of my creative life as “a business.” Do I need support for my creative life? Yes. But it’s not a business. And I don’t need any further education or tips. I’ve taken all the marketing classes I care to. I do not need business tools. What I need is for someone to process my supporters’ payments easily, seamlessly and without too much fuss. I need someone to help my patrons when they run into trouble with that process and that is literally all I need. But in all the changes and fuss around new developments, those things get pushed aside.
I know I’m not a business person but it seems to me that a business would do well to do the business that they do, rather than focus on other stuff they might do. I think they do this to expand growth or something? To have something to say at a board meeting? I guess people don’t like to hear: “We’re doing what we do very well and collecting money as usual.” Boards probably like all the stuff like, “We’re trying THIS new thing.”
I think this particularly happens with these digital platforms since the “product” is so ephemeral. We’ve all seen the way Twitter is falling apart from all these new “products” and “improvements”, (bananas business decisions and leadership aside). I follow many climate activists and action groups, most of whom were at the march in NYC last weekend and Twitter didn’t show me a single tweet from the 75k strong protest. I joined Twitter to be able to see these kinds of news events in action and its current algorithm is hiding them? Twitter isn’t good for what Twitter was for anymore and it seems to get worse every day.
Facebook, too. I signed up for Facebook in 2007 so I could be in touch with my friends. Here in 2023, Facebook generally shows me the same ten posts from the same ten people, over and over again, with an endless scroll of “Suggested for You” posts and ads. I’m lucky when I actually see news from someone I care about. I have over a thousand Facebook friends and Facebook would rather show me Big Bang Theory news — a show I have never watched, followed by a list of my friends who read The Atlantic magazine. I assume it’s trying to get more data on me so it can guess how to sell to me better but….uh, I’m here for the friends? Facebook doesn’t do what it was made to do — what its success is built on.
The drive toward endless growth is likely to kill the original impulse of the company. Patreon doesn’t make supporting an artist (or creator) easy anymore and Facebook doesn’t show you what your friends are posting. These companies are going to “innovate” themselves right out of business.
Eventually other companies will do the things they used to do. I can get Ko-Fi to support monthly payments to me, Substack might pay me for writing and someone is bound to invent a better Facebook soon.
What if the Levi Strauss jeans company was suddenly just not that interested in jeans anymore? What if they were like, “We’re really into sundresses now. Forget jeans. We only want to talk about strappy cotton sundresses. No jeans for any of you.”
I really don’t want to start all over with new platforms but when the old ones start “innovating”, they are usually jumping the shark and even if we don’t close our accounts, we will spend our time elsewhere. Apparently, I still have a MySpace account (maybe I have two?) but I haven’t visited there in over a decade. (I tried to log in just now but I don’t even know what email I was using when I made that account.) I don’t know what MySpace is trying to do in 2023. Did they innovate themselves out of relevance? I don’t remember. I just stopped going there because it didn’t serve my needs. I suspect Facebook and Twitter are both headed that way and I’m worried that the same is going to happen to Patreon. The stakes are higher there because it is significant source of income and support for me — even if it’s only a third of what it used to be — I’d be at a significant loss if it innovated itself out of existence.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on September 22, 2023.
