While Patreon is a relatively new platform with a smaller user base than the known commodities for entertainment such as Spotify, Substack, and YouTube, it’s pretty difficult nowadays to have gone without at least hearing about Patreon. Regardless of an individual’s favorite type of media to consume — whether it be sports analysis, comedy podcasts, video essays, or anything else — chances are that one of their favorite content creators has hopped onto the Patreon bandwagon and has plugged their subscription to their audience on another platform.
What is Patreon?
As such, there should be a significant number of viewers and listeners who have heard of Patreon but aren’t sure of what it is exactly. At the most basic level, Patreon is a platform for creators to upload content just like Apple Podcasts, TikTok, Medium, etc. However, Patreon differs from these more popular sites in a few different ways. In addition, there’s been a number of Patreon affiliates, such as Fanscout, popping up, which allows users to select from a variety of creators in a more digestible format.f
Firstly, Patreon is more flexible about what type of content can be uploaded. On Patreon, a creator can post any type of entertainment they wish, whether it be articles, blogs, music, podcasts, or video. There’s no limit to what a person can make accessible to their fans on the site. This gives creators a more versatile platform where they can venture into all different kinds of mediums while making them available to their supporters. On Patreon, one can find songs, essays, skits, and even full-length feature films from a single publisher all under one single platform.
Secondly, and more importantly, Patreon offers a much more secure pay structure for its creators than places like Twitter, Snapchat, or even Apple Music, which all offer a revenue-sharing model. On most platforms, people earn based on the performance of their content. The more views or listens a person generates from audiences, the more money they make. While this can lead to wildly popular and successful creators on sites such as YouTube, it can make it difficult for a new content creator just starting out to develop a steady source of income.
How content creators can earn money with Patreon
Patreon, on the other hand, is a subscription-based model that allows its creators to build a pool of subscribers from which they can create a consistent revenue stream that they can depend on month to month. As creators on Patreon know how many subscribers they have, they can accurately calculate how much they’ll earn month in and month out according to their subscriber base. It also helps that Patreon takes a significantly lower cut of revenue from its creators compared to other sites such as Medium, Spotify, and YouTube. In fact, most Youtubers rely on it as a source of revenue generation once their adsense revenue goes down.
Patreon takes anywhere from five to 12 percent of a creator’s earnings and also takes a small fee to process online payments from subscribers to their subscribed party. Like most platforms, Patreon operates under a revenue-sharing model, but unlike those other sites, creators on Patreon see a lot more of the money they generate as opposed to their other mediums for content distribution. As such, more and more creators are joining Patreon and, with them, come more subscribers.
Revenue statistics for Patreon and its creators
Patreon went from pulling between $12 and $15 million in 2017 to around $160 million in 2021. With an average cut of eight percent across the board, that means that creators on Patreon pulled in $2 billion in subscription fees from their fans that year. And that number is only continually growing.
As of February 2023, Patreon has more than 220,000 creators listed. The cream of the crop isn’t just making a living there either, as Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast — Patreon’s most subscribed page, with over 50,000 patrons as of January 2023 — pulls between $140,000 and $350,000 per month. Patreon has been consistently growing since 2016, with a few outlier dips. It’ll be interesting to see just how dominant a platform it can be one day for content creation.