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Patreon: An Epitome of Web 2.0

A few decades ago, the Internet was first conceived as a more efficient indexing system for accessing information and documents. Today, the Internet is ubiquitous and multipurpose; a user can stream music, order a product, video call a friend, and arrange a ride all in the same breath. And it — with its new bells and whistles and applications and interactivity — is  virtually unrecognizable from its humble beginnings.

Chapter 13 of our textbook has termed our current era of the Internet “Web 2.0,” a futuristic-sounding name with everyday implications. It essentially describes the way we interact with the Internet today as a crowd-constructed, personalized, and social platform. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit exemplify these three traits well: their respective success or failure depends on the activity of their “communities” of users, they allow individual users to post their own content and information, and they help like-minded people find and communicate with each other.

Web 2.0 sites also follow certain trends in the patterns of their behavior that approximately mirror their three defining traits. The first trend is that sites will become more appealing and beneficial to individual users the more its user base grows. The second trend is the concept of the “wisdom of crowds,” the idea that the collective knowledge of the masses can work together to produce a significant result. The third trend is that there will be a “long tail” in these sites — a small amount of widely popular, mainstream content, with a large amount of less popular, more niche-y content in its wake.

Patreon is a relatively young enterprise born in 2013, and as a product of its era, it’s highly dependent on the mechanisms within Web 2.0 for its success. What Patreon does is connect content creators with their fans so that the fans can collectively fund their favorite creators. Fans can either choose a one-time donation or a subscription system where a preset amount of money is donated to the creator whenever they post a new piece on Patreon (in order to accommodate the flexible deadlines that many creative types thrive on). Creators, on the other hand, are expected to reward their patrons with special perks for donation; an artist might draw custom pieces for her patrons, while a musician might include a patron in their next music video. These perks are tiered so that the more generous patrons will receive more exclusive rewards. The article below gives an overview of Patreon’s journey since its establishment:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahmckinney/2014/04/10/patreon-a-fast-growing-marketplace-for-creators-and-patrons-of-the-arts/

According to the article, one of Patreon’s main goals is to recruit more creators and patrons, and it’s not hard to see why. Patreon is a user-funded enterprise and runs no ads on its site. It turns a profit by skimming off a portion of each patron’s donation to the creator. But having more users also benefits the other users as well — with more patrons to fund a single creator, each patron can pay a little less to get more of the content they need. The creator will also get more money by having more of his or her fans donating through the site. When Patreon’s users are happier, they tend to promote the site itself, starting a positive cycle where having more users improves the user experience, which in turn motivates users to bring in more users. This aligns with the first trend of Web 2.0 sites.

A unique trait of Patreon in contrast to fundraising via advertising is that patrons can choose the amount they give to the creator, whereas each user contributes the same monetary amount to the creator in an advertising-based model. Jack Conte, Patreon’s CEO, says in the article that “Patreon reflects the actual strength of [a creator’s] fan base, and monetizes engagement accordingly.” This also allows a type of “wisdom of crowds” to prevail. For sites like Reddit, the number of “ups” that a post gets can bump it to the top of a Subreddit, allowing for the wisdom of crowds to filter out good posts from bad posts. However, this system doesn’t give users an accurate gauge of how much each person liked the post. Someone who thought it was “not bad” produces the same effect as a person who emphatically believed the post was well-written and relevant. On each creator’s page, Patreon displays both the number of patrons the creator has and how much the creator is getting per Patreon post. This system allows wisdom of the crowd to be represent the skill of the creator more accurately — the best will have many patrons who donate a lot, and the top tier perks for these creators are usually highly sought after by patrons.

The last trend in a Web 2.0 site isn’t as readily apparent from the article, but takes only a short visit to Patreon’s main site (https://www.patreon.com/) to figure out. While there are some creators that rake in tens of thousands of dollars with every post and are backed by thousands of patrons, there are many more creators who have a few loyal supporters donating more modest amounts. For some of these less-popular creators, it’s a matter of skill, but most of these creators never targeted a mainstream audience in the first place and are perfectly happy to be in the “long tail” with their smaller but highly devoted audiences.

Within its first year, Patreon had attracted 10,000 creators, and this number is expected to grow exponentially as the website becomes more and more popular in the artist and creator community. And with the people-centered attitude of Web 2.0, this shouldn’t be an unrealistic goal for a site as people-oriented as Patreon.

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