Patreon wants to colonize the internet with its advantages for subscribers to self-advertising in the same way that the Facebook connection has brought your social graph and your profile to other sites.
Pay a monthly subscription to a content creator on Patreon and now it will earn you exclusive access to their WordPress blog for users, Discourse forums, Discord discussion boards and, soon, other apps like Slack. Essentially, Patreon becomes your membership card for the whole web, not just for his site. And with every new reward offered by this platform, subscriptions are becoming more and more valuable and more and more people are starting to directly fund the artists they love.
More than a million subscribers already pay an average of $ 12 per month to more than 50,000 Patreon creators, ranging from illustrators to political commentators, to video artists and comedians. It is in the process of doubling both sides of its member market each year. And with $ 107 million in funding, including Thrive's $ 60 million C series last month, it has the potential to build this new platform that should support more than 100 integrations, including Slack, of Here a year.
Access exclusive or ad-free content on WordPress when you register with your Patreon subscription
All this is possible thanks to the new Patreon API, which everyone can integrate into their product via the Patreon Developer Portal to become a place where customers can join. Then, these third-party products will appear in the new App Directory that creators can choose to extend the benefits of backing them up beyond Patreon.
This application directory now includes Zapier, which allows designers to integrate other business applications to manage their customers, such as MailChimp email marketing, Google Sheets, Twitter, video streaming, and more. Direct Crowdcast and 750 others.
Brent Horowitz, Vice President of Partnerships and Partnerships of Patreon, considers that "hundreds of shelves organized around this center are calling members, are not held by a single platform". This means gaps in Patreon's native tools. Bones Blogging Interface, will not limit the creative expressions of those who monetize with it as they can use WordPress instead.
Get special badges that make you stand out in discourse forums when you sign up for Patreon
And partner sites and apps should also benefit. Linking with the Patreon platform could bring a new influx of customers and creators to business tools and content hubs. Instead of having to create a member-only level from scratch, sites like WordPress or Discourse can be grafted onto Patreon.
As Patreon spreads through the web, he also tries to become a little less edgy. He voluntarily accepts unsafe content, including nudity, adult fiction and erotic illustration. But he is now attacking contents that are not safe for any where, and that represent fictional incest, the sexual representation of minors and suggestive sexual violence. "
I heard that some of these things that can not easily be monetized elsewhere became a non-trivial part of Patreon's income, and it had to be eliminated before being considered as accomplice of a disturbing content. Meanwhile, Patreon reiterated his support for other niche content and human rights of the LGBTQ community.
YouTube and Twitch, two of the most popular artist-to-artist communication tools among Patreon's creators, are still missing from the platform. They both offer their own modest benefits on the spot for fans who promise funds to the creators.
But Horowitz says that they only support a binary yes-subscriber or non-subscriber system, and the benefits do not travel anywhere else. Patreon's platform allows artists to set different levels of access for different levels of payment. In this way, a creator could make its content ad-free for subscribers of $ 1 per month or more, advance access to new content for $ 5 or more and exclusive customer-only content for $ 10 or more.
Partners will not gain anything from Patreon's tiny 5% subscriptions, but they could have access to the most popular creators on the web and the fan base that follows them everywhere.