I have a question about Patreon!

So today we notice some creators getting basically company-sized revenues thru Patreon, hundreds of thousands

Are there any examples of creators at this scale posting detailed budgets of where it goes, or otherwise creating transparency??

So here's a claim I wanna make about Patreon (as some rando who has never tried to make a go of it there, lol)

- It kinda seems like ppl on Patreon want to run art practices rather than businesses

- In art funding models, transparency is a way bigger deal than in capital models

The capital funding model is: You get a secret amount of money from secret people that a secret # of people decide how to spend secretly

(we're not used to using the "secret" for this due to ideology, but u know, the basic idea is: There is ??? dollars left, & The Boss Decides)

In arts world it's like, well no, when you apply for a grant you submit an itemized budget to the people who will be giving you money; also your org probably has a board of directors whose job is to prevent somebody from misspending the money

So my CLAIM, about Patreon, is that today there are lot of people making the kinds of monthly income that we'd associated with an organization rather than an individual

Unfortunately the default assumption, due to ideology, is that the funds should be handled secretly!

So you end up with cases where u know, apparently it's just one dude, but he's getting $500,000 a year from funders who Patreon has aggregated and given 0 power over this funding they collectively created

We can plainly see how & why this is a bad idea, can't we?

I think it might actually be a good idea for those currently 'winning' Patreon to start self-regulating now, and basically start publishing things like itemized budgets and maybe even incorporating themselves as 'societies' with boards et cetera

The secrecy is not sustainable

I think if people want to build a more durable audience with their relationship that they can sustain for a long time, like, it's important for people to see that out of the $500,000 annually, x amount goes to the video producer, x amount goes to a biz manager, et cetera

It might seem today like things are going steady and it's best to manage this income 'the high tech way' e.g.: Underpay everyone, keep everything secret, explain the lack of management as 'agile' and pretend to be focused 100% on content rather than bizdev

not sustainable

Eventually there will be some capital-induced crisis, like maybe some high-profile accounts will be exposed for malfeasance or something, leaving everybody else caught with their pants down and scrambling to not get hatemobbed

For those who have, the whole time, been gradually building accountability & transparency measures into their growing organizations, the crisis will be manageable

There will need to be a future after this particular funding model, they never last long, ppl are more important

Like case in point, I'd been donating $10/month to this minecraft shader creator person, but it's been quite a while now, this thing's making $750,000 annually and I have no idea where that money is ending up

So I'm gonna cancel that donation cuz, ??????

I don't want "reward tiers", I'm not a fool who can be distracted by gaining access to a discord server. I'm a person, & I can count. Where's it going? There doesn't seem to be a dev team, u know?

It's unfortunate, and it's gonna hurt everybody on Patreon sooner or later

To clarify like, it's not "a scam", the shaders are real and you can use them to play minecraft

It's just that at a certain point I gotta ask whether that amount of community funding is well-matched with the amount of work getting done, & the only answer is ??????

Let's be real clear about it:

-There is an obvious transparency problem

-Patreon is dumping the problem on its creators by not helping anybody with transparency

-Most creators re-dump the problem onto patrons, by not creating their own transparency measures

u will note that Critical Distance already has an advisory board, even though its funding levels are far below the level I've been talking about in this thread

So if you are looking for examples of how you can do these things, that is one

Think about it for a second: There's one org over here that realizes accountability measures are important for spending their ~$12k per year

Then there are examples of $750k in basically grassroots community funding, being managed as if it's seed money from some shady investor