Thank you very much, I’ll do it right away!
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Having worked with businesses that do the super clear cut stuff, I can tell you that I think you would want to take resetting everything every 5 years over not being able to really do much at all and getting suspended/warned every 2 weeks, forever.
I also don’t know of any business that survived putting down clear cut rules that didn’t basically kill itself off within months or a few years of doing so, for the reasons I named.
Why would you even have to reset stuff every 5 years, anyways? If you err on the side of being safe and follow the rules stringently, and then advertise your stuff outside of Patreon, I don’t see why you’d ever have an issue.
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Having been doing this for 20+ years, I shall tell you the story. I’ll give you the short short version.
First, there was the chaos of transacting at all on the internet. It was the 1990s and banks didn’t want to deal with these newfangled things called internet merchants. You’re selling what? How can you write a receipt for a digital file? Nah, we’re not going to do this for that internet thing, it’s a fad and it will go away in a few years. Out of that void coalesced a few things like PayPal and iBill. But before that, it was a handful of homebrew players trying to operate in a system resistant to change, and you just had to pick one and roll with it. Pretty sure all of them died, but you could coast along with a host or two for a while and make it work. Queue reset 1.
PayPal promised to be the land of the free. We all know how that turned out. It went the way all suddenly rich, but well organized yuppie businesses went in the 90s, and was sold off to investors who did not continue the original vision that made it awesome. At one point, PayPal decide to purge all of its adult everything, tangible and intangible.
iBill did its job, but went the way all suddenly rich, cocaine-fueled yuppie businesses went in the 90s, and violently imploded, owing me and many other merchants a lot of money which was debited from customers, promised to us, and never delivered. One of the main guys involved in this used some of that money (probably the bit he didn’t snort up) to make a movie about it, which, surprisingly, didn’t suck and was pretty well accurate to the truth.
Queue reset 2. Also qualifies for reset 3 but these two were close enough that they can be combined into one great big giant reset.
Then there was 2257, but as my biz has never involved photography, I was immune. Not that I was not investigated anyways during that witch hunt, but that is another story for another time. And probably a half dozen other federal legal nightmares from Tipper Gore and Hillary’s crusade against violence in video games and explicit lyrics ruining childhoods and tearing families apart OHMYGODTHEPOORCHILDRENDOSOMETHING during that time that I have forgotten about.
CCBill rose up to pick up the slack where iBill dropped the ball. However, VISA was increasingly puritanical and waged a campaign that not only shut down adult creators but mainstream ones as well, citing violations over representation of werewolves, vampires, and mermaids (yes, insanity, but fact). In order to continue billing I had to reincorporate in the EU to avoid the byzantine sanctions imposed on US merchants. Same company, same internet, same compliance officers, different arbitrary enforcement of the stupidest of rules in 2 different places on the same planet. Queue reset 3.
Now the biz is dealing with multiple fronts because you pretty much have to these days, Patreon having been initially an experiment but now having grown to a not insubstantial part of the revenue stream. However, the inquisition has returned to once again enforce its arbitrary ruleset against an entire culture of creators that want to keep going, and are eager to comply to whatever ruleset that may be, BUT THERE IS NO RULE SET.
There is not even a real ruleset WITHIN Paypal! One side of their face is quite literally partnered with Epoch, selling full on adult website memberships via the PayPal platform, using the PayPal name, while the other side of their face tells Patreon and its creators to get lost. In addition, Patreon has to reincorporate in the EU to avoid the stupid fake rules on the left side the water, so that they can continue to operate with the same billing networks, because those billing networks do not apply the same rules if you are standing on the right side of this water. Queue reset 4.5.6. Whichever one this is. Which is hopefully avoidable but ehhhhhhh so far I am not so convinced.
I still posit that “we do whatever the heck we want with your pursestrings” is not conducive to long term business strategies nor relationships.
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PayPal literally has a special deal with Patreon; both sides have publicly announced this. PayPal isn’t the one doing restrictions on adult content. (On top of that, it’s not even PayPal in both cases, it’s Braintree, a subsidary of PayPal.)
Just to clarify that much, at least, but there are a lot of misconceptions/things people have wrong about who or what is doing this or that in regards to Patreon or themselves.
And yes, billing networks do not apply the same rules because billing networks are ruled by the social rules of the culture they’re within. This is why Visa and Mastercard have a set of rules as to what things are allowed adult-content-wise in the West, yet over in the East (Japan, for instance), those rules don’t exist, and things are much more free adult-wise, because the culture over there is much more accepting of adult content in general.
That’s not a Patreon-fault thing, that’s not even a billing network thing, that’s just a cultural thing.
Patreon also isn’t reincorporating in the EU, it’s just doing stuff through the banks there.
I lost this month about 700$ with the new changes 
This has been very educational to someone who’s new to the NSFW business side, thanks guys!
Personally, I haven’t seen much long term impact from the changes. A slight drop the first month, but it seems to have recovered now.
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@teemovsall I just sent you a DM so we can take a look into this.
Also doesn’t mention anything about 'sex toy play ’ - which they defined as a woman wearing a strap-on. Screwed up my world as a sex educator who teaches about pegging, believe me.
There’s been a lot of discussion in other businesses about who’s doing the censorship and the last I heard Paypal said the big banks were behind it and the big banks were blaming PayPal. What is your source for this information?
The thing is, about the “big banks” and “paypal” blaming each other, they’re both effectively correct.
Because above both of them are the payment processors, like Visa and Mastercard, and they are the ones that lay down the ground rules for a lot of these things. As far as my source goes, it’s just general research and having spent about 15+ years dealing with censorship, marketing, and the entertainment industry and getting ahold of some high up people, so I don’t have any articles persay unfortunately.
Additionally, regarding sex toy play, note that per Patreon’s rules you aren’t supposed to be giving out content in any way, shape or form that engages two real life people doing sexual things together; Patreon differentiates between illustrated adult sexual content, and real life adult sexual content. The former is allowed on patreon, the latter is not.
(Sexual content in this case means, showing two people going at it or one person masturbating, or anything else beyond just showing your body or general nudity).
Note that I don’t work at Patreon though, this is just from what I know, so maybe @mindy can clarify and such in case I got anything wrong.
Thanks for the bank info.
Mindy and I have had lots of conversations about this and she has tried her best to be helpful, while continuing to insist that the (vague) guidelines have not changed (just the interpretation - which is the same thing).
When Fred reviewed my page during the censorship debacle, I asked if the ‘sex toy play’ applied to, say, a hand holding a dildo? If I showed sex toys could there never be a person in the photo? He did not answer that question.
I come from the perspective of being a sex educator - about pegging - who asked whether Paypal’s involvement would end in censorship before I even signed up, and I was reassured all would be fine. That they had a deal with Paypal - an understanding. A lot of what I teach about and offer for sale involves ‘equipment’. Quite a challenge for a sex educator to never have content that is about people having sex, no? That specific interpretation was NOT in place when i signed up.
If anyone cares to read the whole exchange - I put it up on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rubyryder/posts/1757917134261366?hc_location=ufi
Probably the best move I made was to simply duplicate everything from my blog to Patreon from the beginning, because I didn’t quite trust the reassurances completely. So when the censorship hammer came down hard, I simply removed pretty much everything from Patreon and I now connect with my patrons weekly through a mailing service. This has been the blessing in disguise. I deliver their rewards in one easy, weekly email with links to everything. And I get all kinds of information regarding how many people opened their emails and how many links they clicked on, too. Makes it easy to give a free membership at any level I choose, too.
For me, Patreon is simply a payment processor now. that’s it. Once people sign up and become patrons, there is no reason for them to ever go there again.