As I said when the new fee structure was announced and then rescinded, a lot of us would not know the exact damages until 2018.
So here we are, and yes, it hurt.
For my campaign it resulted in over $500 in lost revenue, and who knows how long it will take to bring those numbers back up.
In 2017 I averaged $3,007.75 revenue per month. Dropping that to $2,430 is a pretty heavy hit.
Are you sure this is final? There appears to be a delay in processing.
Not 100% sure, but the percentages collected from each release are almost identical to last month’s at this point. The reality is that every piece I posted after the fee announcement had $100 or more LESS pledged to it than the month before - so that’s 6 releases at -$100 each.
My fees this month were 4.28% processing fees, and 5.15% Patreon fees.
I’ll sit on it for a few days and update then.
If you’re on pay-up-front, keep in mind that as the month goes on that number will grow for any new pledges.
The December readout is total for the 30 days, while for January that’s just where it starts at. (Again assuming pay-up-front.)
My earnings are ALWAYS lower at the start of the month and grow as I gain new pledges as well as one-time pledges.
I’ve been a Patreon creator for over four years now, I know how my revenue works here. I run a per-creation campaign that launched in November of 2013.
My revenue this month is now $2,485.61 - still more than $500 down from my average over the 12 months prior to the fee change announcement.
I have found that this December in particular, was very bad in terms of losses, and growth.
I’m now at a lower funding level than I was 6 months ago.
I can’t say for sure if it was the fee changes, but December was brutal for me - I lost over 20% of my income.
I’ve not had that problem until this year. In fact, December of last year was when I pushed into the new bracket of averaging $3k per month.
I can easily link my losses this last month to the fee changes. All my canceled pledges clearly indicated that they were canceling because of the changes.
I feel your pain but I’m not sure there is much that can be done about it now.
It may just be a coincidence… I lost one patron because of the change and he returned soon after it was cancelled. Overall I actually saw quite a lot of growth this month although I did post a lot of content over Christmas which found a lot of support.
If others have the same issue then maybe there is a trend here that I’m not a part of.
I’m not saying you are wrong and it is a very likely cause but I would be interested to hear of what other people experienced in terms of losses and gains last month.
Really, I expect I’ll be a worse-case scenario, as the proposed changes were worse for me than for almost anyone else I know.
I run a per-creation campaign with 10 releases per month and had a hundred patrons still pledging under $1 per creation (average for those 100 patrons was 27c per creation). Under the current system, that’s still a $2.70 pledge per month, but under the proposed fee structure, that would have jumped to over $6 per month for them, while increasing my revenue from them by only 5%.
Basically, because I run 9-10 creations per month as a per-creation campaign instead of a monthly campaign, my patrons were looking at a $3.50 increase in costs every month.
I suspect we won’t be seein’ those cute little end of year infographics we got before as a result of this. I would really be curious to see how this affected others as well. Thanks for sharin’ the graph, DysonLogos.
Technically speaking, my overall amount I make from art went up for the month as I quickly jumped in to add a link to Ko-fi for my patrons who will no longer support me through Patreon. I lost $11 in Patreon pledges, but made $42 on Ko-Fi. But that of course is going to fluctuate and does not function with the same basic stability as Patreon. My dad dropped his $5 pledge on Patreon and changed to a $25 direct deposit into my account. It ended up better for me in the present, but I’m just a small potatoes earner. There is no telling how this will damage faith in Patreon in the long run to affect future growth and I cannot imagine how this hurt people who have a considerable number of patrons.
To put it in perspective, the loss last month is equal to my monthly groceries + heat + electricity + internet.
I’m going to spend this month, like last month, scrambling to build up new support instead of working on creating stuff. Which is balls.
On the upside, we managed to recover.
While I lost over $500 in revenue last month directly to the announced changes, hard work and the extra visibility has put me right back where I was previous to the carnage, and revenue this month was back in line with last year’s.
