Traffic Acquisition / Advertising

Patreon Feedback
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I’d like to know if Patreon is investing in acquiring more traffic to our pages through advertising and other methods, or if all traffic sent to them only derives from our efforts (referrals, sharing etc) or organic traffic from search engines.

Since Patreon gets a cut, it might be profitable for Patreon to make deals to bring more people in. I tried placing ads, but when you’re small it’s just impossible to convert more than what you spend on them, but if Patreon ran some campaigns we might all benefit, Patreon included.

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I’m absolutely certain that Patreon doesn’t advertise creator pages on other platforms. If someone has better info, please feel free to post the details.

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That’s what I felt… Hence why it’s a suggestion :grin:

When I list an item on eBay, for example, I pay a commision so they spread the word about my listing and I get more eyes on my product. It could work the same way here, we pay Patreon and could surely benefit from some extra traffic, which is something usually too expensive for us to pay for individually.

I tried Google and Bing ads, but if you charge seven dollars and you need 500 clicks to get a conversion, you can do the math and we always lose money with advertising, but a large company like Patreon can get much better deals, offer affiliate programs to publishers and ad networks that only pay per conversion / CPA. If you’re a publisher sometimes ad networks only pay you if you convert, but if you are a small advertiser those same businesses won’t offer you CPA ads so you can show your product for free and only pay if they send you traffic that converts. Now, if those networks are pocketing the difference between systems (charge per click, pay per conversion) on top of taking a “cut”, I don’t know, but since there’s tons of affiliate programs around, I wonder why Patreon doesn’t make use of such strategies to grow (and take us with them)…

They could even charge us a little extra or something, maybe deduct the CPA when a user is acquired through an ad, for example.

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Evan here from the Patreon team and I love this idea. I do know that we are working on discoverability on the platform but am unsure how they are looking to structure it. I think that this would be a great opportunity for creators and Patreon to spread the word.

I’ll pass this along in hopes that the product team feels the same!

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Thank you so much for your feedback! I really wish you can put together a plan that can be profitable for both us, creators, and Patreon, of course :wink:

And, as a publisher, I could also send traffic TO patreon if I have tools that allow me to segment the offers to display, even if I only get paid per conversion, since I would be able to filter what would be more likely to succeed (or I could even choose a few affiliates that I know have the perfect offering for my audience and get a commision each time a new user supports them).

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I’ve got a few related resources to share!

You can watch the recording of our workshop “Turn your audience into happy patrons,” where we talk about the marketing funnel and figuring out if you need to focus on building your audience or converting them to patrons.

This is also a great article that reviews ways to turn more fans into patrons, without necessarily using advertising.

That said, if you did want to advertise, you can customize whom you’re targeting, e.g., prospective new fans, current fans to convert to patrons, etc.

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Oh, I know that we are supposed to work organically most of the time, but having traffic that can “see” us is essential, otherwise we can have the best material and it will be irrelevant if it’s not seen by enough eyes. :wink:

That’s where advertising and affiliate programs are useful, to bring traffic. When you’re a larger business, you can get ad networks to show your ads and only pay when they convert, but when you’re small its not possible.

Patreon might also attract publishers with your own affiliate program, since you’d be paying publishers a revenue per action (% or bounty per paid patronage). If you spend 3 dollars on average per new user, but you make 5, you’re profiting. That only seems possible when your ads are on a cost per action basis or if your product is expensive enough to cover regular CPC marketing costs (the latter is just “impossible” with small value subscriptions, since you’d need hundreds of dollars per transaction to afford CPC marketing profitably).

Converting existing followers is something that I actually do that’s very effective and free. Prospecting new followers is very costly and even social media is designed in a way that forces you to “pay to play” or they will bury your content to not be seen even by most of your following.

Organic traffic from Google is the best thing we have access to freely, but there’s only so much traffic that they’ll send to you if you’re small, plus they keep changing their platform to hold traffic on their own site by showing snippets that already answer questions, for example. You can block that, but then you won’t show on searches.

We (creators) can surely use more traffic.

Publishers can use a good quality affiliate program that lets them add links to your creators that produce content related to their blogs and be paid with a recurring commision when a user becomes a patron.

If Patreon gets in the middle and provides that service, it will surely grow substantially in audience and revenue, since there’s no competition in the market and you’d be the first company linking creators and publishers (and ad networks through CPA ads).

I strongly believe such a system would benefit all parties involved and I wish you can implement that before the competition does. :wink:

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