If you want your Patreon page to be searchable on the site, it costs extra.
Not that searching the site as a user will cost anything. It’s only if you want your page to be discoverable through an in-site search that it will cost the creator extra.
It’s now an extra feature you pay for if you want to tap the folks already using Patreon and supporting other creators.
Well that’s pretty rubbish. So is that the reason that they’ve been sitting on their hands, not fixing the search/explore function?
It appears that way and what I had been assuming for years - it’s not difficult to put a proper search function on your website…but why do it for free?
But it’s quite a hardline business model, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t think Kickstarter does that, does it? What would be the point? I suppose they must have run the numbers, so I guess it’s about making people pay who might otherwise add nothing to the platform - from Patreon’s point of view. But it’s not exactly in the spirit of ‘let’s all be creative and help each other and rainbows and unicorns for everyone!’ - but I sort of knew that attitude was all an act, anyway. At some point, Patreon just drank the marketing guru’s cool aid, I think.
The difference in Patreon is that instead of building a community of supporters for creators, they are focused and branding themselves as a community of creators.
It’s a big difference and probably the reason why Kickstarter makes so much more money. Instead of being focused on making a bigger margin off of each creator, they enable the community to support more than a single project via a proper browse and search function.
Instead of being able to browse the top 10 or 20 highest grossing projects, on Kickstarter I can search via popularity, newest etc. Patreon never had this, and they should have. Now they do, but instead of empowering the support community, they are charging creators to tap that.
If Patreon had an proper browse and search, they could be making more than 5% from people like me who believe in a support community and who would be pledging for more creators. I’m of the mind that if a creator has 200 Patrons or is making a 5 figure income a month, they don’t need my support. If smaller creators had more visibility and a larger support community, Patreon wouldn’t be talking about how it’s model is ‘unsustainable’.
Exactly. I just don’t understand it. The only thing I can think of is that they want to control what sort of creators are associated with their ‘brand’.
Hi there, I wanted to jump in this thread as there appears to be have some confusion. You do not, nor have you ever, had to pay to appear on search on Patreon. Currently, only SFW creators appear in search and we understand that our search function in general needs to be improved; it’s one of our top 5 requests from the community and something these changes in pricing for new creators will allow us to work on further.
@Ghool, I’d love to understand where this confusion as come from. Feel free to DM me so we don’t take this thread off topic. Please know that we have absolutely no plan to roll founding creators into the higher prices and we went into great detail in this blog about why we currently don’t have any plans to allow patrons to browse the top 10 or 20 highest earning creators.
@Rob_Swift welcome to the forum! The new pricing allows us to invest in core features and services to make Patreon better for all creators. Our roadmap is to build a world class payments infrastructure including annual plans and internationalization, improve features such as messaging and notifications, and create a more intuitive patron experience.
@gareth.southwell I hope this helps, but let me know if you have any questions that I missed.
Hi @mindy. Thanks for the reply. So, just to be clear, there are no plans to monetise the search function? At some point, the search function will simply allow people to search all SFW creators and creations? (Currently, the search function doesn’t work at all).
I take the point about Patreon not being a discovery platform - I hadn’t been aware of that blog post - and although I don’t agree with it, I can see the logic to it. I also agree that the search function is secondary to the job of connecting creators with patrons. So, it’s not the end of the world if Patreon continues down the ‘not a discovery platform’ route. I was merely frustrated at the continuing lack of a functioning search, and angered by the idea that this would be a monetised feature. If that’s not the case, then please accept my apologies, and I’m happy to delete my earlier comments so I don’t mislead anyone else.
Mindy, there isn’t any confusion.
Patreon does not have nor has it ever had a proper browse function.
I can search specific pages and creators just fine. What I find lacking is anything that allows me to browse the creators in any way, shape or form.
For instance, if I want to look up other ‘miniature painters’, musicians, videos, podcasts, etc. I can’t. All I get is the ’ Discover’ page which shows the top earners in each category. That’s what I mean by a search function and discoverability.
And it’s discoverability that allows a support community to be fostered. A community that supports creators because they’re new, hot, trending, popular, highest grossing, etc. It’s this functionality that is sorely lacking and which hamstrings your support community from supporting anyone they can’t directly search, or who is already a top earner on the site.
For years I’ve been barking up this tree, and all this time I get the impression that branding and brand image is considered before basic community support is considered.
I was looking for a proper discoverability option, that allows one to give support to those that need it. Top earners make your brand look nice. But I think it’s losing you money. I don’t think I’m the only one thinking like this.
Patreon wants a strong, supportive creator community, right?
I’d just like to know why this is seen as such a hassle/detriment to the brand etc. when it will make Patreon more money (because I’d support new pages and stuff if I could find them) and give new creators a leg up and so they can feel some measure of success. Again this will create more revenue.
I guess I’m failing to see the point of Patreon completely failing at building a solid support community that will help with sustainability in the long run. Brand image needs to take a back seat here - creators are the ones selling a product. Patreon isn’t selling anything, except a place to do-so. If we had an actual reason for these decisions or lack of, there’d be less confusion and greater understanding.
seems to work ok for me, just don’t press enter, let it retrieve the results and select from the list. Maybe patreon devs should consider disabling the enter button in that bar, it is basically worthless in this case.
Hey Folks, I’ll clarify a few things. I can confirm there are no plans to monetize the search function. We understand that our search is not meeting some folks expectations and there are some improvements we are working on thanks to this announcement.
Our search is not designed to help a patron “browse” Patreon, it’s designed to “find a specific creator.” We are not currently working on browsing or discovery and don’t have plans to in the near future.
I spent some time articulating the “why” behind this decision in this blog post. (https://blog.patreon.com/why-isnt-patreon-discovery-platform) , In short, we are currently focused on being a membership platform, not a discovery platform. We build tools to help creators connect to their audience and get paid. If we were to become a discovery platform — a platform where people go to browse and discover new creators — that would put Patreon in between creators and patrons. Think about Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram; these sites are great discovery platforms because they have all the eyeballs. Their goal is to acquire and retain all the eyeballs; they leverage algorithms designed to keep showing you content you will click on. By contrast, Patreon’s membership platform nurtures unique relationships between creators and their biggest fans. You own your fans on Patreon.
As for finding creators to be inspired by and learn from, that is something we definitely want to encourage and assist with. We feature creators on our blogs, in case studies, on our social profiles, and by participating in our events like meetups and Hang Times, you can learn from your peers. We also have a handy feature which allows you to see what creators you follow on social profiles have a Patreon account.
I hope that’s helpful!
A post was merged into an existing topic: Search Function?
Important Update! We’re letting you know the exact launch date for the new Creator Plans: May 7th, 2019. Nothing changes for current creators and if you have friends thinking about Patreon, you might want to let them know the deadline. We’ve updated our full FAQ around this announcement here.
We’ve also made some clarifications and product changes to make it clearer to determine eligibility for founder status works. If you revert your page to patron-only, that will result in the loss of founders status. If you need to take a short or extended break from Patreon without losing founders status, you can use the Pause feature. We’re updating it to allow you to pause for as many months as you need, indefinitely, but you will still need to visit your account each month to ensure it’s paused. This change will be live when we launch the new plans on May 7th. We’ve added this information to the announcement FAQ here and please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks for the answer.
But like I mentioned, all of this is for brand image. It’s good to know where the priorities lie, and what Patreon is wanting to brand itself as.
A Membership Platform.
Not a place for creators to find and give support.
Got it.
New creator plans launch tomorrow. If you want to lock in founders status and pricing, please make sure you’ve launched your creator page by May 6 2019 11:59 PM PT (tonight)!