About Patreon's policy changes (Patreon)

Hi guys, I wanted to wait a little bit and do a proper video on this. (My family is in town for the next couple of days and it's kind of awkward to shoot with people in my apartment) But I've received some concerned messages and thought it was just better to address it sooner.

I'm really unhappy with the new changes Patreon is implementing - the added fees becoming the responsibility of the donors.  Patreon used to take a larger chunk away from creators, then use a fraction of that to cover transaction fees. Now, instead, they're taking a smaller chunk from creators, and charging patrons more so that they have the responsibility of covering the fees.

I assume this is to appease high-earning creators who wanted to keep a larger percentage of their earnings, but obviously is the worst way to go about it. I was ok with the status quo before and would much rather go back to that - all of my friends who are creators emphatically feel the same way - but it's still unclear whether Patreon is going to take any of this feedback into account.

The difficulty here is I'm basically powerless to change this. I've lost a lot of long-time patrons to this, many of whom have gone out of their way to apologize for the circumstances. And I completely understand. The new system actively punishes patrons who use the platform to make small pledges to many different creators. It's depressing for everyone involved.

Unfortunately, migrating from a really popular platform to an unknown quantity is a really dangerous thing to do. Whenever creators get mad at YouTube policies, there's a reason they don't just go over to Vimeo or Dailymotion - they know that they would be leaving a lot of their audience behind. When a site is the cultural go-to for a given service, they basically have a monopoly, even if other equivalent or even better sites exist. People are more likely to sign up to a known entity than go out of their way to something unfamiliar, especially where handing over their credit card info is involved.

I've heard rumors that Kofi is going to try to introduce a subscription-based donation option competitive to Patreon. That's a fairly big site so I might set up one of those concurrently and consider it as an alternative. Part of me is still hoping Patreon will be reasonable in response to this huge outcry and reverse their policy changes before the date they're meant to take effect.

I feel like all I can really do at this point is wait and see what happens, and hope that my youtube channel continues to be a thing I can live off of. I'm grateful to everybody that's still lingering here in spite of this and welcome your input on the matter.