Compare / Patreon vs Pinterest
PATREON
A YouTube musician who couldn't pay rent despite getting millions of views built a platform so that creators c…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Patreon
BUSINESS MODEL
Patreon
Patreon takes a percentage of every payment processed through the platform. It used to run three tiers — 5%, 8% and 12% depending on how many features a creator wanted — and creators who signed up back then are still on those rates.
Everyone joining now pays a flat 8%.
On top of the platform fee, payment processing fees (typically 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction) are passed to either the creator or patron depending on the plan. The combined take rate means Patreon captures roughly 8-15% of the money flowing through the platform.
The business scales beautifully. More creators attract more patrons.
More patrons increase creator earnings. Higher earnings attract more creators.
And Patreon's cut grows proportionally with every dollar processed. Creators have been paid more than $8 billion through the platform since it launched in 2013.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Patreon
Jack Conte was one half of Pomplamoose, an indie music duo that went viral on YouTube in the late 2000s. Their cover of Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" got millions of views.
Their original music was critically praised. And they were barely making enough to pay rent.
The math was brutal. A million YouTube views paid about $1,500 in ad revenue.
Conte spent weeks producing high-quality music videos that cost thousands to make. The economics didn't work.
YouTube's ad model paid creators fractions of a penny per view. Spotify paid fractions of a penny per stream.
For mid-tier creators — popular enough to have a real audience but not famous enough for brand deals — the internet was a machine that turned creative labor into pennies.
In 2013, Conte teamed up with Sam Yam, a college roommate and developer at AdRoll. Their idea was simple: let fans pay creators directly through monthly subscriptions.
Not per-video donations. Not tips.
Recurring monthly payments — like a Netflix subscription but for individual creators. They called it Patreon, from "patron of the arts." The platform launched in May 2013 and signed up its first creator the same week.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Patreon
Patreon grew through creator evangelism. When a podcaster or YouTuber told their audience "support me on Patreon," that was free marketing to exactly the right audience.
Every creator who joins becomes a distribution channel.
The platform expanded beyond its indie roots by courting bigger creators. Podcasters were the first breakout category — shows like Chapo Trap House, True Crime Obsessed, and Last Podcast on the Left built six-figure monthly incomes on Patreon.
Then YouTubers, writers, musicians, and visual artists followed.
International expansion drove the next phase. Patreon now supports payments in multiple currencies and serves creators in over 180 countries.
The creator economy is global — a manga artist in Japan can have patrons in Brazil paying in US dollars, processed through Patreon seamlessly.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Patreon
Platform risk is the core vulnerability. Patreon is entirely dependent on creators choosing to use it.
If YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok build sufficiently good subscription tools (YouTube Memberships already exists, Instagram Subscriptions launched), creators might consolidate onto the platforms where their audiences already live. Why send fans to Patreon when they can subscribe directly on YouTube?
The moderation challenge is constant. Patreon hosts content across the entire creative spectrum — including adult content, political commentary, and controversial creators.
Payment processors (Stripe, PayPal) have their own content policies and have pressured Patreon to remove creators. Every moderation decision risks alienating a segment of the creator community.
Revenue concentration is a risk. A relatively small number of top creators generate a disproportionate share of Patreon's revenue.
If a handful of the biggest creators leave for a competing platform or build their own subscription tools, it would materially impact Patreon's business.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Patreon
Patreon Memberships — the core product allowing creators to offer tiered monthly subscriptions with exclusive content, early access, behind-the-scenes material, and community perks. Patreon Commerce — tools for selling digital downloads, merchandise, and one-time purchases directly to fans.
Patreon Community — Discord-style community features built natively into Patreon, including chat, posts, and polls for patron-only spaces. Patreon Video — native video hosting so creators can post exclusive content directly on Patreon instead of using unlisted YouTube links.
Patreon Free Membership — a free tier that lets fans follow creators and access some content, serving as a conversion funnel to paid tiers.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Patreon
Index Ventures led the Series A. Tiger Global led the 2021 round that valued Patreon at $4 billion.
Tiger Global participated in growth rounds. Initialized Capital was an early backer.
DFJ Growth and Wellington Management invested in later rounds. Creators themselves, including YouTubers and podcasters, have been informal ambassadors and some have invested personally.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.