I had millions of YouTube views and couldn't pay my rent. The internet broke the connection between making something people love and getting paid for it. Patreon fixes that.
YouTube, Spotify, Instagram — they all pay creators in pennies per view. Patreon pays in dollars per fan. Turns out fans are worth more than views.
A thousand true fans is all you need. You don't need millions of followers. You need a thousand people willing to pay $10 a month.
We've paid out over $3.5 billion to creators. That's not ad revenue split by an algorithm. That's fans directly paying for work they value.
Every creator who tells their audience about Patreon is doing our marketing for free. The product sells itself through the people who use it.
The ad model turned creators into content machines chasing views. Subscriptions let them make what they actually want to make. That's the difference.