The Week Long Patreon Trainwreck

Well this has been fun.

For those of you not really aware of what's been going on this past week, Patreon announced some outrageously bad changes to its fee structure. 

I'm not going to go into too much detail about the specifics, as Chris already covered everything here. But in short, the new system was pitched as "Creators now take home 95%" of each stated pledge value. However to do this, all the credit card transaction fees, which are currently borne by creators, would be pushed on to you, the patrons, at a rate of $0.39 + 2.5%. The astute among you might have already noticed that this does, in fact, not mean the creator actually takes home 95% of what you paid.

Worse still, this negatively impacts smaller pledges the most; what was once a $1 pledge became $1.38 under the new system. For a Patreon like Spoiler Warning, where the majority of our pledges are less than $5, this change would have been disastrous. It doesn't take much thought to realize that if you increase the fees on patrons, they might donate a little less. And they might feel a bit sore and less likely to use the platform altogether if their charges increased by as much as 40%.

This logic, however, appears to have eluded the great minds at Patreon for the past week, and it's still not really clear why. The stated reason for this change was to make things easier to understand for patrons that donate to campaigns where they're charged immediately for access, but are then charged again at the beginning of the month... by separating each pledge into individual transactions and charging you for each campaign you support each month on the day you pledged, potentially leading to many charges over a single month. 

Over the past week, a number of other possible explanations were raised. Many on twitter pointed out the large influx of venture capital Patreon recently raised, and that this may be a scheme to raise revenue (an accusation Patreon has repeatedly denied) and there was also the possibility raised that Patreon was attempting to change their service to avoid certain regulations, which they obviously wouldn't be able to publicly admit to.

And then there's the possibility they were really so out of touch that they thought everyone would be happy with the change. And perhaps that's even more worrying.

Regardless, after pissing off literally the entire internet for over a week, today Patreon announced that they were, in fact, not jumping off that bridge after all.

The bone-headedness of this plan, the slimy way it was pitched, the lack of transparency and insane explanations, and the fact that it took an entire week for them to walk it back after completely universal condemnation; I think I speak for everyone when I say it's greatly shaken my faith in this platform. Patreon has been good to me, and good for this show; and it's allowed us to do things we could never have done otherwise, both in capabilities and in quality. But I think, in a way, I was taking it for granted, and this incident has exposed how volatile it really is.

I don't blame anyone at all who cancelled their pledges as a result of this scare; I totally understand the outrage. And I completely understand if you still don't trust Patreon enough to re-pledge now that disaster has been called off. I would've been uncomfortable asking anyone to remain onboard or pledge more if this had gone through.

Also irritating about this whole thing was the timing, especially since we'd been working on revamping the Spoiler Warning campaign with reward tiers, stretch goals, and better avenues of communication and audience participation. When it looked like the proposed fee changes were going through, I was tempted to cancel it altogether. Now that it seems Patreon is finally listening, I feel a little more comfortable with going forward, at least as long as Patreon doesn't turn scummy again. You can expect to hear more about that next week.

Until then, at least the worst has been avoided. Thank you all so much for the three years of support you've given us on Patreon already.  We love doing this show and we want to make it the best it can be. 

Let's see what happens.