Patreon CEO says the company's generous business model is not sustainable

I’m curious what isn’t sustainable, since it doesn’t go into detail in the article.

If using stripe (or similar), all payment backend/scalability is included in the processing fees. And that portion is covered by the additional 5% fee Patreon charges directly.

5% of 500 million = $25 million USD.

+ 10 million USD extra since the actual processing fees are typically 3% or less in cost.

That leaves ~$35 million USD to cover:

- support staff - ethics staff (mentioned was important) - ops/accounting staff - developers - designers - legal/insurance - office space/expenses - marketing - hosting, transactional email expenses - r&d

Most videos/content are using YouTube still from what I’ve seen, that would help avoid a large bandwidth bill.

It’s not a large company for sure, but do content providers really want a large, for-profit entity with ever increasing revenue needs in between them and their subscribers?

I’m curious what the unsustainable bit is when the above is considered.