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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite interested in learning more about what kind of things people are willing to pay 80-100 USD a month for on Patreon.

The author also throws around some percentages of the growth of hig end payers on Patreon, but no hard numbers. Did it increase by 5 people? Are high paying patrons growing faster than low paying?

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On Twitch people commonly give $100 for absolute nothing, just to be thanked by the creator live, which they would do for significantly less money as well, often just $5.

I suspect the top tiers at Patreon must work the same, there's some benefit there but people are doing it because they are a megafan and want to show it. I'd be intested in how many of them are living in a false belief / parasocial relationship though.

I have a few streamers I occasionally throw money at. But those are ones I actually interact with outside of the streams/very small streamers, without deluding myself to think they are my friends. They owe me NOTHING.

Parasocial relationships are scary though. A few times I almost slipped into one. (Nowadays I intentionally stop watching streamers I feel I am getting too close to.)

I only follow a couple streamers (as opposed to surfing more generally) and I notice the same names repeatedly doing donations like that. Most are one-offs but there are maybe 10 names that stick out in my brain because I see them so often.

I know parasocial is the popular thing right now, but I think it's just a more general 'microtransaction whale factor' that encompasses collectible card games, gachas, and stream donations. I leave realmoney gambling out of that because I think the chance to get actual money back makes the rationalization different, nobody who is whaling thinks they will get a dime back.

Some of these megafan donations are probably fakes, the streamer sending themselves money with an alt in the hope that real people follow. The platform has little incentive to stop that sort of thing.

That is absolutely possible, but there are also definitely people who simply want to support people who do cool stuff, and don't necessarily need anything in addition to the free content in exchange.

$100 for 1 piece of content, yes, but $100 regularly per month?

Yes. A month.

I wanna read an article about the $100/month patreon tiers and the people who pay for them.

Good point. I’d pay 1k for that content

> I'm quite interested in learning more about what kind of things people are willing to pay 80-100 USD a month for on Patreon.

This is probably not representative over the whole population, but, I have a Patreon. I had a few people pay me $50/month (where the base tier is $5/month). The $50/month tier has no extra benefits besides a vanity Discord role. So why did they do it? They genuinely want to support whatever I'm doing. That's it.

I'm a Github sponsor for $100/m for audio support on Asahi Linux for M1 MacBooks (though I don't expect this to last a full year) and a $48/m Patreon supporter of marcan for the overall development. For marcan that was their highest tier, I probably would have went more towards the $80 range had it been an option. There are actually a few others with lower max tiers (like $10) where I've maxed out. My goal here is they deliver good work and I want to make sure they are able to continue investing the hardware and time to do that.

Prior to the Asahi stuff I had that more spread out across some interesting and/or useful things like Zig.

While it doesn't fit TFA's premise of 100 on one thing, Patreon is used as a donation platform by many groups, for example i know of several online radio platforms using it (when asked "why not Liberapay?", they say Patreon helps take care of business and tax issues, provides an API, etc.). DKFM uses the API to display their Patreon donors on the website for example.

Sci-fi publications use it as well for monthly subscriptions - the general math holds up that some people spend $5/$10 per thing totalling up to $100/mo (or some variation). But I don't think that supports what TFA is suggesting $100/thing/mo), that feels like a lot. They might believe the Patreon user only supports one thing/mo, but I'm not sure that's true - people have varied interests based on my travels.

> when asked "why not Liberapay?", they say Patreon helps take care of business and tax issues, provides an API, etc.

Another big advantage, especially in audio / video formats, is that you can say "support me on Patreon" and people will know what you're talking about, vs. needing to spell out a URL for people.

Agreed. It seems like examples should be easy to find and highlight if it’s really as common as this article suggests.

I’ve seen people spontaneously put $100 toward creators they really appreciate, but those are rare. $100 per month on a recurring basis or a constant influx of one-off $100 donations is a much higher bar. You would need a relatively massive audience to convert enough people interested in spending $1K/year on something.

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