Facing a rebellion of furious creators, Patreon backs away from a new fee

Four years ago, cartoonist Jeph Jacques signed up for Patreon. The idea behind the then new website was intriguing: a reimagining of what it means to be a “patron” of the arts, for a generation of creators who were struggling to transform online fan bases into reliable income.

On Patreon, fans sign up to give small, regular payments to their favorite online visual artists, podcasters, vloggers, comic-book artists and other creators. For the fan, it’s a bit like being a member of a club. For the creator, those small donations can add up.

“My community of patrons is fantastic and I consider them my most valuable readers,” Jacques said in an email this month. He is the artist and author of the long-running daily webcomic Questionable Content; for a dollar a month, he lets his Patreon fans see his strips 24 hours before they published on his main website. His 5,000 Patreon supporters make up 33 to 40 percent of his income in any given month, he said.

But recently, Jacques could only watch as, over the course of 12 hours, he lost more than 120 pledges — more than he’s lost in any entire month on the service.

It wasn’t something he had done, or said. Instead, his supporters were taking a stand against Patreon itself. In the hours before Jacques saw his monthly income plummet, Patreon had announced a fee change that infuriated creators and patrons alike. Many felt the change was a betrayal of trust, and it immediately drove away many dedicated patrons.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte backpedaled last week, saying the company was dropping the decision that caused all that fury.

“Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income. No apology will make up for that but, nevertheless, I’m sorry,” Conte said.

Patreon had planned to change how the company processes payments to creators. Its initial model removes the processing fees for each payment out of the donation itself, before it reaches creators — so a fan’s $1 donation might give around 90 cents to creators after Patreon deducted fees. The new plan was: Fans themselves will pay those fees — 2.9 percent of their payment, along with a newly standardized flat fee of 35 cents — on top of the amount they have selected to give. For instance, a donation that once cost a patron $1 would then cost $1.38.

Patreon’s reasoning for the change? The new system would allow creators to keep a bigger percentage of the donation amounts their patrons pledge to them, something they believed both creators and patrons want.

Instead, many creators — and their patrons — were infuriated. Viral Twitter threads accused Patreon of changing the payment structure solely to increase its profits, a charge Conte strongly denied to the Washington Post and on Twitter.

Mostly, though, creators felt Patreon was taking away some of the reasons the service appealed to them. Jacques’ average patron gives him $1 to $2 a month. Creators like him, who rely on small payments, said the new system would discourage that.

In the hours after Patreon’s announcement, creators sent viral tweets about their lost income, begging Patreon to do something to stop it. Conte spoke to the Post twice about the anger among creators. In the first conversation, Conte said the company had made a mistake — not in the actual policy change, but in how they it was announced. It was a message Conte relayed in hours of phone calls and conversations with angry creators.

But by the middle of last week, Conte said Patreon was reversing the policy change. The fee structure still needs to change, Conte said. But not in the way they had originally planned.

The new fees, Conte said, were always going to come with trade-offs for creators and patrons.

“We thought these trade-offs were worth it. We thought that the cons of the new system were worth it,” he said. “And creators have been adamant, they’ve been clear, they’ve been overwhelmingly clear with this that the trade-offs are not worth it.”