Hello. Welcome to Daily(ish) for 12/13/2017. It's, two degrees out. Feels like minus two Celsius. This is not a weather podcast, but this is brought to you by my Patreon supporters.
Speaker 1:Still there. Still Patreon's still around and kicking. Patreon.com/ichris is where you can check out my now two year old video on why you should support me on Patreon. I think it's time to update that one. If only because my son is much older and different than he is in the video, and maybe I am too.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Well, I'm definitely older. But, yeah, patreon.com/ichris is where you can check out how you can support me. And I am joking if you don't have no idea why I'd be sort of laughing about the idea of Patreon still being around, then thankfully, you've had you've been blissfully unaware of any sort of Internet controversy of the week, or maybe you've been blissfully unaware of that Internet Internet controversy anyways. About a week ago, Patreon announced a plan to change their fee structure.
Speaker 1:So without going into huge detail, they were basically going to take the transaction fees, service fees, whatever you wanna call them, and move them from being on the creator's account effectively, mine, to the pledge, the patron's account, yours in a sense, anybody who supports me. So, and there's specifics and numbers and stuff in there, but basically they're gonna change that such that so that the the marketing message anyways was the creators get to take home more money, so the creators will be happy. Now explain that to your patrons, and, hopefully, they all stick around and are happy to do that as well. Problem being that and and I I posted something to my patrons as well just saying, like, I'm sure. It happened on a day when I was really busy, and so I wasn't sure.
Speaker 1:Didn't have time to fully comp take it all in. But, just saying, like, hey. This is happening. You know, read up if you want. Let me know if you have any questions, and, we'll see.
Speaker 1:And sort of as the week wore on. Was basically a week ago now that they announced this. And, and so and that was gonna go into effect December 18. And, and it had other things to do with, other changes that they were wanting to do basically because they have sort of some folks that are on monthly things where which all of you are if you're supporting me on Patreon, where each at the beginning or near the end of the month that they, charge you or whatever for your patronage, and and then you get access to all the stuff that's, you know, hidden or whatever or locked to patrons only on my Patreon account for the rest of the month, and then they charge you again and it repeats. But what if somebody joins up the what they're thinking was, like, what if somebody and the confusion is somebody joins in December 15, let's say, and they don't get charged until December 30, but they already get access to it, all the bonuses or whatever of being a patron, and then they quit before money has ever changed hands.
Speaker 1:That was one issue. So they wanted to be able to, like, change the payment cycle so that a patron, when you sign up on the fifteenth or the twelfth or the seventeenth, whatever, all of that should be just tied to whenever you sign up rather than just being a monthly thing, which kinda makes sense. I get that. It it is kind of I don't deal with stuff where I'm giving away digital downloads and things like that a lot. There's certainly a bit of that with the courses and stuff that I'm doing, but or the course so far, but the the ones I'm creating.
Speaker 1:You know, if somebody, I've effectively given them to people, patrons, whatever level you're supporting me at, and especially if you've supporting me for a while, there you go. Someone new signs up and then just gets that access code and then goes and downloads the $20 course or whatever for effectively for free and then quits my Patreon account support, then, you know, they're kind of, in a sense, stolen, I guess. I don't know. I'm in it for the long term and and don't really anticipate that being a huge issue for the kind of stuff I do, but I sympathize with creators who do deal with that kind of stuff. So, and there's other stuff.
Speaker 1:So, anyways, all that to say, huge uproar response from the Internet, basically, pointing out, you know, some issues with that, people who donate, third of my supporters would be sort of in this 1 to $2 a month, support range, then effectively, your your support is almost not doubling, but it's going up quite a bit per month when you're agreeing to $1 a month. Now it's going up to a dollar 25, dollar 30, per per month basically. And so, 2.9% of the transaction plus 35¢ fee basically. So actually more than that. So like a buck 45, buck 50.
Speaker 1:I'm terrible at math, especially live live podcasting math. The money you'd be donating would be going up, obviously. And so it's it hurts a lot of the smaller donation or people who maybe donate a lot to Patreon, but it's spread amongst a bunch a whole bunch of, Patreon campaigns. And so either way, a lot of people would stand to lose a lot of patronage if those people all went away. It would kinda suck to have to instead of giving a dollar, you're now giving a dollar 40, dollar 45 or $2.50 or whatever.
Speaker 1:And so, there's a huge uproar from both Patreon creators as well as people who support Patreon people like me. I'm lucky in that I'm not, as I said in my message to my current patrons, I'm not in a position where Patreon is supporting my living. Like, it's not my livelihood. It helps us with GoodStuff fees and and things like that for sure. We just had our the registration for goodstuff.fm.
Speaker 1:The domain name is like $90 a year because it's a dot fm. And, so that helps to pay for that and keep us in in business so to speak that way, as well as our podcast hosting and our web hosting, all that kind of stuff. But so it's not my livelihood, but it is you know, helps pay the bills. So in response to that, Patreon now just today on, Wednesday, December 13, six days later, have rolled back and said we're not doing any of those changes in response to all the the uproar and the the people complaining and Patreon campaigns losing, you know, lots of donation support. Nothing actually has been lost yet.
Speaker 1:If those people come back, they would still go you know, their transactions would go through at the end of the month. But certainly, there's a very good chance that, you know, once someone's gone, it's it's much harder to get them back. So no money has actually changed hands. No no dollar amounts changed yet. It's sort of at the end of month or the next payment cycle, I guess, with Patreon that, the we'll see, I guess, what the net change is in terms of how many people left Patreon, both Patreon people who like me, creators, as well as Patreon supporters.
Speaker 1:Through most of it, I've actually been, fairly I'm I'm I'm all for, like, jumping, grabbing the pitchfork or whatever and jumping on the, Internet rage bandwagon generally, especially against corporations and and big business and stuff like that. I've been kind of quiet and and if anything, optimistic that Patreon would do the right thing, that they would roll this back like they have. They're still gonna try and figure out a new way forward for sure, but they're gonna do it with, well, they they wrote a very big sort of apology letter, acknowledging where they screwed up and why and how and and that they want to hear from the Patreon community community and also work towards figuring out a better way forward. But I was optimistic that they would, do the right thing here in listening to the creators and users of their platform, the people who make them the money that they have, besides just the investors who have invested in the company. And I was optimistic primarily because I I've watched them since they started knowing, Jack Conte, the CEO, and where he started from as a just a creator who was making music videos on YouTube and getting paid less than a penny per view or whatever it was and trying to figure out a better way for creators to be able to do the thing they love and get paid for it so they can keep doing the thing they love instead of having to worry about managing a platform and managing payment fees and structures and IT stuff and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:They can just create the thing and put it out there in the world. And whether it's a pay for, you know, a transaction thing or just a patron supported model, which is where the name came from, that's kind of that was that's at the heart of what Patreon was started with. Now they've taken venture capitalist investments and all that kind of stuff, and so there's it gets muddy and who knows who's really pulling the the the strings and stuff like that. But, the in as I read the the apology letter, it's definitely restored most of my faith in Patreon that was lost over this, but I completely understand where folks are maybe now lacking or can't feel like they can't trust them anymore, feel like they need to move to something else. The problem is that every unless you build it right from from ground, like I've tweeted today in a bit of a tweet storm, you're building it from scratch, from the ground up, you own every single piece of the stack from, you know, the payment gateways to the the websites, the membership system, or whatever you wanna call it, all the way through, you're still gonna be at the mercy of somebody else's business decision.
Speaker 1:So PayPal could just decide to up their fees, which then you either take on yourself or you pass on to your supporters, which that's gives you that right. Whereas what Patreon was going to do was just force you to do that, so that's why they've rolled it back. They've apologized for that idea. But any rate, you're whether it's Memberful as a popular WordPress plugin for managing memberships and things like that that, some sites use. They could just decide to stop making the plugin, stop supporting it because they wanna do other stuff, sell to a bigger company, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:You're you're always at the mercy of somebody else's business decisions unless you own every single piece of the stack. And so that's where the some of the Internet outrage, I guess, towards Patreon felt a little bit over the top on not unwarranted, but just, like, not taking back the big stepping back, taking in the big picture of how life it's only been four years since Patreon started and where we were at before Patreon and how hard it was to set up a sort of funding campaign of some sort, whether there was Kickstarter around at that time, which was sort of like for a one off project thing, but Patreon came in with this ongoing support model that really sort of changed the game. And now, you know, recently Kickstarter has announced they're planning to make planning to make something that is, you know, similar to Patreon in terms of ongoing support. And there's other sites like it, Indiegogo, etcetera. All those kinds of things are out there.
Speaker 1:But a lot of them weren't there when Patreon started, and, and not that that gives them a free pass to do whatever they want, obviously, forever and ever. But it does allow them, in my mind anyways, for my dollars and where I choose to use a platform like Patreon, it does allow them a few missteps along the way while they're trying to figure this all out. Because in order for them to be around for me to use, they have to be profitable. And unfortunately, I I don't totally agree with the idea of taking venture capital money and investment because then you're kind of beholden to the people who've given you a whole bunch of money, but I do understand how it enables possibly a whole bunch of opportunity and allows them to grow in a way that they needed to but couldn't afford to at the time. So we'll see where it all lands.
Speaker 1:There's other, services, like I said before, Memberful. There's Podia Podia Podia, I think is how you could say it, formerly with Coach. It's where I have my courses that I'm selling and making. The Snapchat course and the Instagram courses and stuff that I'm putting through are all through a company called that was called Coach, now called Podia, and, which is the plural of Podium, I think. And so they have a membership system that's kind of was rolled out just before this all happened with Patreon that could be a viable way for me to set up a sort of system that people would use.
Speaker 1:But I struggle with that one because it's it's more of like a selling stuff and commerce kind of thing, whereas Patreon is definitely built around the idea of, like, support and, membership in a, artist creative type way as opposed to the more commerce business side, which is what where Podia sort of lands roughly. But it's it could be used for that as well. So I'm still evaluating. I'm using taking this opportunity with what happened with Patreon to just sort of evaluate, and at least now there isn't a panic or rush to do it before December 18 when all these changes were gonna go into effect with Patreon. So all that to say, if you've got questions, comments, concerns about Patreon specifically, about why you'd support me or why you why you are and wish you shouldn't or want to not, any of that kind of stuff, feel free to email me, [email protected].
Speaker 1:Twitter, I'm iChris on Twitter. And, I'm experimenting with, besides the course stuff there, I'm experimenting with, a little app called Descript. I think it's how it's pronounced. But, basically, it's a transcription app for Mac where it takes the audio from a podcast like this one, transcribes it using Google, I forget what it's called, Google language, Google Transcribe, whatever, an API with Google, and then that you normally would pay for, but then they allow you at scale to use the service, for a certain amount of minutes, and, and then make a transcription of the podcast. And so I've I tried that out actually on episode two twenty seven or episode two twenty twenty six of this podcast, previous episode.
Speaker 1:And if you check the link in the show notes, can watch the video where I sort of walk through how I just use Descript to transcribe the audio for that podcast. And, and check it out in the show notes. You can sign up, and if you do, we'll both get a hundred extra minutes of free transcription time on the service to try it out. And what I like about them, just like many other services on the Internet, it's free to try, but then you do have to pay if you wanna keep using it because, again, if they don't make any money, they're not gonna be around or they're gonna get sold to somebody else, and, then they're not around anymore and back to square one. So, yeah, I think that's all I was gonna say on that.
Speaker 1:I feel like I ranted for a long yeah. Fourteen minutes. Alright. Well, this is a longer Daily(ish). Hope you have a great Wednesday wherever you are in the world.
Speaker 1:I really wanna thank the Patreon supporters who are sticking with me. And, I did lose a Patreon supporter, and that's fine. Like, I and the reason given was because of the fee structures, and maybe they'll come back and maybe they won't. But I completely understand the the need to, not dis or to disagree, I guess, with what Patreon was doing and show that by, you know, not continuing to use the service. That's fair, and and, there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1:I understand. Hopefully, they come back someday, but, also, I yeah. I I support that decision, obviously, and and not gonna disagree with any of that kind of stuff because it is frustrating. They handled it poorly, and hopefully, that will be the last time it's something that bad anyways from Patreon. Alright.
Speaker 1:Like I was started to say a minute ago, have a great day. Hope you have a great Wednesday wherever you are in the world, and enjoy the rest of your week. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support. Goodbye.