Greg's Corner

Patreon’s admission of error is refreshing

For those of you who may not know, Patreon is a crowd-funding platform that many content creators use so they can be funded by their fans. It’s used by everyone from bloggers, to YouTubers, to musicians and artists. Creators are able to ask for pledges by month or per episode, depending on the type of content they create. Patreon takes a small percentage of the pledges as their fee. Recently, Patreon announced a new payment procedure where patrons would be charged a processing fee of 2.9% along with $0.35 per pledge.

The problem with the new payment procedures is that the majority of Patreon pledges were made up of $1 pledges. A number of people make multiple $1 pledges to several different creators. So if someone pledges ten $1 pledges to ten separate creators, the patron would be charged $3.50 extra altogether for their pledges. This caused many $1 patrons to withdraw their pledges causing content creators to lose a lot of money. Many content creators complained about the new payment structure and Patreon listened. Patreon CEO Jack Conte, reversed the previous decision in a blog post titled “We Messed Up”.

While content creators may still be out of money and Patreon’s reputation may still be damaged, it’s refreshing to a tech company listen to its uses and admit they made a mistake. While companies like Facebook and Backpage are appearing before Congress using legalese to try to avoid any admission of wrongdoing, Patreon stepped up and said they were wrong and are trying to move on to repair their relationship with their users. If only more platforms were this honest with their users.