Patreon is Evil (I'll Explain)

Donations are an artist’s best friend. It’s a paradigm as old as time: you create something, you give it to the world for free, and then you let people know that you accept donations. You don’t accost people—you don’t follow them down the street (literal or figurative) and harass them, and you fully accept that they don’t HAVE to donate any money to you. But, you make it know that it is something that they can do to show their appreciation. Then, if they do donate, that’s money that you have now received which is not taxable—it was donated to you, with no relation to a good or service provided, as that was given freely. (However you feel about taxes, artists, who often live in poverty doing what they do, should be doing what they can to pay as little of them as possible.)

How then should we feel about any entity which exists to destroy this paradigm, rendering it forgotten for those who once knew it and its virtue, and unknowable for those too young to have been exposed to it yet? Because that’s literally half of Patreon’s whole business model: get artists, who had been providing their work for free on the internet, to provide a little extra work, which a percentage of their fans can pay to have access to. That’s a good and/or service—that’s taxable. Exactly HOW taxable depends on where you live, but the point is less the weeds of that and more the direction that this moves everything: art as product, paid for specifically to the artist—at precisely the time when artists are able to provide types of art for free that previous generations could only dream of being able to, such as feature-length films.

I make and release entire feature-length films for free to the internet. I put them up on YouTube for all to see. If people want to show their appreciation, they can go to my website (killthelionfilms.com) and they can donate to help keep me afloat. That is a beautiful paradigm—there is nothing broken about it, and in fact it is only made better by the impressiveness of what I can provide. Gone are the days where artists could only afford to give, for free, maybe a little dance on the sidewalk in front of an upside down hat, or a magic trick, or whatever. Now we can give away entire filmographies that we own fully. What a time to be alive—if one fully embraces their freedom as creators, and donations, and if audiences are not brainwashed to believe that they ‘should be getting something for their money’ by way of extra shit that they pay for through Patreon.

Patreon has been very successful in quite a short time at breaking and replacing a not-at-all broken paradigm, to only its own benefit. (I don’t care if you’re an artist reading this who ‘makes a lot of money on Patreon’ and is ‘grateful’ for it—you have no idea what you, and everyone like you, and everyone less successful than you, is losing in the long run by selling your soul to this specific devil.) Artists were not asking for a paradigm shift in this direction—only Patreon was. It carved out cultural territory for itself that was occupied, but undefended—and now, as a result, Patreon is a business worth over a billion dollars, and artists and audiences are dumber, their priorities rewired, their brain washed, without them realizing it.

I mentioned that this is only half of Patreon’s business model. Were they merely rewiring minds culturally in a way that was detrimental to both artist and audience for the mere ‘fuck you’ of it, that would be bad enough—but they are also doing this to be able to make a ton of money. The other half of their operation is the literal cut they take from the money you receive on there, which ranges from 8-12%. I’m not counting payment processing fees, which are unavoidable—I’m only counting that which Patreon itself takes simply for being Patreon and providing you with a ‘credible’ (demonic, domineering) platform for you to fuck up yours and all of our lives and minds with. A platform which is essentially nothing—just simple forms and things: a webpage, in essence.

Artists, and people in general, used to have their own webpages—their own websites, really. This was before social media platforms took over the internet—this was back when people used to be able to customize their entire online presence from the ground up, making and managing, to their own specifications, the entire way in which you can interact with them and their work. Donation buttons were common—PayPal was an easy way to do this, but there are much better ways now, such as Stripe. The point is though, this was all solved: as with so many things in life that get replaced for something ‘newer’, nothing was broken—and nothing has been improved henceforth.

To this day, you can still buy a domain and webspace for a song per year—it’s really not expensive, and its damn sure cheaper than having a Patreon page, especially in the long run. So, if the amount of money that Patreon takes from you as an artist by way of its 8-12% cut is greater than the cost of a website for yourself, then even if you disagree with all my other points, it’s still not worth it to use Patreon. Because, essentially, their business model, on top of the cultural destruction they bring, is to get you to overpay for what is essentially just a webpage (not even a website, but a webpage, as you are sharing being on Patreon with others).

I have a friend who is quite successful on Patreon. Who he is specifically is not important—what’s important is that he is paying between $650 (8%) and $1,000 ($12%) per month to Patreon, by way of their cut: that’s how much what is essentially a webpage is costing him. Let’s say the average payment from a fan of his is $5. That’s up to 200 fans of his whose money, unbeknownst to them, is never even making its way to him at all—it’s going entirely to Patreon. They think that they are helping him out, and are being good fans, but they are literally paying Patreon per month, not him—and the more successful he becomes, the more fans suffer that same fate.

Patreon is a pox upon the world of art. As typically happens, once things start getting good for all, some fucked up entity comes in and sets us all back worse than when we started—and makes us forget how good we were having it. Our consciousness was expanding, but then we were overcome with thoughts that were not ours, and which do not make sense, and which were put there by those who wish to control us and make money off our backs. I hate it, and you hate it—we all naturally hate it. But, we are often conditioned to see government as the only possible entity which can dominate and oppress us. In truth, billion dollar companies—especially those in the tech realm—can do much worse to us than our own government, and at a scale that totalitarian governments of the past could only dream of. We must be naturally skeptical of these entities, and we must call evil for what it is as much as possible. We must fight for our cultural territory, and we must reclaim it whenever it is lost to enemies. We are artists—we are powerful. We can change hearts and minds on a level that politicians, and tech, can only dream of. We must not be doormats in front of the mansions of our wealthy oppressors. Let’s get our own mansions. It all starts with donation.

If you enjoy my films and the work I do, consider donating to me at killthelionfilms.com