Gyllblad's (and I suspect many other creators') concern is ultimately that the business model that they've been relying on for however long is being disrupted. If Patreon suddenly collapsed, that would be akin to your losing your job. This is perhaps closer to your employer saying, "instead of paying you every two weeks, we're just going to give you one big paycheck every quarter." Even if the end dollar amount is essentially the same, you would likely have to significantly alter how you handle your personal budget. It's not a perfect analogy, I know, but the point is that you have to find a way to radically restructure how you handle your income even though, on paper, it doesn't seem all that different.
Of course, Patreon is free to establish their rules however they see fit, and some of this is in response to Apple changing the rules of their app store. (Although I'm not sure why Patreon even needs an app. If you're giving them credit card an contact information for billing purposes anyway, the app wouldn't offer much more useable data. I mean, yeah, technically it would have more data but how would they use it? I suppose they could read what other apps you use and try to suggest other Patreon campaigns based on your interests there, but I don't think they've ever pursued that. That would be more difficult and less accurate than just suggesting campaigns based on other campaigns you've already backed, which is what they do already. So ultimately, the app doesn't offer Patreon any functional advantage over just having a website that can be viewed on a person's phone. But hey, that's me thinking like a user.) I expect Patreon looked at their user base, saw that the majority of creators just use a monthly setup anyway and decided that they could save some money in development/maintence costs if they forced everyone into a single billing standard. The number of creators like Gyllblad who might find this problematic are inconsequential as far as they're concerned.
Crowd-funding was a major disruptor in the comics market. Not just Patreon, but Kickstater and IndieGoGo and all of them writ-large. They allow creators to work in regular, micro-payment systems that would be, at best, difficult to manage with digital funds-transfer options like PayPal or Venmo. However, there haven't been enough variants in the overall system that have become successful enough to offer competition. The problem with this type of market is that you're not just talking about a basic product alternative that you can cast aside if you ultimately don't like it; people are understandably more reluctant to turn over credit card info for regular payments to a company they're unfamiliar with. Which means competitors take longer to build up trust, and it takes more to get consumers to switch.
All of which means Patreon can "get away with" more significant changes with less impact than many other industries. They're likely counting on that. They pushed that limit a few years ago when they attempted to push processing fees down to the indiviual consumer (Gyllblad references this in her video) because that was a change that impacted literally everyone on their platform. I don't doubt that they're considering here that it won't get as much pushback because it doesn't impact nearly as many people.
I don't have a real solution or answer to any of this. I point it out mostly to spotlight that this is what 21st century capitalism looks like for comic creators. Companies have always been in business to take as much of your money as possible with the least effort/expense possible, and this is just the 2024 version of how that plays out. Independent creators are heroic in my mind for even attempting to carve out a living in this environment, and this type of thing is just one of the many challenges they have to face just to to make something that might not sell to the broadest swath of the population.
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