In 2024 creator Jack ConteDisclosure: I love Jack Conte because I think he’s a genuine, passionate, transparent creator that advocates for creators. He is part of our internet culture from the early 2000s and his efforts to share what he learned are outstanding in my opinion. He should have his own childrens show, if he wasn’t already running Patreon. gave this presentation at SXSW 2024 called Death of the Follower. The challenges that creators face have changed as the Internet has changed, and Jack has been at the very center of it as a creator himself and then as the founder of Patreon.
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Transcript: Death of the Follower
Hi everybody, hello, hello. Welcome. I’m so psyched to be here today. Maybe before I even get started, can I just get a show of hands? If you’re a creator, raise your hand. Let’s see creators. Oh my gosh, yes. Okay. If you’re in the music industry - focused in the music industry, management companies, labels - okay, great, cool. And then how about if you’re just in tech? Like, anybody in tech, creator economy tech? Okay, awesome, cool. All right, cool, cool. Mix of folks here today.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole arc of the internet and how it’s evolved over the last couple decades, and then how I think it’s going to evolve, and Patreon’s place in all of that. And that’s what I want to share with you today.
So I started making music and videos and putting them on the internet right after I finished college in 2007. And I made a ton of movies in school. I also made animations as a kid, so making stuff wasn’t particularly new to me. But I had just spent - at the time when I finished college - six months and thousands of hours on a new record called Nightmares and Daydreams. I was living at my dad’s house at the time, working out of my old childhood bedroom, and I was trying to figure out how to reach people with this new record that I had worked so hard on. Like, even the cover - that guy on the cover is an actual clay guy that I made out of Sculpey, and then I did a photo shoot with him and I got a great shot, but then I had to use the lasso tool in Photoshop to cut him out. And this was before the magnetic lasso tool, so I had to do that by hand, and that took way too long. But none of that mattered, because by sheer luck I happened to finish school right when this budding technology called the internet was going through a massive shift. It was just starting to move from what people called Web 1 to Web 2.0. I’m sure everybody knows about this in this room. Y’all are here at South by Southwest, so you probably know this. But Web 1 was essentially a read-only version of the internet. In retrospect, people call this '90s version of the web the static web. It was like AOL, where you could browse web pages and read the news, but there was no easy way for people to upload and share. And then in the early 2000s, a slew of new companies like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter came onto the scene. And YouTube’s motto was “Broadcast Yourself.” The whole idea of Web 2.0 was that for the first time, as a creative person, you could easily participate on the internet. You could post and tweet and upload instead of just being a passenger. And I thought that was awesome. Honestly, I still think it’s awesome. It’s so easy to forget how magical this is, how special this is. But this moment in history marked a shift for humanity, and for artists and creators especially, because for the first time on the internet you could do more than just consume - you could create, you could reach other people.
And it was in that moment, right here in 2007, when I happened to graduate college and finish my record Nightmares and Daydreams, and I was trying to reach people with it. And at the time, my best bet was DMing bands on MySpace and asking if I could open for them at local bars up and down the West Coast. I sent cold outreach to music venues to get booked, and then I got in my car - because I couldn’t afford to rent a van - and I drove up and down the West Coast of the United States, and I played the dankest local bars, and I sang my guts out. And I sweated and I sang and I sweat and I sang, and I ate tacos out of the back of my car while my friends were all getting promoted to high-paying jobs as investment bankers. And I did that for years, tour after tour - and I’m using the word “tour” lightly here. Like, there weren’t people at my shows. Like, nobody came. On a good night there were a couple of stragglers who wandered in off the street, but I was playing empty bars. It was so hard to reach people.
So you can imagine how excited I was when a friend sent me a video of a guy named David Choy singing with a guitar in front of his webcam on a new website called YouTube. And this video had like 300,000 views or something like that. I couldn’t believe it. David was reaching people. This phase of the internet had the potential to solve a fundamental problem for me as an artist. I felt like I had to jump in, and I did. I immediately started uploading videos to YouTube. Back then, no one else was showing the at-home recording process, so I just filmed myself playing instruments and then I layered them in the video with split screens so people could see all the musical elements coming together to form a song. And it’s funny, because in 2023 this idea seems totally obvious, but nobody was doing that back then. It wasn’t a fancy recording studio with millions of dollars of equipment. It was a bedroom with an Mbox audio interface and a cheap version of laptop recording software called Pro Tools LE, and an old Sony Handicam that I lugged around with me everywhere that shot on Hi8 tapes, and a bed comforter hanging on the wall to dampen the sound, and broken cymbals that a fan sent me in the mail for free. But I was making real music. I was screaming my guts out and playing accordion and doing collabs with friends, and it started working. People started watching my videos and listening to my music. I was reaching people. My videos started getting thousands of views. It wasn’t millions of people at first, but it was so much better than playing empty bars. So I kept doing it, and by 2009 I had made 43 YouTube videos of my songs, and I was feeling amazing because for the first time in my life I was actually reaching people with my work.
Okay. But the real beauty of this new website called YouTube - the most amazing thing about it - was that it had a subscribe button. I only realized how truly special this idea was in retrospect. But in my opinion, this concept turned out to be one of the most important things about this new era of the internet - what people called Web 2.0. The subscribe button was foundational. It changed YouTube from being a tool to reach people to being a way to reach them and then build a following around my work. The subscribe button allowed people who liked my stuff to sign up to see more of it in the future. And as a creator, it gave me a channel of distribution to ensure that my future work was sent to those people. So it turned out that Web 2 solved more than just reach, more than just discovery. It represented the birth of the follower.
In my opinion, the follow is not some handy feature of a social network. The follow is foundational architecture for human creativity and organization. The idea of a creator - an artist - or a community of fans around them who want to see their future work. This concept, the follow, it’s profound. Whether it’s the following that I was building as a musician, or a podcasting duo who talks about what it’s like to be single moms in a community of single mothers who finally feel seen and understood, or a science education creator and students who didn’t previously have access to high-quality education - the follow was a system of organization for the entire internet. It was a framework for the distribution of creativity and communication. Not just reach, but a past, [an] ongoing communication, connection, a sustained relationship, community.
And I learned just how magical the concept of the following could be when I did my first collab with my girlfriend Natalie. We put up a video on my YouTube channel in 2008 that was a song we created together, and it was different than my music - it was way less screamy and insane - but it was more active and fleshed out than her music. So we decided to create a new separate channel for our collabs, and we called this new YouTube channel Pomplamoose. But - oh, all right, got some Pom fans in the house, all right. But we posted our first video - the first Pomplamoose video was actually posted on my channel - and I had about 7,000 subscribers at the time. And my subscribers loved this new video, and at the end of it we posted a little link to the new Pom channel to tell people about it, and almost instantly the new Pom channel got 3,000 subscribers. That’s what a following is - people see your new [work and] literally they follow you wherever you go on the internet.
So Natalie and I started making more videos and more videos, and within a year we got 18,000 subscribers. And then in one video we announced that we were playing a show, and we showed up to the show in San Francisco and there were 40 people there. And oh my God, guys, I cannot tell you what it’s like to have 40 people at your show after years of playing empty bars. Magic. It was amazing. It was so great. That night was such a great night. I feel like I can literally remember that.
Another time, Natalie and I were filming a vlog to put in one of our videos, and my sister happened to walk in behind us. And she was holding a bar - she’s a soap maker - she was holding a bar of grapefruit-scented soap. Pomplamoose means grapefruit in French. And she said, “Hey guys, look, I have Pomo soap.” And Natalie and I just saw that and decided to keep it in the video. And we put it up in the video, and our fans were like, “Oh my God, Pomo soap, we want a bar of Pomo soap.” And so we made another video and we said, “Okay, now you can order Pomo soap.” And we got hundreds of orders for Pom soap.
Another time, when USB thumb drives were starting to get huge, we thought, why do CDs? Let’s put all of our music on a thumb drive. And so we did. We loaded up the thumb drives, we put up a video, we said, “Hey, if you want to buy a thumb drive, you can buy a thumb drive now.” And we ended up selling hundreds and hundreds of thumb drives. We decided to sign every one of them because we wanted to be really personal with our fans. And it was kind of crazy - we had to figure out the packaging, we had no idea how to package that many thumb drives. My family ended up helping out. My parents were freaking out. Dad’s like taking pictures and stuff, you know. Like, it was really fun, it was amazing.
Another time, we decided to put our album on iTunes - our first Pomplamoose album, back in like 2008. And we didn’t have artwork, so we asked our fans, “Hey, do you want to make the artwork for Pom?” And we got hundreds of submissions for the cover of the new Pomplamoose album from our fans, and they were freaking talented. Their artwork was amazing. This is the one that actually won. Natalie and I just love this one. So this is actually the artwork for our first album - it was made by one of our fans.
Another time, we booked a show at a laundromat. That’s a sentence I just said. We booked a show at a laundromat. The idea was - it was a laundromat where there is a cafe and a laundromat. You could go, order food, do your laundry, eat, and by the time you’re done eating, take your laundry home. That was the idea of [this] laundromat. And we booked the show - if you crammed people in there, it held like 60 people in this laundromat. And then we uploaded this video, and this was the first video that we ever uploaded that went viral, and it got like half a million views overnight. And we showed up to our show at the laundromat, and there were 200 people crammed inside the laundromat and then 150 or 200 people outside, like spilling into the street. Cars were swerving around them. And there was no stage - like, it’s a laundromat - so literally I’m playing music and there’s a person right up in my face. I’m looking at a person’s eye while I’m playing Pomplamoose songs. Like, it was insane. Honestly, it was Mayhem. I don’t have any pictures of that night, but this is what it felt like. It was just insane. And this was the first time I was like, “Oh my God, this is going to work. Having a following is amazing. This is going to work. We’re going to be able to be full-time musicians.”
Another time, we posted another video, and at the end of the video we told our fans, “Hey, we’re uploading a song to iTunes.” We decided not to ever sign with or enter the music industry. We did everything ourselves. We negotiated our own contract with iTunes directly. We posted our songs directly to iTunes, and so we kept almost all of the revenue associated with that. And when we posted this album and told our fans about it online, told our followers, we sold 30,000 songs that month, and we got $22[2],000 deposited directly into our bank account. It was more money than I had ever seen in one place ever in my life. I was losing my mind. It was so incredible.
Then Pomplamoose started playing shows and we started touring, and hundreds of people started showing up, and then many hundreds of people, and then thousands of people started showing up. And this is my wife crowd surfing, because she’s a badass.
And that’s what I mean when I say that the subscribe button is not a silly feature. The concept of the follow changed my life. It made my dreams come true as an artist. It took me from playing empty bars to living out my fantasy as a musician. The follow is a piece of internet architecture that felt closer to magic than anything I had ever experienced in my life.
Right around the moment that Pomplamoose was starting to work, right through all of this, there is this genius named Kevin Kelly. Has anybody heard of Kevin Kelly? Founder of Wired. Yeah, a bunch of people. Amazing thinker and mind. He wrote an essay called “A Thousand True Fans,” and his premise was simple. It was that in the age of the internet, you don’t need millions of fans to be successful. If you can just find a thousand people who are willing to buy a hundred bucks of stuff from you per year, that’s $100,000 per year, which is a pretty freaking great business. As a creative person, you just need a thousand true fans who really connect with you and believe in you. And this is different than just reaching people. It’s even deeper than followers. This is super fans, true fans, real fans - call it whatever you want. The idea is that there’s this group of people that is your core. If reach means people see it, and follower means people want to see more, then true fans are the people who go to the shows and buy the merch and download the record and pay for the course and get the live stream tickets and all the things.
And this idea really resonates with me. We had fans showing up to Pomplamoose shows with tattoos of the band. We had fans literally making custom t-shirts, Pomplamoose posters, drawings, artwork, cookies - we had a fan do icing of my face on a cookie. I ate my face. We had a fan who made an oil painting of me screaming my guts out. I learned HTML and I had a little website. I used this link [and] release software called E-Junkie, and I cobbled together like a little MP3 store for myself on the internet, and I would sell original music. And I was selling $500 a month of my original songs on my own website with my own shitty thing that I made. Fans were showing up to buy things, to be there.
One time, we asked our Pomplamoose fans to come film a music video with us on a Saturday - like, show up to Dolores Park in San Francisco, just show up and be in this music video. And 50 people showed up. They even learned this dance, and we shot this dance, and the dance is in this Pomplamoose video.
Another time, we would always use this software called Stageit, which was like a ticketed live stream software, so we could play our songs, people could buy tickets and show up live on the internet. And Natalie and I would just sit at home and play these songs for 45 minutes, and people would buy tickets and leave tips during the concert, and we would routinely make like three grand in 45 minutes playing our songs. Like, these are true fans.
Another time, Natalie raised over $100,000 for her record from just 2,000 people.
Another time, we made a Pomplamoose album, and we went online on YouTube, put up this video, and we said, “Hey everybody, we have a new Pomplamoose album. It’s not for sale. You can’t buy it. You can’t get the new Pom album. The only way to get the new Pom album is if you donate a book to the Richmond School District and then send us the receipt for that book, and we will send you the Pomplamoose album for free. Just donate a book - super easy. We’ll send you the album in the mail for free.” And the Richmond School District ended up having to rent a shipping container to keep up with the packages. It was like 11,000 books that got sent to the Richmond School [District]. It was like $140,000 worth of books. It was amazing. It felt incredible to see that many people show up for this. That’s true fans. Real fans. Super fans. Call it whatever you want.
But this was the concept that was rattling around in my head when I started Patreon 11 years ago. This is actually the first sketch of Patreon. I called [up] my co-founder, and he turned this into what is now Patreon. And the idea was very simple. It’s like a membership platform where fans could sign up for a subscription payment to the creator, and the creator could run a membership and get paid for their work. I’m not going to tell the Patreon founding story - I’ve told it a million times. But the company is now over 400 people, 11 years in. We have over 250,000 creators who have made over three and a half billion dollars on the platform, which I think of as proof - if we ever needed it - that the true fans are there and the true fans are ready.
Okay. In the background, while Patreon was being formed and building over the last decade, the whole internet was again starting to shift. And if you think of the '90s as Web 1, the 2000s as Web 2, right around the 2010s there was a new change happening. Facebook started experimenting with a new thing called ranking. And I realize most everybody here knows about this, but what ranking did was essentially take the feed - which you can think of as a list of posts from creators that I follow - and it analyzed each and every post for how engaging it was. And if it wasn’t engaging enough, Facebook would then take that post and push it down in the feed. In other words, they started ranking or ordering posts according to what was best for their business. This was actually great for Facebook. It was the right business decision for them, their company, and their revenue model. But what it meant for creators was that for the first time since Web 2.0, my followers might not necessarily see my posts. And this idea of a subscription started to break down. If the person doesn’t receive the things, it’s not really a direct, true connection between a creator and their fans. It’s not really a subscription. The channel of distribution is broken.
And it creates another problem too, around creative freedom, because now suddenly my post has to be better than the other posts according to a set of criteria that I don’t know or have control of or even agree with. So instead of thinking, “What do I want to make? What lights me up? What is the output that I want to create as an artist? What will my fans love?” - instead of thinking those questions, now in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “What will the ranking algorithm favor?” And that subconsciously or consciously changes my creative output to achieve Facebook’s goals, not my goals as a creator.
And if it were just Facebook doing this, fine - creators would just leave and post somewhere else. But it worked really well. It was great for Facebook’s business. People started spending even more time on the platform. So the other platforms had to compete, and YouTube launched the Cosmic Panda redesign, centering the entire company around watch time. And Twitter and Instagram followed with ranked feeds in 2016. And we only saw it in retrospect, but now I think of the 2010s as the decade of ranking - the decade when the original promise of the creator-led community, the true follow, was broken for the first time.
I want to just do a quick aside here, because I know there’s this big debate in the world about chronological feeds versus algorithmic feeds. And I don’t want to make it sound like I’m a zealot on either of the two polarized sides. That’s actually not the takeaway here. It’s not how I think of it. I actually see problems with chronological feeds, because as a creator, if it’s chronological, then you have to keep posting to stay on top. So I don’t think that’s necessarily the best way to build strong relationships either. The problem that I have is: if you’re going to change that, if you’re going to adjust the way you create a feed, what is the purpose behind that? What is the intention behind that? Are you trying to create a place where you can build strength of relationship with your community, where your fandom gets energized over time, where people are guaranteed that subscription, where you get a direct connection with your community and your true fans - is that it? Or is it maximizing attention? Is it maximizing watch time? Those are two very different goals and very different ways of organizing your entire product as a technology company. This one helps me as a creator, and this one hurts me as a creator. It hurts my community, it hurts my business, it hurts my creative output.
I wish that it stopped there. But around the turn of the decade, a new company came onto the scene called TikTok, and TikTok had a much deeper impact on the ecosystem than I think anyone foresaw at the time. It wasn’t just short-form vertical video - that wasn’t it. That’s a red herring. I think it was much more fundamental than that. TikTok said, “We want to make the most engaging feed possible.” This whole idea of a list of your subscriptions? Forget about that. In fact, forget about the whole concept of subscriptions. TikTok started from the ground up with something totally different called “For You,” where each of these posts are chosen for me by TikTok instead of me choosing what’s in my feed. And this completely abandoned the concept of the follow.
But it worked. TikTok hit a billion users by 2021, and traffic on the internet started flowing away from the legacy social companies and toward TikTok. So just like with Facebook and ranking, the other platforms had to compete. YouTube launched Shorts, Instagram launched Reels, and Twitter launched a “For You” feed as well. And within a couple of years, this whole system of organization for the internet - the creator-led community - started to fade into the past.
I have really felt this personally as a creator in the last four years especially. My fans don’t see as much of my stuff anymore. It’s harder to sell tickets to a show. It’s harder to reach people with my new work. It’s harder to build community. It’s harder to build a business. It’s harder to energize my fans. Just curious - for the creators in the audience, are you feeling this too? Are folks in the room feeling this? I’m seeing nodding heads, raised hands, yes. Okay. I’m - this is - I just feel it.
What’s happening here is we are in the middle of another shift, and this is a big one. If the '90s was Web 1, and the 2000s was Web 2, and the 2010s was ranking, I’m worried that the 2020s could become the death of the follower.
I got an email from a creator that I was spending a lot of time with a little while ago - about a year and a half ago - and I got this email and my heart just sank in my stomach. Can we get the slide up? Great.
“Hey Jack, I’m writing this letter to you hat in hand. Due to changes at Facebook, overnight the traffic to my links and my pages dropped by 80%. As such, it looks like I’ll have to sell my home. I’m dusting off my resume and looking for jobs in social media management.”
And I’m seeing more and more things like this. And it’s not just happening to creators - it’s happening to anyone who posts stuff on the internet. It’s happening to media companies. Look at what’s happening to, you know, Vice and BuzzFeed and, you know, Rooster Teeth’s announcement a couple weeks ago. This is a really hard change to navigate for anyone who’s posting stuff online and trying to build community and business.
For the creators in the room, I think it’s really important to remember and to understand that if you’re not connecting as much as you want to with your audience right now, that does not necessarily mean there’s something wrong with you. A lot of us as creators have this tendency to be like, “Oh, what can I do better?” And that’s a good impulse, honestly. It’s like growth mindset - how am I contributing to this, what can I do better? And again, I think most of the time that’s really good. But there is also something happening in the background right now. It’s a macro thing that’s happening on the web that makes our jobs as creators really hard right now. There are a lot of smart people at big, well-funded media companies trying to figure this out too, and they’re having trouble with it too. So as creators, just know that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with you.
I believe that this problem is the single most important problem that faces creative people today - the weakening of creator-led communities, of our distribution channels to our fans. This is the hardest, most challenging, and most painful issue threatening the present and the future of creativity on the internet.
So I want to be very clear about this. I actually don’t think that this is going to happen. I don’t think that we’re actually going to see the real death of the follower. That’s not what I think is going to happen. I think the follow is too important to die. I think it’s too valuable to ignore. I think it’s too useful and awesome for creative people, for publishers, for media companies. And I think the next wave of internet and media technology companies are going to surge on this problem and try to solve it. And it’s actually already started. And the incumbent social platforms - they’re not going to be able to fight it, because their revenue relies on maximizing attention to drive their businesses. They’re being forced up towards discovery, towards reach, personalization, algorithmic curation. These are the levers that drive attention and therefore drive their strategies. That’s why there’s already an opening, and why we’re starting to see a whole new set of companies emerge that look fundamentally different from the legacy social landscape - Discord and Kajabi and Fourthwall and Gumroad, Moment, which Patreon acquired last year, the courses platforms, events companies. Some people are calling this subset of companies the creator economy. I don’t even think of it like that. It’s a fundamental shift in approach, and the hallmark strategy of the drivers of these businesses is the focus on deeper connections as opposed to just more connections - the true fan, the real fan. Call it whatever you want. It’s the 5% of fans that drive 90% of the community and business. This is a direct-to-fan business. [Versus] an ads business, this is about depth of connection, this is about maximizing attention - [no,] this is about deeper fans, this is about more fans. And what binds this new wave of emerging companies is that their strategic focus is down here.
The next decade of creative and media technology companies will focus on building direct-to-fan connections and community strength. As creators, we’ll still need the social platforms. We’ll still need those companies up here for discovery, for reach. We need that. But those companies will be one component of the many tools that we have as creative people to help us run our communities and businesses. That’s where the world is going. I’m sure of it.
And personally, right now, I feel a sense of responsibility through this. I feel a sense of responsibility because I remember what it feels like to be a creator on the outside of these platforms, watching the internet move in a direction that I don’t agree with and that I don’t like and that I don’t think is good for my community or my business. I remember what that feels like. I remember feeling anxiety. I remember feeling fear. I remember being scared of where that was going and what it meant for me. And now, through whatever crazy life path I have been on as an artist, I’m now finding myself as a CEO of one of these tech companies. And I feel this sense of - I want to help build the type of internet that I want as a creator. That’s what I want to do.
So I really don’t want this talk to feel like a Patreon ad - actually, I really hope it doesn’t. But I do want to give you a sense of how I’m thinking about this problem, given this seat that I’m in, and how Patreon is now thinking about this problem and what we think our place is in it and what we want to do about it.
And the headline is this: it’s been 20 or 30 years, and the current version of how art and community exists on the internet today - I don’t think is the right version. How community and art exists on the web - I don’t think it’s the right way. And I want Patreon to contribute to building a better version of how art and community could exist on the internet. We’ve oriented the whole company around this problem, and we’ve been building a lot in the background over the last couple of years. But we made some big announcements a couple of months ago about the next phase of Patreon and how we’re thinking about this problem specifically.
We started as a membership platform 11 years ago - subscription payments. But we have built a lot, especially in the last three years, in an effort to take a more holistic approach to solving this. We built video, community, podcasting, better posting, a new media player, commerce, free membership - which is essentially like a follow gated on an email - and live. And while this might look like a lot, it’s actually just three things: media, community, and business. And we’re now thinking of Patreon no longer as a membership platform where we started, but as this whole thing - the media, community, and business foundation for the next decade of professional creativity on the internet, organized around the concept of the true follow, in an effort to build a better way that art can exist on the web. That’s the theory. That’s what the company is setting out to solve now.
And in practice, what that looks like is a new set of products and tools that we built into Patreon. This is our first foray into community, and essentially this allows fans to connect with each other and build energized fandoms, and creators to hop in there and talk with fans. And it’s a place for true fandom. Why did we build this? What’s the thinking, what’s the strategy and the idea behind this?
Here’s why. As a creator on the internet today, I can get subscribers and I can get views, and if I could send my fans to Instagram or TikTok and they can be there - but what I’ve noticed is those communities degrade over time. They don’t get energized over time. They get de-energized. It gets harder and harder to reach those people. I make a post, I reach 2% of my audience, I reach 1% of my audience. I lose touch with those people, and there’s no way for me to find those real fans, those true fans - the small portion of my fans that drive everything for me as a creator.
The way we’re building this, and what I want as a creator, is a place where I can send my fans and that fandom gets energy over time. That fandom gets closer. That fandom gets more vibrant, more connected over time, more enthusiastic over time. That’s what I want as a creator. That’s the space that I want to have as a creative person. Creators deserve a place like that. That is important. It’s important for the future of creativity.
Okay. Another thing that we built is commerce. Commerce allows creators to sell a digital thing - an episode, a bonus episode, a download, a course, anything that you can sell online, any digital thing. Why did we build this? Why did we build commerce? Because creators send lots of people to their Patreon - millions of people to their Patreon pages every month. What we found is a lot of those people are true fans. They’re the really intense, interested, excited fans. But not all of those fans are ready to pay with a subscription payment. In fact, a lot of them don’t want to pay a subscription payment. And why don’t they want to pay with a subscription? Well, they either have subscription fatigue - which is a real thing - or they’re not in the right financial situation, or they don’t want to commit to a payment every month. But they’re still true fans. And rather than having those true fans leave the creator, we want to give creators a way to start forming connections with those fans, to build businesses with those fans. And so we built commerce as a way for the true fans that aren’t yet ready for a subscription payment - they can now participate in the creator’s business and community through this commerce product. And meanwhile, the creator can build an awesome business along the way too.
The logic is very similar for free membership. Why did we build free membership? What is free membership, by the way? Think of this as like a follow gated on your email. So it’s kind of like an email capture, almost. As a creator, it allows a fan to follow your page without paying, in exchange for giving [you] their email. And it’s the same logic as commerce. Creators are sending their true fans - millions every month - to their Patreon pages, and we wanted to give creators a way to reach that portion of their fans that go to the shows, they have the merch, they have the hat - they’re true fans. But for whatever reason, they don’t want to buy one of the things you have digitally, and they don’t want to pay a subscription. And this allows creators to continue forming relationships with those fans. And what’s super exciting about this is we have found that about 40 to 50% of these fans actually say that they intend to pay the creator in the next few months. They have high intention to be a part of the creator’s community and business. And this gives creators a way to start building community with those folks.
Okay. We also acquired a live experiences platform called Moment, and I don’t even want to call it ticketed live streaming, because it’s not - it’s so much more beautiful than that. Arin and the team did such an incredible job building this place for creators to sell tickets to these live experiences, and they can debut their work - a stand-up special, a movie that they’ve made, a special episode that they know is going to be a total banger, whatever it is. It allows creators to sell tickets to that experience and then have community with those fans while they’re all watching it together. And they’ve launched amazing creators - [Tam and Paula] and Bieber - and they’ve worked with folks like Andrew Schulz. And it’s just an awesome way for creators to have that live community experience and start gathering those community members around their work.
Okay. So all that to say, the way we’re thinking about it and the way we’re thinking about this next phase is that we’re not just a membership company anymore. We’re a true-fan company. We’re a creator company. We’re building a better way for art and community to exist on the internet.
Because I want Patreon to build an internet where creators have true creative freedom. I want Patreon to contribute to a web where creators have control of their businesses and their careers. And I want it to feel like fire to be part of a creator community. I know what it feels like to be part of an energized community. I remember it. And I have that same conviction now that I did back in 2013 when I started Patreon. I know that it is possible to build an internet where fandoms thrive and where professional creativity is possible for anyone. I believe this in my bones. It is not a choice, it’s not optimism - it’s just deep down what I actually know to be available to humanity, if that is the path that we choose.
Okay. That’s what Patreon is doing. It’s how we’re thinking about this future and Patreon’s place in it. But for the creators in the audience, we don’t have to wait. Creators don’t have to wait for this. Over the last decade, I’ve talked to thousands of creative people, had my own creative projects, I’ve learned a lot. And I want to share just a few thoughts about navigating the shifts in the internet and how we can all prepare ourselves and our communities for those shifts. And we don’t even need to wait for any of the tech platforms to catch up.
Can I get the next slide? Great.
The first: invest in those true fans. Invest in the depth of connection, not just new. It’s not all about new views, new subscribers, watch time up and to the right. It’s about depth. It’s about quality of interaction. It’s about finding that small portion of your fans that are your engine, that are your core, and then figuring out how to reach them. By the way, sometimes when I talk about this, creators think, “Well, does that mean like DMs? Like, should I be talking to individual fans?” No, not necessarily. That’s not actually what I mean. I mean find those people and build real connections with them in whatever capacity you have. And my team will probably kill me for saying this, but it’s not even [necessarily about] using Patreon. There are like a bunch of ways that you can do this, right. Like, you can do it via email lists, you can get a Discord, you could get a Patreon if you want - I’m a little biased, but I think you could. You could find some other place where you can build that community with your true fans. The point is: find those people and invest in that community. That is the engine that will drive your business, [and] slingshot your business through these shifts in the internet.
Okay. The second thing: make beautiful things. There is so much tension, especially right now, to make for the algorithm. And I’ve seen the diagrams, I’ve seen the charts - I’ve even drawn them in my answers. You know, make for the algorithm, make for yourself, and then make the things that help you build a business, and you sort of have this Venn diagram and the little center part, and that’s the sweet spot. I’ve seen all that. And I get that. But the gravity - the gravity everywhere we look as creators today - the gravity is just pushing us. It’s just pushing us toward making for other reasons than why we set out to make things in the first place. It’s so important to remember to make beautiful things, to make things that light you up, and to make things that you care about.
There’s a wonderful metaphor that I love - it’s a business metaphor, but it makes sense for creators too. I think it’s a metaphor of the hot dog stand under the Eiffel Tower versus the local restaurant. The hot dog stand under the Eiffel Tower gets thousands of new customers coming through their hot dog stand every day, right, because just tourists just coming through. And they know they’re going to get lots and lots of new customers, and sure those people don’t come back, but it doesn’t matter because they’re just always getting new customers every day because of the Eiffel Tower. And they just make hot dogs and sell them, and some portion of those customers buy their hot dogs - [they] actually don’t even have to be very good hot dogs, right, they just sell hot dogs, they know they’re going to keep making money. And that business works. Like, it works. It’s an okay business.
There’s another business, which is the local restaurant business, where the people there just focus on making great food and having great service. And they actually are not in a place that gets a lot of foot traffic, so they don’t get lots of new customers. But everybody in like a five-mile radius eats there twice a month, and they just get lots of repeat customers because they’ve built trust and they’ve built depth of connection with those people. And people know that restaurant and love it and know they’re going to have a great time when they’re there. That is a great business. You don’t have to get lots of new [customers] and billions [in] acquisition - you don’t. That’s not the only type of business you can build as a creator.
There’s this wonderful group of creators - oh my God, I’ve fallen in love with them. Anybody heard of the YouTube New Wave? Has anybody heard of these folks? [I’m] seeing some hands. It’s this group of creators. They make these wonderful 30-, 45-minute long-form films - many documentaries - about their lives and their struggles coming into the world, and quitting college, and they’re beautiful. It’s incredible. They’re patient, they’re slow, the films are long. But oh my God, the depth of the message in these films is incredible. And they’re building such a strong community around their work. People just love what they have to say and can’t wait to see the next one. That’s a real business. That’s a real community. It’s different than what we’re incentivized to do everywhere on the internet, but that works.
Okay. The last thing - [wow,] that was loud. Know what you want. The hardest lesson I have learned as a creative person and as an operator and CEO over the last 10 years is to know and trust what I want, and to be true to that over time. It’s easier said than done. Don’t let somebody else tell you what you want, because then you’ll end up with what they want instead of what you want.
I think a good example of that is: as creators, we open up our dashboards and we see these metrics on what success is. This is a dashboard that someone else built for us, and it tells us what we want. And the weird thing is, after a couple of years, we begin - like, our minds get reprogrammed - and we believe, “This is what I want. This is success.” And we chase that.
If you went back in time and you asked Ella Fitzgerald or David Bowie or Prince, “What do you want? What’s your goal as an artist? What matters to you?” - do you think Bowie would have said, “My goal as an artist is to maximize the amount of human hours spent consuming my work”? I don’t know what Bowie wanted. I’m not going to pretend to. But I can tell you what I want as an artist. I can tell you what matters to me as a creative person, and what I know will matter to me [in] 10 years [from] now and 10 years from now.
I want to say something that matters to somebody. I want to say something that only I can say, because of whatever experience I’ve had and my lived experience - something that is uniquely pointed to me. I want to say that. I want to figure out how to say that. I want to find that core of human truth in my experience and communicate it eloquently and clearly, and have it be true and feel true, and have someone else see that and have that person think, “Yes, that feels true.” And it feels true to them. And then I want that person to feel connected to me, even though we’ve never met before in our lives, but I said a thing that resonated with them and made them feel a little bit less alone - because they felt like there was another person who had that same experience.
I want to make things that are timeless. I want to make things that feel true now. I want to make things that feel true in 50 years. I want to make things that still feel true 500 years after I’m dead. I want to figure out how to use my short years on this planet to find that kind of truth and say it. That’s what I want as an artist.
And that’s a very different goal than watch time. That may not be what you want as an artist, and that’s okay. But the point is to know what you want. What matters to you? What are you trying to achieve as a creative person? We have this tendency to look outside for those answers - I do it too. This advice is honestly more for me than it is for anybody else in this room. We want there to be a Yoda. We want there to be a leader or a manager or a voice of authority that can tell us what we want, because it’s a scary thing to ask. But that does not exist. What we want comes intrinsically, not extrinsically. It comes from in here. That’s where we find it.
So as we navigate this next phase of the internet as creative people, as we go through these ups and downs of the web in its ever-evolving state, do not forget what matters to you as an artist. Do not forget what fills you with pride to make. Do not forget your purpose for making things in the first place. Don’t forget why you wake up in the morning and devote your time and energy to your craft. Don’t forget what gives you a sense of meaning as a creative person. And lastly, don’t forget to scream your guts out.
Thank you. Thank you everybody. Appreciate you being [here]. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.