I’m not sure if expecting over a thousand patrons is realistic. Out of 120,674 creators on Patreon, there are only 583 that have over 1000 contributors. At 100 contributors, each contribution would only be $1, and at 5x that amount, with 500 contributors, you would only be contributing $5, still an affordable amount. Obviously, with a $10 monthly limit you would be limited to only 1000 contributors, which is an issue for projects that are of sufficient scale scale, however I would think projects that large would have more than one project page or sub-projects by the time we have projects with that many supporters. However I think that’s a discussion that requires it’s own topic.
Either way, my vote is for pennies being the smallest unit. It’s simpler the explain, simpler to understand, and simpler to implement. It’s just more elegant than rounding.
We can’t be sure at this point either. But Patreon does not solve the coordination problem / snowdrift dilemma at all. It doesn’t even have the sort of mutual assurance of a threshold campaign.
We’ve gotten 90 patrons when it’s super hard to even find out that you can pledge, hard to find the place to pledge, and has not even been announced.
The premise here is that orders of magnitude more people will be into giving pennies and maybe a couple bucks as part of hundreds or thousands of patrons than are willing to unilaterally chip in a few bucks as one of the mere dozens of patrons to something on Patreon.
Put another way: I’m sure even that substantial portion of our current patrons would not have pledged to us if it were just a Patreon-style pledge. They’re pledging with the hope of being part of a much greater number of patrons than is normal today — and the fact that they’re only giving pennies until it reaches that higher level is part of this. I have many reasons to believe that when we simply make the site easier to navigate and pledge and announce our working system, we’ll get a lot more patrons too.
In short: I do not support moving to higher base. I support aiming for thousands of patrons. We won’t succeed at our mission if all we can do is get the same sorts of numbers that already happen on Patreon.
original match level and high ambitions
For reference, we started originally at 0.01¢ (hundredth of a cent) match level at moved up to the 0.1¢ level when we realized that initial start was just too ambitious and too hard for people to see as meaningful.
Our goal in the long term should be to see match levels reduced because we’re succeeding at getting tens of thousands or more patrons. The real ambitious dream goal is not to compete with the income levels seen at Patreon but to compete with the numbers for something like Netflix.
1 Appreciation