Hello,
i would like to have more clarity on the following questions:
- Will crowdmatching actually work?
- Does crowdmatching make sense?
Like the author of Problems with crowdmatching + proposing an alternative, i’m not convinced that it is the right approach.
My background in short: I’m involved in many free software projects and try to find a way to sustainably fund public goods. I fully support your mission and share the vision, that FLO public goods can out-compete proprietary stuff with less funding. cooperation > competition
I think i generally understand how crowdmatching work, but i want a deeper understanding and get a feel for how it works in practice.
Problems i see:
- Funding of small projects is limited. They might have a dedicated community of enthusiasts that are willing to donate more, but they can’t. They would probably get more with Patreon.
- When a project is popular and has many patrons, many will not be able to afford to contribute. Only rich people can contribute. So it’s not democratic anymore.
- I would intuitively donate more to projects i care more about. Here i can’t decide how much to contribute. I might even not be able to afford contributing to my favorite project. I guess the theory is that my individual opinion is less important than the collective. It might protect me from stupid decisions to fund projects that will fail (like i did ).
- matching has also the effect that people donate more (i guess). that mechanism is not used with crowdmatching
- When i contribute and that will bring a patron over their limit, my contribution is not matched. But that was my motivation to contribute. Do we have to communicate that when pledging?
- The theory is that crowdmatching will bring the project more patrons and funds than Liberapay or Patreon. A study with the first projects would be great.
- I like to say “when everyone contributes a little, we have a lot of funding”. consider every firefox user donates 0.10$. but they would have to donate a lot more…
- How would big projects work in practice? Consider these:
- Wikipedia got 110,000,000$ in 2019 in donations, that equals 9,166,666$ per month. with crowdmaching, it needs 96,000 patrons which contribute $96 each. not sure if they want even more… they might need less with sustainable monthly donations
- Firefox (400,000 people donated to Mozilla in 2019), Mozilla got about 16.000.000$ in 2018 in donations and about 430.000.000 in “Royalities” (is that the Google money?). total 450,000,000$, equals to 37,500,000$ per month. crowdmatching would need 195,000 patrons contributing $195 each (they would need less when they focus on developing firefox, so it’s probably overfunded and mismanaged. the TTS/STT project is nice, but can be split out)
Example projects:
These are all not failing projects, but they fail to get enough funding through Liberapay. But it would be worse in every single case with crowdmatching (with the same number of patrons).
Patreon don’t list projects publicly. The examples that they have, have 90% non-public income. The funding seems in all cases from enthusiasts. They market it even that way: “Patreon helps you build direct relationships with your most engaged fans.” Many creators are single persons, snowdrift seem to focus on projects.