“Patreon needs to build new businesses and new services and new revenue lines in order to build a sustainable business,” said Patreon CEO Jack Conte.
Jokes on them. Once you accept the VC business model, “sustainable” is never in the cards, that’s not what you signed up for. Ironic for a “sustaining” fundraising platform. The VC model and whatever exit it gets (buyout or IPO) fundamentally demands infinite constant growth, not sustainability.
As Douglas Rushkoff puts it, Twitter can get $2 billion revenue a year for just being a simple group-texting app — and that’s considered failing and dangerous because it has nowhere to grow. It lives in an investment/economic system that cannot tolerate the idea of just getting to that massive point and sustaining. If they can’t grow, they’re doomed.
Patreon accepted that playbook from the beginning by going VC instead of building a co-op or similar. And they seem to be still deluded about this.
Meanwhile, Facebook cannot tolerate donations and creativity happening outside of Facebook, so they’re declaring war on Patreon et al with their own comparable paywall-service, only they can set the terms more because they have a couple billion audience members held hostage…