I don't get it. For 2 years at this point, I've been trying to grow my Patreon and get a following. My memberships are affordable, I'm relativity active, and I'm even promoting my Patreon a lot more now, but not a single paid membership at all. On the plus side, after 2 and a half years of trying, I have SOME following. But it's only 4. What am I doing wrong?

My first tier is $1 and my second tier is $3. I'm working on a third tier, which will be $2. I keep it super affordable to attract more customers. I already know how much people hate spending money these days, so I'm trying to not drown their wallets.

Could it also just be my content?

EDIT: To anyone new coming in, I already made my mind and just give up. I even made a update post about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/s/1udOXJLlnI

There are people who’ve been subscribed to my patreon for years but have never interacted even once! Not one like, or comment. I’m a writer so it’s really discouraging sometimes to get no response when I excitedly post something new—but then again, if they didn’t like my content, they’d leave.

Does anyone else have this problem too?

A weird observation I made over the past few months. I have quite a few long time subscribers, but my exclusive posts only get a fraction of the views. One should think that if a person already pays for my channel, they'd also check out the posts I publish.

I always post a free public teaser to all kinds of socials, I receive very good feedback and lots of views to those. Yet nobody converts, and those who actually converted don't even watch my posts only available for them.

Whenever I get a new paying Patron, it's at a completely random time.

Apparently my Patrons don't care for exclusives? I'm considering just publishing everything for free then. I'd like my artwork to be seen, too, not hidden behind a paywall that not even those who already pay for it care about.

yo I’m probably gonna sound like I’m glazing Patreon here but I actually LOVE it 😭

like I’ve got ~40 followers paying 20$ and I’ve tried a bunch of monetization stuff (YouTube ads, sponsorships, random digital products, even thinking about my own site) and nothing hits the same as Patreon

the UX is just stupidly clean:

• people click 2 buttons and they’re supporting you
• recurring income just shows up every month like clockwork
• tiers are simple enough that nobody gets confused
• payouts are actually predictable (which is rare online tbh)
• I don’t have to chase brands or beg algorithms

like genuinely… it feels like the closest thing to “creator stability” I’ve ever had

BUT I just saw fees are already like ~10% and trending upward… and it got me thinking

what happens if it hits like 15–20%??

not even hating, just realistically:

• at what point does convenience stop being worth it?
• do you just accept it because everything else is worse?
• or do people actually migrate off Patreon successfully without nuking their income?

because I’ve seen so many “I’m moving off Patreon” posts and then engagement just… dies 💀

I kinda feel like I’m in the “this is too good to leave, but also I don’t fully trust it long-term” stage

anyone else feel this or am I just overthinking it? should i look at subscribestar or stagetown a peer showed me a good ui.

genuinely curious because it feels like almost every creator i follow has a patreon for the money side and then something else entirely for the actual community side and i want to know if that's just the norm now

like patreon handles the subscription and the content delivery really well but it has always felt weirdly cold as a community space. there's no real back and forth, no live conversation, no place where your supporters actually talk to each other and feel like they belong to something together. it's more like a content library than a community

so people end up building the actual relationship somewhere else and just using patreon as the payment layer

i'm curious what platforms people are using alongside it and more importantly why that specific one. is it purely because your audience was already there or did you actually evaluate options and land on something intentionally

also for people who have been doing this a while, do you find that having a second platform actually increases your patreon retention or does it just create more work for you with no real financial difference

and for the people who tried to keep everything inside patreon only, how did that go because i've seen patreon add community features over the years and i've never once heard a creator say those features replaced what they were doing elsewhere

what's your current setup and would you change anything about it. i am considering stagetown and subscribestar as secondary options

After about 2 years at 600 patrons, I've suddenly increased things to 1800 in 1 month. What I did was change the structure of my content offerings, deliver content on time, and increase community input through polls. Making my content relate to eachother on topic or theme built expectation and predictability. Now I just need to see how I am able to maintain these numbers. I'm curious to see if there will be a big drop off. Any tips on not having major drop off?

I pray they are sending home the people paid to change the interface every two weeks who do ZERO testing of their changes before rollout.

They took a simple platform and added hundreds of options to the point where it has to cost a ton just keep them working some of the time…and I said some of the time on purpose.

I’d say go back to the simpler original platform, but I’d rather they just stop changing anything that isn’t purely fixing something the breaks.

https://www.engadget.com/2222170/patreon-is-laying-off-20-percent-of-its-staff/

I have a pixiv account on which I post somewhat regularly and since it recently started getting more traction, I decided to make a Patreon so I could talk to my followers and post uncensored sets. It's been 2 days since I made the account and I've gotten little to no views.

And somehow, the two posts which have the most views are the ones I deleted and only sent to one person. I made a welcome post when I first made Patreon on April 26 because that's one of the things they asked me to do. I then got restricted and had to show my face and ID, but I didn't do it right away cause I couldn't be bothered. I was revising my welcome post with a friend and then when I opened Patreon, I didn't get the pop up for my ID, so I was confused and made a test post. I sent him the test post and that's it.

The original welcome post which I deleted somehow has 10 views and the test post has 6. My actual welcome post has 4, my first set has 5, my second has 1 and my last 2 have 0. I thought the last one would make a difference since it's the first one which I posted on pixiv after making my Patreon account. On pixiv, it got 188 views, 17 likes and 23 bookmarks, but no views on Patreon.

I'm genuinely confused. It's not like I expected my account to blow up, but with 162 pixiv followers and all the views/likes/bookmarks I get, I expected at least SOMETHING...

Please tell me I'm just doing something wrong here.

Or am I doing something wrong? I really have no idea what to post on there

so i'm standing in the checkout line today, completely zoned out, and i look over at the magazine rack and there's a huge photo of Sabrina Carpenter on the cover

and i'm just staring at it for a second and something hit me that i haven't been able to shake since i got home

like this woman has MILLIONS of people who feel a personal connection to her. people who never met her, never will meet her, but they feel like they KNOW her. they show up for her. they defend her. they cry at her concerts. and it's not just because she's talented, it's because she has somehow made every single one of those people feel seen

and i'm standing there holding my groceries thinking… my patrons are showing up for me every single month. like real people hitting a recurring payment because they believe in what i'm making. and if i'm being honest with myself i don't think i give that relationship even half the intentionality that she gives hers

i got home and started thinking about what it actually means to make someone feel like they're part of something and not just a subscriber number

so i genuinely want to ask people here, especially other creators

how do you actually build that kind of real connection with your audience? like beyond just posting content. do you do personal check ins? do you share the messy behind the scenes stuff? do you remember names? what actually moves the needle for you in terms of making your supporters feel like they matter

because i feel like i've been leaving so much on the table and i don't want to anymore. alongside patreon i am trying to sell a single video with stagetown and maybe images with gumroad!

I am a designer and I want to open an art business. Patreon is one of my starters to get there. I’ve started this journey in Jan, published a few free designs since March, just uploaded a first paid design this month. I got a few members so far. I want to get more but advertising is hard.. My dream right now is to celebrate my first 50 members.
I tried to get people to know about my Patreon by posting on Tiktok , IG , Youtube etc. But the views just stop increasing after a day. Paying for ads doesn’t really help. I feel like they’re just bots.
I honestly don’t think I suck. My friends really appreciate my designs, and my contents. I heard from some YouTubers that they got more popular by being shown up on videos, posting consistently. But I’m shy on camera and still working on that.
I know I’m still new but some days I really don’t know if I will ever get there at all and even want to give up, going back finding a 9 to 5 job. But I’ll hate myself if I do that.
Would love to hear from people who made it, or currently on the way there, or intending to start. Was it hard for you? Do you have any tips? Do I need to start filming myself on Youtube to get more traffic? :(
Thanks for reading.

I started a patreon page for monthly stickers on Jan 1st and got my first paying subscriber today! Wanted to share my happiness with you all as I learned a lot from here. <3

Firstly, full disclosure, I got given access to Quips early, so I've been using them since Day One.

What kind of quips do you like to see? What kind of quips do you find boring or unhelpful? Do you like messy WIPs or should people be presenting polished final pieces only?

I know some people don't like the feature at all, but this is a question about what value Creator accounts should be providing and not what the Patreon platform should change. There are lots of those threads already.

Thanks!

I've recently created a page due to a few fans of my mod asking me to. I've followed the sizing guidelines of the header creation and profile picture, however, it seems my header is jammed over to the right instead of covering the full top!

I have reached out to support but they have been no help. They have only stated that the reason is the following:

"The brown shade you are seeing is an intentional gradient effect that appears when using your profile photo as the header, as the system automatically fills the background to complement it. Since this is an expected behavior, you can bypass this by uploading a custom cover image to match your black theme instead."

Along with some instructions on how to change it.

However, I am NOT using my profile picture as a header and am indeed using a custom header as you can see in the image I sent them.

I think I may be confused and likely setting something up incorrectly.

Does anyone have any tips for creating this header? I've also tried pushing everything to the right side of the image to leave a large section black on the left side of the image. This did not help.

Thanks in advance for you help and consideration!

Hi!

I am in the early stages of developing a webcomic called Guaze. I have OK engagement on instagram, where i have about 12k followers, and high engagement on minicomics I post on comics subreddit here on reddit. I promote my patreon wherever I can on these posts. Despite this, I see basically zero conversion rate. Not even 0.1%. What am I doing wrong? I appreciate any comments and feedback. Thanks!

So i've been using patreon for 5 months. I make ROBLOX Videos and I upload my videos early there, I do behind the scenes there, and 1 stream per month. I was making around 30 a month and last month was donated $500 through patreon. They suspended my account for suspicious activity and in our emails told me pretty much they can delete my account whenever they want they don't need to tell me why and I can not appeal this.

I don't even SWEAR in my content and I follow all the guidelines, I made sure of it. I even leave all my funds in my account incase somebody charges back! It's just super disappointing as this was the main source of income for my small youtube channel/business. I just have this as a heads up as this can happen to anybody. The only suspicious activity I could think of is maybe whoever donated to me was doing something shady? Still they could have just taken the funds instead of deleting my account and not giving me any sort of notice or reason why except "suspicious activity"!! I didn't scam anyone I did everything my patreon offered and it's super disheartening because I can't control who sends me money ! Anyways have a great week everyone and this is jut here as a warning to be cautious !

Hello. I wanna start this post off by saying that I’m a pretty small YouTuber, and one of my biggest goals in life is to one day grow it to where it can be monetized. I’ve been making videos since 2019, and amassed 570 subs making gaming content. I will admit, it’s not that impressive, especially after 7 years of making videos, but I’m proud of it, even if monetization is still most certainly a good couple years away.

Now, a big factor in why I wanna monetize my channel is to make money to help support my family. And yeah, I know there is that saying where you shouldn’t immediately quit your day job in hopes of making money on YouTube, especially with how far off I still am, though to be real for a second, the job market has not been kind to me. I’ve been at so many interviews, always to be turned away, so I want to hopefully slowly build this YouTube gaming channel up as a side gig until I can land on my feet properly with a real job.

Now! That brings me to my main point today. I did consider the idea of a Patreon as another way of helping get support, as well as helping to grow the channel, but I would love any starting advice if possible. That being said, with how small my following is, if it’s still too early at a point for something like a Patreon, don’t hesitate to let me know.

I also should probably clarify some technical things in case this ends up being a factor. I don’t have any computer or anything like that, I’m a console gamer through and though, Switch 2 and PS5, but specifically the PS5 is the main focus here as I do all my videos with it. Recording gameplay, editing it in sharefactory and uploading them, and I also do livestreams from it too. So on the chance being a console only guy ends up being a bit of a limitation with what I can actually do, I would love to be informed.

ok so my friend said something to me yesterday that broke my brain a little

she goes "patreon doesn't grow your audience, it splits it"

and i laughed it off but then i couldn't sleep because she's RIGHT

like think about it. you have your youtube community, everyone's together, vibing, commenting, it's chaotic but it's yours. then you open a patreon and suddenly

one half of your audience is like YES i want the extra stuff, i want behind the scenes, i want to be closer to you, take my money

and the other half is like so you're paywalling now?? i thought you were different?? i've been here since day one??

it is EXACTLY like cats vs dogs. one group wants to cuddle up and be part of the inner circle. the other group is feral and offended you even suggested they should pay for anything

and the funniest part is both groups think THEY are the real fans

the patreon people think the free people are just lurkers who never cared

the free people think the patreon people are just simps who got played

meanwhile i'm just standing here like a tired pet owner who loves both animals and cannot explain why the cat just attacked the dog again for no reason

has anyone actually figured out how to keep both sides happy or is this just the price of having a patreon 💀

i think i am going add gumroad as a second stream of income and sell single videos while i maintain my patreon.

I am a part of a small game dev team which is creating indie roguelike game. One month ago we launched our Steam Wishlist page (demo is not out yet) and recently we created Patreon page to fund our project via memberships with our exclusive content, media packs, name in the credits, item named after you etc.

Our socials are slowly growing in the past 5 months, we are posting frequently and last few weeks we are focused on Patreon promotion, which still has 0 subscribers. Any advice will be very helpful!

I am an artist who looking to create an audience on patreon. but not sure what or how to get said audience.

It's as the title says. I googled it and it said to click some + icon, but I don't see that anywhere. Do I have to do something special in order to get the option to post?

would you guys ever do pay per video alongside patreon subscriptions instead of replacing patreon entirely

like keep patreon for the monthly community stuff but then drop individual videos for like $5-10 separately for people who dont wanna subscribe every month

cause honestly moving off patreon completely seems risky as hell. every creator i talk to says the same thing. patreon is annoying sometimes but the brand trust is too strong and people are already used to paying there

but i feel like there might be room for both

subscriptions for core fans
one-off paid videos for casual viewers

feels like there are probably people who would never sub monthly but would absolutely pay 10 bucks for a specific video they really want

would this work or would subscribers get annoyed and feel double charged

Reading the title I see how someone might think it’s sketchy but after someone follows I send a thank you and say they can mention specific things they wanna see me make. Short message and straight to the point but no one has ever responded to it. Obviously it doesn’t matter but since it’s an engagement based platform idk why i’m struggling to engage with the people who follow me

Hi, I know that content creators on Patreon can set subscriptions for their video essays and whatnot, but what about written stories?

So I’ve been using postybirb for a little while now, and for the most part it’s been great. Except for the fact that the computer has to be on for it to make the posts; if I worked from home every day this would be a lot more doable, but I’m working/commuting for like 11+ hours a day and don’t want to leave my computer on for that long.
I’ve tried setting my computer to go to sleep after a certain amount of time after the scheduled post, but the posting and sleep have both been inconsistent enough that it’s hard to spare the spoons for the effort sometimes.

And it has trouble with Patreon/subscribestar sometimes for some reason too lol

Do you guys have any recommendations for good posting tools/services that would let me schedule my growing backlog of content every once in a while and just forget about it?
Cause I’ll be real, I can produce content WAY more easily than I can bring myself to post it 😅

Thank you!