Author Topic: eevBLAB #59 - Patreon Is An Unsustainable Business (Read 16247 times)

EEVblog · « **on:** February 06, 2019, 02:49:53 am »

Patreon is an unsustainable business, in their own words.
They took the investment money and now they are paying the price.
It looks as they nothing Patreon can do that won't piss off their creators will bring in enough money to keep the investors happy.
In addition to the fallout from the Patreon Purge, the future is not looking bright for Patreon and Jack Conte.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patreon-announces-it-will-pay-out-half-a-billion-dollars-to-content-creators-in-2019.html

Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/eevblog

johnlsenchak · « **Reply #1 on:** February 06, 2019, 05:29:37 am »

In my opinion, Youtube content creators (not all) have become solely about making money, verses making real good content

timelessbeing · « **Reply #2 on:** February 06, 2019, 05:59:58 am »

Not solely, but definitely the main motivator.

Maybe Jack will sell Patreon to Microsoft or Google or something. Patreon employees should probably have a Plan B ready.

Where do you get a stainless toilet like that ... airplanes?

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #3 on:** February 06, 2019, 06:01:30 am »

What I would like to see is an app to simplify supporting your favorite creator(s) using cryptocurrency to the point where it's literally just selecting them in the app and letting the app run to mine crypto. Ideally, it would be some sort of energy efficient cryptocurrency although every one of those that I have dealt with have significant downsides that make them not very good as currencies.

Berni · « **Reply #4 on:** February 06, 2019, 06:37:58 am »

The main point of cryptocurrency is that its the opposite energy efficient. If its easy to run on a phone then someone will put together a rack full of servers running a few 1000s of instances of a Android VM that's running the mining app.

The fact that you need immense amounts of processing power to do it is part of the design for cryptocurrency to avoid having someone just print money for free. The processing power is sort of the proof of effort that you worked hard for those cypto coins.

Bud · « **Reply #5 on:** February 06, 2019, 06:53:10 am »

I fail to see how it is feasible to mine even a tiny fraction of a cryptocurrency on a mobile phone. Best way to kill the battery comes as a bonus.

TERRA Operative · « **Reply #6 on:** February 06, 2019, 07:37:07 am »

Quote from: johnlsenchak on February 06, 2019, 05:29:37 am

In my opinion, Youtube content creators (not all) have become solely about making money, verses making real good content

IMO, there's no problem with using the platform to make money, but as you say, they also should be striving to make good content..

I deleted my patreon partly for this reason. I make youtube content, but I don't think it's nearly good enough to ask for money beyond a youtube ad here and there.
I think it'll be a looonnng time before I reach the critical mass of the more prominent channels (if ever).

Moshly · « **Reply #7 on:** February 06, 2019, 07:48:40 am »

Subscribe Star is just as bad as Patreon, look what happened to Apostate Prophet ->
https://youtu.be/VRitNVGa2xA?t=300

timelessbeing · « **Reply #8 on:** February 06, 2019, 07:49:40 am »

Quote from: TERRA Operative on February 06, 2019, 07:37:07 am

I make youtube content, but I don't think it's nearly good enough to ask for money

That doesn't stop a lot of people.

Synthtech · « **Reply #9 on:** February 06, 2019, 08:11:31 am »

Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin left the sinking Patreon ship. Clean your room Patreon!

Howardlong · « **Reply #10 on:** February 06, 2019, 08:40:28 am »

300 employees!!!! WTF are they all doing?

For the non-tech roles, there is zero reason to be located in San Francisco. I'd even suggest that they should move the tech roles out. They can't be that great, Patreon hardly has a great reputation for its technology, whether it be data breaches or as a payment processor.

It sounds like Conte's had a boot up the butt from his investors.

Regarding the payment processing, that is their single core business proposition. The phrase "You had one job" springs to mind.

OwO · « **Reply #11 on:** February 06, 2019, 09:46:09 am »

"The company is also on track to pay out $500 million to content creators in 2019, pushing the company to surpass $1 billion in payouts since its inception in 2013.

Under the company's current business model, 90 percent of funds are paid directly to content creators. Patreon takes 5 percent, and the remaining 5 percent covers transaction fees."

$500 million * 0.05 is $25 million. How the fuck do you need $25 million a year to run a shitty website plus payment gateway? It's not even a real payment processor. The site is not youtube, it doesn't host videos or anything bandwidth heavy. Inefficient corporations with a shitload of overhead deserve to die, so that leaner operations can take their place.

EEVblog · « **Reply #12 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:12:34 am »

EEVblog · « **Reply #13 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:17:42 am »

Quote from: OwO on February 06, 2019, 09:46:09 am

$500 million * 0.05 is $25 million. How the fuck do you need $25 million a year to run a shitty website plus payment gateway? It's not even a real payment processor. The site is not youtube, it doesn't host videos or anything bandwidth heavy. Inefficient corporations with a shitload of overhead deserve to die, so that leaner operations can take their place.

Imagine if you had 10 really smart and capable people, who would bet against them being able to do the same or better for say a $1M salary each?
Patreon is begging to be taken down by a much leaner startup.

Marco · « **Reply #14 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:36:17 am »

They have a good business, but they don't want a business ... they want a multi-billion dollar buyout. Can't do that with a 25 Million revenue company with limited growth potential.

ziggyfish · « **Reply #15 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:37:53 am »

I would say, the investors have seen the response of the recent purge, and seen the down turn in revenue from it and said, to the CEO, how are you going to recover this lost revenue?

He would also have his own ambitions, so he's looking at other ways of making money.

ziggyfish · « **Reply #16 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:43:40 am »

Quote from: EEVblog on February 06, 2019, 10:17:42 am

Quote from: OwO on February 06, 2019, 09:46:09 am
$500 million * 0.05 is $25 million. How the fuck do you need $25 million a year to run a shitty website plus payment gateway? It's not even a real payment processor. The site is not youtube, it doesn't host videos or anything bandwidth heavy. Inefficient corporations with a shitload of overhead deserve to die, so that leaner operations can take their place.

Imagine if you had 10 really smart and capable people, who would bet against them being able to do the same or better for say a $1M salary each?
Patreon is begging to be taken down by a much leaner startup.

Although I agree with you regarding company size. However the Pareto Principe is at play here. Square root of the employees produce half the revenue. Sqrt(300) = 17

NivagSwerdna · « **Reply #17 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:46:30 am »

Quote from: Marco on February 06, 2019, 10:36:17 am

...with limited growth potential.

It is curious that it is not growing (if that is the case)... You would think it would scale rapidly iff it was a good idea...

Marco · « **Reply #18 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:48:27 am »

Quote from: EEVblog on February 06, 2019, 10:17:42 am

Imagine if you had 10 really smart and capable people, who would bet against them being able to do the same or better for say a $1M salary each?
Patreon is begging to be taken down by a much leaner startup.

It depends on how willing PayPal is to work with another company and if they are willing to be as lenient for more questionable content for newcomers as they are with Patreon. There is really no alternative to PayPal other than starting your own payment processing company, which certainly is an option, but not an easy one.

timelessbeing · « **Reply #19 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:48:38 am »

I don't think this "purge" is as significant as people make it out to be.

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #20 on:** February 06, 2019, 02:10:44 pm »

Quote from: Berni on February 06, 2019, 06:37:58 am

The main point of cryptocurrency is that its the opposite energy efficient. If its easy to run on a phone then someone will put together a rack full of servers running a few 1000s of instances of a Android VM that's running the mining app.

The fact that you need immense amounts of processing power to do it is part of the design for cryptocurrency to avoid having someone just print money for free. The processing power is sort of the proof of effort that you worked hard for those cypto coins.

The energy efficient coins (e.g. Swagbucks) use all sorts of tricks to prevent that exact problem. The biggest one is IP limits, followed by actually using bandwidth so an IT manager that tries to deploy a few hundred instances at work would significantly slow down the network. Known VPN/VPS ranges are blacklisted.

There's also Curecoin and Foldingcoin that's efficient in a different way - do real work that is of benefit outside the cryptocurrency system.

langwadt · « **Reply #21 on:** February 06, 2019, 06:11:04 pm »

Quote from: NiHaoMike on February 06, 2019, 06:01:30 am

What I would like to see is an app to simplify supporting your favorite creator(s) using cryptocurrency to the point where it's literally just selecting them in the app and letting the app run to mine crypto. Ideally, it would be some sort of energy efficient cryptocurrency although every one of those that I have dealt with have significant downsides that make them not very good as currencies.

not matter how you twist it cryptocurrency is a stupid waste, it is like flushing useful resources down the drain to get
internet points

Dave · « **Reply #22 on:** February 06, 2019, 06:16:37 pm »

Quote from: langwadt on February 06, 2019, 06:11:04 pm

not matter how you twist it cryptocurrency is a stupid waste, it is like flushing useful resources down the drain to get internet points

Why bother actually looking into it, when you could just repeat the blanket statement that the banker told the news reporter, right?

Bicurico · « **Reply #23 on:** February 06, 2019, 06:19:10 pm »

I don't know what Patreon is and at this time I'm afraid to ask...

NivagSwerdna · « **Reply #24 on:** February 06, 2019, 06:46:10 pm »

It seems they acquired Memberful (a tiny 1-10 employee) company... so maybe their aspirations are membership generally not just their previous core business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patreon

EEVBlog presumeably in the NSFW category

Grapsus · « **Reply #25 on:** February 06, 2019, 08:44:52 pm »

Just watched the video and in my opinion Dave's analysis is 100% correct. Dudes in California had the right idea at the right time. They could absolutely have bootstraped their business, but they took a ton of investor money so that they could "expand", rent overpriced offices in SF, do corporate shit and now the investors need at least a 10x return.

Technically, 10 people working remotely from places where renting a boiler room doesn't cost 4k$ per month could run the website and enjoy the 5% cut for a long time.

Patreon has the same temptation as Internet service providers: they provide a service and it pays, but they see all this money and content passing through them and wonder "how can we get more out of it into my pocket?".

Next logical move from Patreon: the fee increases to 15%, but it's paid for by the patreons and now creators get more value services like advice on how to make polically correct content...

langwadt · « **Reply #26 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:03:32 pm »

Quote from: Dave on February 06, 2019, 06:16:37 pm

Quote from: langwadt on February 06, 2019, 06:11:04 pm
not matter how you twist it cryptocurrency is a stupid waste, it is like flushing useful resources down the drain to get internet points
Why bother actually looking into it, when you could just repeat the blanket statement that the banker told the news reporter, right?

look into what? wasting energy to make something that has no useful value?

Bicurico · « **Reply #27 on:** February 06, 2019, 10:30:21 pm »

Can someone please explain me why I would want to pay someone via Patreon, AFTER I have seen the videos on Youtube?
I can understand the monetisation through ads on Youtube.
I can understand that there are people in the world willing to fund Youtube channels, because they enjoy the videos and want to keep the creator motivated/funded in order to do more videos. But why not pay directly with Paypal or credit card?

This is a serious question and I might be biased from the cultural background of the region where I live.

I simply don't understand the need for Patreon, especially since they seem to charge/retain as much as any other payment system.

Thanks,
Vitor

tszaboo · « **Reply #28 on:** February 06, 2019, 11:00:08 pm »

It is Price's law, that the square root of the number of employees is doing half the work.
So from that 300 employees, 17 programmers are doing 50% of the work, and out of this, 4 people are doing 25% of the work. So the value distribution looks like this:
4 people 25% of the work (6.25% per employee). Imagine the senior developer, who knows everything, he is a genius, knows stuff, the CEO the
13 employees do 25% of the work (1.92% per employee) These are the other senior developers
The remaining 283 employee is responsible for the 50% of the work (0.17% per employee). These are the "Culture, Media, and Arts Specialist" and the bunch of "Creator Success Lead at Patreon" (WTF is that title even mean???)
So one of those 4 people are doing the same work as 36 other employee. If they leave, well good luck replacing them. Out of 36 you might find someone who is worthy.

I'm seeing the same thing where I work,every single company, the most of the work done comes from a very small group of people.

Being lean means that you have those 17 people who can do 50% of the work. And there are those people, that could be fired on the spot, because they contribute practically nothing to the company. The larger the company it is, the more there are these people. And I actually dont know, how Price's law deals with people who are making negative contribution to the company, but I'm sure there will be many of this. Like a system architect, who decides to implement something stupid, a manager, who agrees to this, and then 30 developers spend a year building something not really working, which has to be constantly maintained by 15 of those 30 employees. So congratulations to the system architect, he just made about 3 million dollars worth of technical debt with some stupid decisions. But this dept is payed at 50% rate unlike regular debt. Or those people who started policing the authors for their content, which lead to people leaving the platform.

GeorgeOfTheJungle · « **Reply #29 on:** February 06, 2019, 11:06:26 pm »

I've always wanted to have an "unsustainable business" like that.

coppice · « **Reply #30 on:** February 06, 2019, 11:19:23 pm »

Quote from: NANDBlog on February 06, 2019, 11:00:08 pm

It is Price's law, that the square root of the number of employees is doing half the work.

Its kinda depressing how many areas of life where Price's law fits reality really well. You misstated it, though. The square root of the employees achieve half the useful results. The others may be working quite hard, but are not achieving positive results.

Grapsus · « **Reply #31 on:** February 06, 2019, 11:21:48 pm »

Quote from: GeorgeOfTheJungle on February 06, 2019, 11:06:26 pm

I've always wanted to have an "unsustainable business" like that.

Depends if you actually own all the shares or if a bunch of sharks are on the board...

timelessbeing · « **Reply #32 on:** February 06, 2019, 11:28:48 pm »

Quote from: Bicurico on February 06, 2019, 10:30:21 pm

I simply don't understand the need for Patreon

Didn't Dave explain it? Patreon provides the means for incentive and rewards. They can schedule payments, convert currencies etc.

langwadt · « **Reply #33 on:** February 06, 2019, 11:35:02 pm »

Quote from: Grapsus on February 06, 2019, 11:21:48 pm

Quote from: GeorgeOfTheJungle on February 06, 2019, 11:06:26 pm
I've always wanted to have an "unsustainable business" like that.

Depends if you actually own all the shares or if a bunch of sharks are on the board...

yeh accept other peoples money to grown and they will want you to grow bigger faster and make more money
so they get get a return now damn the consequences

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #34 on:** February 06, 2019, 11:55:25 pm »

Quote from: langwadt on February 06, 2019, 06:11:04 pm

not matter how you twist it cryptocurrency is a stupid waste, it is like flushing useful resources down the drain to get
internet points

If you think supporting independent content and an independent financial system is a waste, then the app is not for you.

Quote from: langwadt on February 06, 2019, 10:03:32 pm

look into what? wasting energy to make something that has no useful value?

At this point in time, my Swagbucks mining setup is "wasting" 8W or so to make $16/month or so. A far cry from the days it was making $150/month, but still zero carbon since it's solar powered. (Side note: I achieved a bit of fame with that solar powered mining setup and got a lot of "likes" from my friends.)

EEVblog · « **Reply #35 on:** February 07, 2019, 12:43:42 am »

Quote from: Bicurico on February 06, 2019, 10:30:21 pm

I can understand that there are people in the world willing to fund Youtube channels, because they enjoy the videos and want to keep the creator motivated/funded in order to do more videos. But why not pay directly with Paypal or credit card?

Because then you have to give your credit card to a dozen different creators websites, or set up recurring Paypal for each one. When everyone is in Patreon it's much easier.
It's always been a very precarious position for Patreon, but now they want to rock the boat, and they'll sink in the process.

EEVblog · « **Reply #36 on:** February 07, 2019, 12:51:40 am »

They have plenty of bog jobs open:
https://www.patreon.com/jobs

https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon

Jobs available on the Trust & Safety team!
https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon/jobs/1444567

coppice · « **Reply #37 on:** February 07, 2019, 12:52:12 am »

Quote from: EEVblog on February 07, 2019, 12:43:42 am

Quote from: Bicurico on February 06, 2019, 10:30:21 pm
I can understand that there are people in the world willing to fund Youtube channels, because they enjoy the videos and want to keep the creator motivated/funded in order to do more videos. But why not pay directly with Paypal or credit card?

Because then you have to give your credit card to a dozen different creators websites, or set up recurring Paypal for each one. When everyone is in Patreon it's much easier.
It's always been a very precarious position for Patreon, but now they want to rock the boat, and they'll sink in the process.

Isn't the key advantage of Patreon that it is geared towards the simple setup and control of regular monthly payments?

EEVblog · « **Reply #38 on:** February 07, 2019, 12:53:09 am »

Quote from: NivagSwerdna on February 06, 2019, 06:46:10 pm

EEVBlog presumeably in the NSFW category

I'm just waiting for some Patreon fan to find something I said that's "harmful" and report me to the Trust'n'Safety team

EEVblog · « **Reply #39 on:** February 07, 2019, 12:54:21 am »

Quote from: coppice on February 07, 2019, 12:52:12 am

Quote from: EEVblog on February 07, 2019, 12:43:42 am
Quote from: Bicurico on February 06, 2019, 10:30:21 pm
I can understand that there are people in the world willing to fund Youtube channels, because they enjoy the videos and want to keep the creator motivated/funded in order to do more videos. But why not pay directly with Paypal or credit card?

Because then you have to give your credit card to a dozen different creators websites, or set up recurring Paypal for each one. When everyone is in Patreon it's much easier.
It's always been a very precarious position for Patreon, but now they want to rock the boat, and they'll sink in the process.
Isn't the key advantage of Patreon that it is geared towards the simple setup and control of regular monthly payments?

Yes. You can say "I'm going to give $50 a month to creators I like and then spread out the money under the one umbrella were you an see and account for it all.

Grapsus · « **Reply #40 on:** February 07, 2019, 12:59:07 am »

Wow that jobs page is hipster fest

EEVblog · « **Reply #41 on:** February 07, 2019, 02:08:39 am »

Quote from: Grapsus on February 07, 2019, 12:59:07 am

Wow that jobs page is hipster fest

Did you catch mention of diversity? it was real easy to miss

I wouldn't be betting on that equity thing. The odds of Patreon imploding before going public (the only sensible way equity will be worth anything) would have to be almost even money surely?

langwadt · « **Reply #42 on:** February 07, 2019, 02:25:15 am »

Quote from: EEVblog on February 07, 2019, 02:08:39 am

Quote from: Grapsus on February 07, 2019, 12:59:07 am
Wow that jobs page is hipster fest

Did you catch mention of diversity? it was real easy to miss

I wouldn't be betting on that equity thing. The odds of Patreon imploding before going public (the only sensible way equity will be worth anything) would have to be almost even money surely?

a book every quarter and standing desks, that is some odd stuff to brag about

LapTop006 · « **Reply #43 on:** February 07, 2019, 02:38:25 am »

It isn't all that hard to come up with a need for a bunch of people.

Say:
- 20 developers for the site / features
- 10 senior management / exec
- 5 lead finance people (they do payments globally, this is going to always be a pain point)
- 10 tech operations people (they'll have internal IT needs as well as the site)
- 20 support people

That's 65, with most probably in HQ, and most of the rest in a secondary office location.

Then add one biz-dev / point-of-contact, and one finance person per major market; the former more for support than growth, the latter since tax is different enough to likely justify roughly this; at which point 200 seems high but plausible.

EEVblog · « **Reply #44 on:** February 07, 2019, 02:43:06 am »

Quote from: LapTop006 on February 07, 2019, 02:38:25 am

It isn't all that hard to come up with a need for a bunch of people.

Say:
- 20 developers for the site / features
- 10 senior management / exec
- 5 lead finance people (they do payments globally, this is going to always be a pain point)
- 10 tech operations people (they'll have internal IT needs as well as the site)
- 20 support people

That's 65, with most probably in HQ, and most of the rest in a secondary office location.

Then add one biz-dev / point-of-contact, and one finance person per major market; the former more for support than growth, the latter since tax is different enough to likely justify roughly this; at which point 200 seems high but plausible.

They had 80 people when they got the $60M funding in Sept 2017.

LapTop006 · « **Reply #45 on:** February 07, 2019, 04:02:40 am »

Quote from: EEVblog on February 07, 2019, 02:43:06 am

They had 80 people when they got the $60M funding in Sept 2017.

Yeah, and I could perhaps see doubling that, but at 300 *shrug*

Marco · « **Reply #46 on:** February 07, 2019, 07:08:00 pm »

Quote from: langwadt on February 06, 2019, 06:11:04 pm

not matter how you twist it cryptocurrency is a stupid waste, it is like flushing useful resources down the drain to get
internet points

Cryptocurrency as a concept is silly, cryptocurrency as it exists is in a very weird regulatory framework where it can be a convenient way to do international money transfer. How long that regulatory framework will keep existing is anyone's guess ...

If I was to setup a Patreon/PayPal like service with cryptocurrency I'd want to design my own hardware for it, with display and buttons, so you can see to which website you are making a payment before signing off on it. You need to make it cheap too, because you would have to send it out for free with the first deposit and make the money back on your cuts.

This hardware is needed for security, people's computers simply aren't reliable. It's not a small amount of money either. Patreon works because it's so easy to fire off a subscription and forget about it, which works with credit cards because they have access to your bank account. It wouldn't work with a cryptocurrency address with a small amount of money on it. Stability wise you could protect that deposit for people with Gemini (full reserve dollar pegged cryptocurrency which just uses Ethereum as an exchange platform to piggy back on the aforementioned regulatory framework).

If you could make cryptocurrency really user friendly and secure, you might be able to make it work ... hope you aren't squeamish about porn, because that's the kind of market you need to get the ball rolling. All in all though, a hell of a gamble. Needs substantial amount of initial investment and you're relying on the regulatory framework to not shift out from under you and the Gemini to keep existing.

rrinker · « **Reply #47 on:** February 07, 2019, 09:42:17 pm »

Quote from: LapTop006 on February 07, 2019, 02:38:25 am

It isn't all that hard to come up with a need for a bunch of people.

Say:
- 20 developers for the site / features
- 10 senior management / exec
- 5 lead finance people (they do payments globally, this is going to always be a pain point)
- 10 tech operations people (they'll have internal IT needs as well as the site)
- 20 support people

That's 65, with most probably in HQ, and most of the rest in a secondary office location.

Then add one biz-dev / point-of-contact, and one finance person per major market; the former more for support than growth, the latter since tax is different enough to likely justify roughly this; at which point 200 seems high but plausible.

If you need 10 tech support people for in-house support of the other 55 employees, or even 290, you're hiring the wrong tech support people.

Howardlong · « **Reply #48 on:** February 07, 2019, 10:16:23 pm »

10 tech support people for a business of 290 people in finance is not at all uncommon, in fact I'd say it was quite low especially to support 24x7 operations where you need at least four FTEs for each role to cover all shifts, and allow for vacation and sickness.

In finance, Sarbanes Oxley dictates segregation of duties, so you can't (or shouldn't) have a single individual able to, say, insert some fake transactions and be in a position to be able to cover that up, for example by having both database and system administration access to production systems.

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #49 on:** February 08, 2019, 12:01:47 am »

Quote from: Marco on February 07, 2019, 07:08:00 pm

Cryptocurrency as a concept is silly, cryptocurrency as it exists is in a very weird regulatory framework where it can be a convenient way to do international money transfer. How long that regulatory framework will keep existing is anyone's guess ...

If I was to setup a Patreon/PayPal like service with cryptocurrency I'd want to design my own hardware for it, with display and buttons, so you can see to which website you are making a payment before signing off on it. You need to make it cheap too, because you would have to send it out for free with the first deposit and make the money back on your cuts.

This hardware is needed for security, people's computers simply aren't reliable. It's not a small amount of money either. Patreon works because it's so easy to fire off a subscription and forget about it, which works with credit cards because they have access to your bank account. It wouldn't work with a cryptocurrency address with a small amount of money on it. Stability wise you could protect that deposit for people with Gemini (full reserve dollar pegged cryptocurrency which just uses Ethereum as an exchange platform to piggy back on the aforementioned regulatory framework).

If you could make cryptocurrency really user friendly and secure, you might be able to make it work ... hope you aren't squeamish about porn, because that's the kind of market you need to get the ball rolling. All in all though, a hell of a gamble. Needs substantial amount of initial investment and you're relying on the regulatory framework to not shift out from under you and the Gemini to keep existing.

Some alternatives like Subscribestar are already offering the option of using cryptocurrency, so the biggest problem (going from cryptocurrency to whatever the creator uses) arguably has a solution.

A problem cryptocurrency solves is to make it possible to support your favorite creator(s) by running a program on your computer. The energy use is something to consider, but besides energy efficient cryptocurrencies, there are some cases where the generated heat is useful such as during the winter. Maybe someone will eventually figure out how to make an energy efficient cryptocurrency that's actually good in general.

I recall there actually was an idea to use porn itself as part of altcoin mining (as in the mining references data from porn videos), in order to add another barrier to IT managers deploying miners across hundreds of office PCs.

Marco · « **Reply #50 on:** February 08, 2019, 12:58:58 am »

Quote from: NiHaoMike on February 08, 2019, 12:01:47 am

Some alternatives like Subscribestar are already offering the option of using cryptocurrency, so the biggest problem (going from cryptocurrency to whatever the creator uses) arguably has a solution.

No ... the biggest problem is making it user friendly, secure and amiable to recurring payments.

The last one is perhaps the hardest nut to crack, subcribestar doesn't even try AFAICS ... it's just for one time payments. First off unless your cryptocurrency account is linked to your bank account, it can't have the same reliability as a recurring credit card payment for the content provider. So either you allow automatic topping off from the credit card (and invite a whole lot of overhead from the credit card companies, charge back potential and all) or to mitigate it you could require minimum balances before allowing new payments/subscriptions. Even the technical implementation of the recurring payment is not trivial, you will pretty much have to implement it on the Ethereum blockchain and instead of a normal address use a smart contract for the customer deposit.

For user friendliness you probably want to partner with Coinbase so you can handle everything with a single signup, people don't want to go through multiple sites to get everything to work (yes they do that with PayPal and Patreon, but Coinbase isn't PayPal).

One alternative for the security of custom hardware might be to implement the smart contract so transactions can only be done to other smart contracts of your own design and keeping the money in escrow for a while, with the ability to reverse the transaction within that time. You massively increase the burden on your company by allowing charge backs though. Those are pretty much the choices though, if you place all the burden on the customer to caveat emptor then all transactions must be absolutely securely signed off by him ... if you want to take short cuts and allow signing transactions on mobile phones, or worse computers, you pretty much have to have some kind of charge back mechanism for when some zero day lands and empty everyone's accounts.

It's a huge amount of work to get something which theoretically would not instantly turn off a normal user, or turn him off after some inevitable security lapse if you don't design it securely. That's before you even start marketing and see if they are willing to use it.

PS. I'm not sure subscribestar will be able to continue for much longer ... without PayPal and Stripe they have to either deal directly with credit card companies now (huge overhead) or with more traditional payment providers (big fees, and for anything porn related huge fees).

LapTop006 · « **Reply #51 on:** February 08, 2019, 01:09:28 am »

Quote from: rrinker on February 07, 2019, 09:42:17 pm

If you need 10 tech support people for in-house support of the other 55 employees, or even 290, you're hiring the wrong tech support people.

I'd say it's probably less than half of them working on internal IT needs (helpdesk, hardware tech, as well as network admins etc.), the rest keeping the production elements (ie patreon.com) live and working well. Not just "tech support".

Part of the reason for so many people is you burn them out if they're permanently oncall.

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #52 on:** February 08, 2019, 01:21:16 am »

Quote from: Marco on February 08, 2019, 12:58:58 am

No ... the biggest problem is making it user friendly, secure and amiable to recurring payments.

The last one is perhaps the hardest nut to crack, subcribestar doesn't even try AFAICS ... it's just for one time payments.

Mining pools already give recurring payments as long as the mining software is running.

I have a script to turn a Raspberry Pi and an old Android phone or tablet into a Swagbucks mining machine that uses very little electricity and needs little manual intervention. In my desire to help others who want to support independent content, I have shared the script, but it still requires manual intervention for the mined coins to support the creators. It would be a lot better if that part could be automatic.

Marco · « **Reply #53 on:** February 08, 2019, 01:24:23 am »

Mining is unsustainable, undesirable and fast becoming unprofitable ... even with ASICs. Burning 10x the electricity in cost of the payment you make is hardly an option.

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #54 on:** February 08, 2019, 01:32:58 am »

Quote from: Marco on February 08, 2019, 01:24:23 am

Mining is unsustainable, undesirable and fast becoming unprofitable ... even with ASICs. Burning 10x the electricity in cost of the payment you make is hardly an option.

Energy efficient (and highly ASIC resistant) altcoins are the answer, it's just that so far, nobody has figured out how to make one that's overall good as a currency.

Marco · « **Reply #55 on:** February 08, 2019, 01:37:21 am »

It's not really an answer, because mining in and of itself doesn't confer value to a cryptocurrency ... in fact any real cryptocurrency is worthless for this application, normal people don't want to play speculator just to make transactions. Cryptocurrency is only useful because regulators treat it with kid gloves for the moment, so as I said you should use Gemini.

EEVblog · « **Reply #56 on:** February 08, 2019, 01:54:07 am »

They are "culture" driven
https://patreonhq.com/how-to-build-culture-that-lasts-dc25b086cefd

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #57 on:** February 08, 2019, 02:03:22 am »

Mining does offer a solution for those who want to run some sort of machine at home to support their favorite creators. Maybe an alternative would be some Bittorrent like system that rewards users with points for "seeding" content, which can then be used to support creators. Funding is provided by users who pay, which gives them priority access to downloads, so they get more benefit than with existing systems while offering users who don't want to pay some way to help. The device used to seed with can be a Raspberry Pi or similar, so very little electricity use.

In effect, I just described something that works like a cryptocurrency "mined" using bandwidth, even if the underlying implementation is not based on cryptocurrency.

EEVblog · « **Reply #58 on:** February 08, 2019, 02:13:31 am »

Quote from: NiHaoMike on February 08, 2019, 02:03:22 am

Mining does offer a solution for those who want to run some sort of machine at home to support their favorite creators. Maybe an alternative would be some Bittorrent like system that rewards users with points for "seeding" content, which can then be used to support creators.

Isn't that how Steem is supposed to work?

BTW, I'm earning Like coins for every time someone thumbs up a video, and they don't even know it, I'm going to be filthy rich if they are ever become worth something

(almost certainly won't, but it's kinda fun having millions of an absolutely worthless coin)

james_s · « **Reply #59 on:** February 08, 2019, 04:53:05 am »

Quote from: langwadt on February 06, 2019, 10:03:32 pm

Quote from: Dave on February 06, 2019, 06:16:37 pm
Quote from: langwadt on February 06, 2019, 06:11:04 pm
not matter how you twist it cryptocurrency is a stupid waste, it is like flushing useful resources down the drain to get internet points
Why bother actually looking into it, when you could just repeat the blanket statement that the banker told the news reporter, right?

look into what? wasting energy to make something that has no useful value?

That's been my issue with it as well. Most valuable things you mine have inherent industrial value. Gold, silver, platinum, copper, diamonds, all of these things are highly useful materials. Cryptocurrency is like paper money in the sense that it's only valuable because we assign value to it, except printing paper money is very cheap in comparison. Mining cryptocurrency is like plugging in a bunch of space heaters and setting them outdoors, it's almost criminally wasteful. It's main value is as a speculative investment, people mine or otherwise acquire it in hopes that the value will go up and they can sell it off at the right time to leave someone else holding the bag.

Part of me hopes some revolutionary new computing or mathematics appear and crack the whole thing wide open.

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #60 on:** February 08, 2019, 05:24:06 am »

Quote from: james_s on February 08, 2019, 04:53:05 am

That's been my issue with it as well. Most valuable things you mine have inherent industrial value. Gold, silver, platinum, copper, diamonds, all of these things are highly useful materials. Cryptocurrency is like paper money in the sense that it's only valuable because we assign value to it, except printing paper money is very cheap in comparison. Mining cryptocurrency is like plugging in a bunch of space heaters and setting them outdoors, it's almost criminally wasteful. It's main value is as a speculative investment, people mine or otherwise acquire it in hopes that the value will go up and they can sell it off at the right time to leave someone else holding the bag.

Part of me hopes some revolutionary new computing or mathematics appear and crack the whole thing wide open.

Where would you draw the line for "wasteful" vs "not wasteful"? Using my Swagbucks mining machine that uses 8W as an example, what's the minimum amount it must make per month to be considered not wasteful? $150? $15? $1? What about other energy efficient coins like Curecoin/Foldingcoin where the mining does useful work outside the cryptocurrency system?

In the end, the goal I'm going for is for ways for sharing users to "sell" some sort of resource they have (ideally a "use it or lose it" resource with very low incremental cost like spare bandwidth), but the money they get in return goes to the creators they want to support. (The sharing users can also accept donations, but keep that separate from donations to content creators so that the sharing users won't be parasites.) From the perspective of a paying user, they would support their favorite creators plus what the sharing users are doing to help the community, thus increasing the value of what they're getting for their contribution.

james_s · « **Reply #61 on:** February 08, 2019, 05:33:07 am »

What is the monetary value per watt hour?

I don't see how something that uses 8W is worthwhile, I mean what's stopping someone from building a rack of 100 of those, or a bunch of i7 CPUs running thousands of virtual machines?

The only reason crypto has any value is that it takes a lot of energy to make it. It can be thought of as condensed electricity, except that you can't turn it back into useful electricity. If you can make it with a low cost low power machine then it's not going to be worth much because anybody can make it. If it's cheap and easy to make then it's not worth anything, the value of anything is determined either by its utility or its scarcity.

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #62 on:** February 08, 2019, 05:45:13 am »

Quote from: james_s on February 08, 2019, 05:33:07 am

I don't see how something that uses 8W is worthwhile, I mean what's stopping someone from building a rack of 100 of those, or a bunch of i7 CPUs running thousands of virtual machines?

Only one machine in the rack will actually work if all you have is one IP address. If you're an IT manager in an office with hundreds of machines that each have their own public IP, try deploying hundreds of Swagbucks mining instances and the bandwidth usage will add up enough to greatly affect network performance. If you try to use a VPS hosting site with lots of bandwidth, the pool servers refuse to accept connections from known VPN/VPS IPs.

Berni · « **Reply #63 on:** February 08, 2019, 09:47:54 am »

When you are running IT in a big organization you can run lots of these without issue.

Big places have a dedicated fiber line directly to the towns major internet exchange. These fiber lines are in the order of 100Gbit or more. This means you can fit about 10 000 average residential connections into that pipe. And if you own such a line you also own a IP pool of at least a few 1000s of IPs. So pretty easy to run a few thousand instances on that and still look like its a few thousand households doing it.

One of the places that had such a connection is the university and the high school i went to. The link to the internet is so fast that they didn't even bother to put in any sort of traffic limiting, despite people using torrent all over the place. As long as you found a 1Gbit Ethernet port on a wall you had 1Gbit out to the internet and your own IP and could download torrents pretty much as fast as your hard drive could write data. Im pretty sure you could even obtain multiple WAN IPs if you had a switch plugged into that port.

The internet that big organizations get is FAR from the internet mere mortals get at home.

MT · « **Reply #64 on:** February 08, 2019, 12:56:35 pm »

Fasten your seat belts folks, the change to gold standard has already begun.

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #65 on:** February 08, 2019, 02:08:51 pm »

Quote from: Berni on February 08, 2019, 09:47:54 am

When you are running IT in a big organization you can run lots of these without issue.

Big places have a dedicated fiber line directly to the towns major internet exchange. These fiber lines are in the order of 100Gbit or more. This means you can fit about 10 000 average residential connections into that pipe. And if you own such a line you also own a IP pool of at least a few 1000s of IPs. So pretty easy to run a few thousand instances on that and still look like its a few thousand households doing it.

One of the places that had such a connection is the university and the high school i went to. The link to the internet is so fast that they didn't even bother to put in any sort of traffic limiting, despite people using torrent all over the place. As long as you found a 1Gbit Ethernet port on a wall you had 1Gbit out to the internet and your own IP and could download torrents pretty much as fast as your hard drive could write data. Im pretty sure you could even obtain multiple WAN IPs if you had a switch plugged into that port.

The internet that big organizations get is FAR from the internet mere mortals get at home.

A lot of those super fast connections are lumped into the "VPN/VPS" category and rejected. Finally, the IP that mined the coin is visible to the exchange which gives a last line of defense against Swagbucks becoming dominated by mining businesses. (I wouldn't be surprised if the exchanges and/or pool servers actually use a whitelist of known residential IP ranges.) That's also the biggest downside - the exchange pretty much has complete control over how much the coins are worth.

Keep in mind that Swagbucks has been out there for years and if it could be easily taken over by mining businesses, it would already have been.

Berni · « **Reply #66 on:** February 08, 2019, 02:49:52 pm »

Good luck keeping an eye on all IP ranges all over the globe, especially when you get into IPv6 ranges.

Its also possible that the big guys simply haven't bothered with it cause it doesn't look profitable enough. There are so many different kinds of crypto coins out there these days that its hard to get noticed from the crowd.

The original idea behind cryptocurencies back when bitcoin started out to facilitate payment for goods was good. But now that people started seeing it mostly as a way to make money things got out of hand. Because of that the value of these currencies started going all over the place and that made them terrible for payment of goods as anyone accepting them as payment would need to get rid of them as fast as possible while they still retain the same value unless they want to play the crypto stock market game.

Maybe now that things have calmed down they can once again have a shot at the original goal for facilitating payment of goods and services, but i think the next major instability in crypto prices is just a question of time.

NiHaoMike · « **Reply #67 on:** February 08, 2019, 02:56:05 pm »

Quote from: Berni on February 08, 2019, 02:49:52 pm

Good luck keeping an eye on all IP ranges all over the globe, especially when you get into IPv6 ranges.

Swagbucks is only available in some locations (North America being the biggest) partly for that reason.

13hm13 · « **Reply #68 on:** February 08, 2019, 05:49:12 pm »

Great BLAB Dave -- thx!

About VC funders "strategy" ...

In fact, the unofficial 4-step plan to success in Silicon Valley, is:

Grow fast
Lose money
Go Public
Cash Out

https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/03/11/bro-culture-poisoning-silicon-valley/

Bottom line:
The VCs and CEOs (of startups) walk out with mucho $$.

The workers of the startup are the losers (unless a highly unlikely "unicorn" is produced).

Simon · « **Reply #69 on:** February 10, 2019, 08:39:40 am »

Quote from: johnlsenchak on February 06, 2019, 05:29:37 am

In my opinion, Youtube content creators (not all) have become solely about making money, verses making real good content

You could say the same for some peoples posts.......

Simon · « **Reply #70 on:** February 10, 2019, 08:42:52 am »

Given the armchair head quarters it rather looks like this is jobs for the boys and and expectation that ones desired lifestyle justifies ones salary rather than the other way around.

Taking on investment unnecessarily is about the most stupid move, it means you are selling out before you have anything to sell. This feels like a modelled was followed because they felt it was the "big" thing to do.


EEVblog Main Site	EEVblog on Youtube	EEVblog on Twitter	EEVblog on Facebook	EEVblog on Odysee

Author Topic: eevBLAB #59 - Patreon Is An Unsustainable Business (Read 16247 times)

Share me