I really just wanted to contribute to this thread to talk about people’s dependence on Patreon.
Most of the people who everyone talks about who are making big amounts of money on there are early adopters; they had big followings and were usually quick to jump into Patreon. They’ve usually been using the platform for a couple years. What happens when everyone sees these outliers and decide they need a Patreon too because of that small percentage of people making big chunks of money every month and the market has become extremely saturated. That means it’s even harder for ANYBODY to make money, but the outliers are still there making it look to newcomers like its an extremely viable solution when the truth is everyday its just going to be harder and harder to make money on it because people there are too many options and people can’t support every artist.
It’s now at the point where I have pals who have huge followings (in the hundreds of thousands) who at most can only make $40 a month on Patreon because the market is so insanely saturated. They’re planning out how they use their platforms well and it doesn’t seem to be an issue of quality or poor planning or bad tier rewards; its just market saturation. And especially with how unstable websites like this are (there’s no social media site that is going to last forever in the same way as it had in its peak and everything gets replaced by newer, better options), it’s dangerous to think that ONE platform is the way to make your living. Patreon isn’t going to last forever and it’s always always always EXTREMELY hard to get folks to switch platforms for you. Like how when people decide to make new Instagram accounts for whatever reason; they always lose a significant chunk of followers.
That’s not to say that everyone should stop using it. Or that you won’t make some significant amount of money but it is to say that it is a LOT harder and a lot more unlikely. I’m also just here to say DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET.
I also have a bit of an unpopular opinion about working for free as an artist or a writer. I think you have to grind a bit before people start giving you money for your work. I think it’s fine for beginner comic creators to partner up with people w/o expecting pay if at the very least you stipulate that you split any future potential profits. But everyone, in some capacity, has to “work for free” to start. People make comics and create artwork for themselves and people write stories they put online for free and that’s just part of the process. It is tricky though because it’s hard for people to want to take up a kind of partnership like that with some random person on the internet. Which is why so many writer/artist duos are usually real life pals or partners.
Also, most social media has something in their TOS that people confuse for claiming ownership of your work but it's actually just them having the right to, if for example you become a really big content creator, they can use you to try and draw other people in by saying "Hey, look! [Blank] uses Patreon so you should too!" But they do not own the rights to your work in the way people think.
