$1 a month follow up

I posted about this idea on Threads and I was pleasantly surprised that almost nobody was outright dismissive, especially of the idea that people would pay this small amount. It was even really nice to see a few people deciding to try it out to see what happens.

I also immediately got some hot takes in the replies. The main thrust of those most critical takes were basically this: “At $1 a month, the artist sees basically none of that after platform fees”

I get this. It’s a fair point. But I think it may be the wrong framing (or at least the framing I’d intended), so I have a few thoughts in response:

$1 a month is more a recurring low-stakes tip than a “creator subscription”

I think this got lost in the Threads discourse, but the idea here is to make it easy for someone to support you as an artist/creator with zero strings. If someone is throwing me a buck each month, I’m not doing anything differently or specially for them; they don’t get any exclusive content or extra time from me.

Therefore it is not meant to be like a Patreon subscription, in which I offer exclusive content to subscribers and therefore turning my brain into a weird light content service. I think this is what makes creator subscriptions feel hard for a fan to commit to in light of subscription fatigue.

Instead it’s more akin to a tip than a recurring subscription to a service provided by me the artist. With that in mind, I don’t care so much about the platform fees and think of them more as a cost of reaching people who can tip me globally but can’t tip me in cash. (I do care some obviously, keep reading please!)

I think we as creators also have had our brains wired to think that a $5-10/month creator subscription is simply the only viable way of asking for support on a recurring basis thanks to the size of Patreon and Twitch and the like.

$1 a month is absolutely not for everyone

I treat the $1 a month idea as something to try, which may not make sense to everyone. I especially don’t know that it makes sense for creators doing creation for a living. For me, it was a way to make it easy for people to support me & the side stuff I do, which I have limited time to work on (and a salary which makes my side stuff optional).

But realistically I get that a full time creator may have enough content to justify gating some of it behind a subscription. I can think of countless examples in my own network for whom this might be the case.

Yes, platforms take a cut, but it’s not all your money – it’s at most half

I won’t repeat the math in my previous post.

What I found in the replies, though, is that a LOT of creators, musicians especially, elicit a visceral reaction the minute someone mentions platform fees. I get this to an extent. But it’s also worth reminding ourselves that…

Yes, platforms take a cut, but the internet is amazing and platforms do provide a valuable service connecting otherwise isolated people

Without any of the platforms on which we publish our creative output, we wouldn’t have a way to reach the entire internet connected world. Yes, some platforms are more exploitive than others, and overreach & greed are problems. But they do allow us to expand our audiences. I don’t like Spotify, but I wouldn’t have 150 people listening to my music each month on Spotify (which I still have even for the limited set of singles I left there). I wouldn’t have made the few thousand dollars I’ve made selling my music on Bandcamp and PayPal and Stripe. The 30¢ payment processor cut that makes $1/month seem unfeasible is because the fixed cost associated with processing a credit card transaction online, something that works in seconds and across the globe. That’s amazing! There’s no reason they shouldn’t take that cut.

No, we should not be OK with money going to rent-seeking oligarchs

I don’t want to money that could be mine or hardworking people to billionaires or VCs or their acolytes. I’d much rather that money be kept in the hands of everyday people. Money kept from me and sent to companies run by billionaire CEOs or billionaire VCs investing in those companies is not good for the world.

The fun part about the internet is that many of the platforms we can use to garner support as artists are not run by these people. I talk a lot about the joy of Bandcamp, but they’re not the only players in this space for musicians. Same goes for non-music creators and Patreon.

Buy Me a Coffee and Ko-fi are both independently & profitably run without meaningful outside funding. Yes, they rely on PayPal and/or Stripe to facilitate payments, but again, critical payments infrastructure to connect the world in ways that were previously not possible. Stripe actually exists because PayPal, the prior incumbent internet-based payment software, got complacent and awful and was ripe for disruption; they’ve since made changes to compete with Stripe and other payment providers to be less awful (though still pretty awful).

This should encourage you to find creative ways to avoid the platforms

I was recently inspired by Dave Hawkins to just add Liberapay, Venmo and PayPal links to every Kid Lightbulbs page on the internet. These each address the platform fees problem:

• Liberapay is a global donations platform that doesn’t take a cut. Instead they are themselves donor-supported to keep the platform alive. The only fee taken are Stripe or PayPal’s fees (2.9% + 30¢), resulting artist payout for $1/mo: 67¢/supporter/month
• PayPal and Venmo are peer-to-peer payment services that allow you to pay directly from a bank account. No fee involved if I am willing to wait 1-3 business days to be paid.
• I could also set up Cash App if I wanted, which is the same model.

I’d much rather get 67¢ per dollar in support, or the full dollar someone wants to send me. So I’m going to try this out for a while. It’s worth artists humoring this option as well.