Patreon – Another Form of Crowd Funding

Recently, I’ve been rather intrigued by a site called Patreon.  The site, like with IndieGoGo and KickStarter, are intended to crowd fund, only Patreon works on a smaller scale.  Patreon is intended for content creators like web comic artists, musicians, writers, etc that create regular content.  Patrons, the content consumers, pay either per piece or per month, depending on how the content creator set up their page.  Like I said, I was intrigued and it seems rather promising.

So, I made myself a Patreon page.  The setup process was fairly simple, relatively easy to understand, but I felt it was decidedly lacking in “How To’s”  I found an FAQ, but that didn’t answer my questions entirely.  For the most part, the site seems to be pretty straight forward, though I did have a challenge with one of my “creations.”  When I tried to add an attachment to a creation, I ended up with this weird page with nothing on it.  I’ve emailed Patreon, and hopefully they can tell me what I did wrong.

As for finding desired content, I feel like their search and discovery capabilities are rather lacking.  For example, when I typed in “paranormal writer” I got no results, even though I am a writer, and paranormal is listed in my description as one of my genres.  I honestly have no idea how to look specifically for specific types of content.  For example, if I was looking for paranormal stories.  That I can see, there is no way to include metadata or search keywords for your content, making it easier for patrons to connect with the type of content they are looking for.  It seems Patreon is intended almost exclusively for helping content creators with a base of loyal fans collect from said loyal fans with likely little in the way of expanding that base of fans on Patreon.

Still, I think as a means of funding content creators, it has promise, and we’ll see how my impression of the site changes in the future as I play around with it.