Top 20 Crowdfunding Sites – Patreon – 3/20

Patreon

230 9th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

Patreon is an Internet-based platform that allows content creators to build their own subscription content service. It is popular among YouTube content creators, webcomic artists, writers, podcasters, musicians, and other categories of creators who post regularly online. It allows artists to receive funding directly from their fans, or patrons, on a recurring basis or per work of art.The company, started by musician Jack Conte and developer Sam Yam in 2013, is based in San Francisco.

History

Patreon was founded in May 2013 by artist Jack Conte who was looking for a way to make a living from his popular YouTube videos. Together with Sam Yam he developed a platform that allows patrons to pay a set amount of money every time an artist creates a work of art. The company raised $2.1 million in August 2013 from a group of venture capitalists and angel investors.In June 2014 the company raised a further $15,000,000 in a series A round led by Danny Rimer of Index Ventures.In January 2016, the company closed on a fresh round of $30 million in a series B round, led by Thrive Capital which puts the total raised for Patreon at $47.1 million.

The company signed up more than 125,000 “patrons” in its first 18 months. In late 2014, the website announced that patrons were sending over $1,000,000 per month to the site’s content creators.

In March 2015, Patreon acquired Subbable, a similar voluntary subscription service created by the Green brothers, John and Hank Green, and brought over Subbable creators and contents, including CGP Grey, Destin Sandlin’s Smarter Every Day and the Green brothers’ own CrashCourse and SciShow channels. The merger was consequent of an expected migration of payment systems with Amazon Payments that Subbable used.

In October 2015, the site was the target of a large cyber-attack, with almost fifteen gigabytes’ worth of password data, donation records, and source code taken and published. The breach exposed more than 2.3 million unique e-mail addresses and millions of private messages. Following the attack, some patrons received extortion emails demanding Bitcoin payments in exchange for the protection of their personal information.

In July 2016, Patreon sent out an email to its users, announcing changes for its more adult-oriented creators. Notably, content creators working under the “NSFW” Not Safe For Work categories on Patreon can now accept payments through PayPal via PayPal’s subsidiary Braintree. This move now allows Adult Content creators on Patreon to accept payment more easily. Before these creators could only accept payments through credit cards.

In January 2017, Patreon announced that it had sent over $100,000,000 to creators since its inception.