A middleman is completely unnecessary if you don’t need to spend any of your time actually creating anything.
You are right. But I’d like to nuance your comment.
As a zine maker, a small press publisher and a freelance I’m well aware of what kind of compromise you have to make when you have a middleman and what kind of workload you had to yourself by not having one.
I you read this twitter feed I link in my thirst message you will see a lot of alternatives that worth the attention and the discussion :
- A Patreon for the artists made by artists is really appealing to me. And really relevant to the DIY philosophy.
- An open source solution is really interesting too, it’s frustrating to be dependent of platforms like tumblr, instagram or Etsy that can censor or change policies without a warning.
- Many artists and small press publishers are going back to the good old email newsletter.
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If I were to take a guess, the financial geniuses who came up with the scheme would have stuck to their guns, but they suddenly found out that they weren’t the real owners of Patreon after all. Finance attracts a certain person who wants to win points, and is trained to look out after their own interests.
The conventional knowledge is that altruists make for lousy accountants, so that’s why we all feel we need to hire the selfish ones, and hope that we can keep them in check.
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I decided that bailing would hurt the creators I support more than Patreon itself so I decided to stick arround. If thjey had doubled down on the fees I probably would have left.
It would have been hard though. One of the podcasts I listen to is almost unbearable in its ad-supported version.
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The one person i support has a large enough fan base that me leaving would not affect them but supporting what they do and what they stand for means something to me and i did not want to drop my support if i could avoid it. Should it come down to it i would have left Patreon but glad everything got (mostly) resolved.
As are several other platforms the creatives can choose to use, platforms which haven’t hamfistedly done anything to change the established terms between the creators and their patrons.
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As an artist, I already manage a drupal site, which, in spite of the vast array of modules available for it, and my not being a coder, still takes a lot of time off of my schedule. I’m not talking about maintenance (which also can take time), but finding what will work and implementing it in a satisfactory and functional manner.
I find this exhausting. I hate seeing it as a chore—but that’s what it is.
And this is why I do it. Every time we turn around it seems like there’s a new reason to avoid these services unless we’re using them as a stopgap until we can deploy our own (or can afford to launch our own).
Some of us never stopped, but yes, this is useful. There’s also nothing wrong with offering something tangible, too, even if it means a bit of postage.
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Business school teaches that you appear responsive and avoid fueling competition until you have a lock on the market.
I’m a big fan of printed stuff myself, I sell most of it on book and comics festivals, I have very few online orders.
And I mostly support artists by buying zines and other tangible stuff.
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