Hugo Stewart
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

I find that Patreon will never be able to be a catch all solution. For example how are small up and coming creators supposed to build the depth of fanbase to make crowd funding viable? It is a real chicken and egg situation and for people like that bigger companies able to see potential and inject some small dollars (in the scale of a company) can go a lot further than a few dollars a month trickling in through patreon.

I feel crowd funding content only works if (a) the audience is so large that there is bound to be a large demographic with disposable income. Think Sam Harris. or (b) there is content that is so tailored to a single demographic that it gets a core fanbase so intensely invested that they can support it even without numbers. Think a lot of projects like Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog before it was huge. But if you fall outside these two categories (like so many up and comers do) the crowd funding is only one option.

So where I am heading with this line of reasoning is that while crowd funding works within limits I am hugely skeptical of it being the solution to the problem presented.

Rather than engaging in the full essay that I could write about this issue I shall just present the rather intuitive, if unsatisfying, solution that it will have to be mix of all of the options. There is no single solution that solves everything — advertising can be fantastic (in fact i would argue has largely been fantastic) but it obviously has flaws that have been discussed at length. Crowdfunding works for some and leaves others in the dust. There may be other options that no one has even thought of to solve this problem and that could become a major player. The issue that Reilly so eloquently presents is one of huge disbalance and misguided incentives — we need to reestablish a balance. But any argument that tries to present a silver bullet rather than a combination of solutions I find flawed from the outset.

<P.S> Also a massive fan of Sam Harris. Some of the most engaging interviews I have heard in a long time even if there are times where my philosophical tendencies diverge from Harris’s.

    Hugo Stewart

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