Patreon: the website to become a patron of the arts

Patreon: the website to become a patron of the arts

Launched at the beginning of May 2013, Jack Conte's Patreon website is an interesting twist on the crowdsourcing/crowdfunding trend. The website, indeed, works allowing fans to donate 1 dollar (or more, if they want) for every song or video an artist produces: so, if the artist creates six videos a year, a fan donating $1 per work would give $6 a year. Obviously fans pay nothing if the artist does not release any works.
As with Kickstarter or PledgeMusic, higher dollar contributions get patrons more benefits (the basic one is access to the new music/video they helped to finance).

"On the Internet, it’s not just content that’s king", said Conte, who launched Patreon on Tuesday May 7 with Sam Yam, a former roommate from Stanford University and co-founder of AdWhirl, a company that was sold to AdMob in 2009. "It’s regular content. But models like Kickstarter don’t work for regular content. And the advertising you earn on YouTube is nice, but it doesn’t seem to assign the appropriate value for the amount of work and passion that goes into certain types of content".