If you’ve been on YouTube for any length of time over the past few months, you’ll know that there have been many changes that have resulted in advertiser revenue dropping, and a good number of creators are scrambling to find ways of making up that revenue. For quite a number of them, Patreon has been a life saver, and others are working with sponsors, or creating merchandise such as t-shirts that can be sold in support of the artist.
While I applaud the resourcefulness of artists in terms of getting paid for their work, I’m also noticing a trend toward focusing effort away from the work of creation and towards the work of revenue generation. Certainly, the two must go hand-in-hand, as making a living from your creativity has to involve an exchange of money in one way or another for the work that’s being consumed. Viewers and other consumers of any sort of online art have been spoiled, in a way, by the availability of advertising money based on number of views. With that income model now being disrupted (for a short time or permanently, it’s too soon to tell), artists have to find ways of underscoring the fact that making art takes time, effort, and resources that do not come cheaply.
However, more often than not, I’m seeing creators asking their viewers to support financially in general, rather than supporting the work that they make. Patreon, especially, makes this blurring of financial lines very easy to do. Artists have a choice of charging per work created (by the story, the painting, or in the case of YouTube, by the video) or monthly. Most of the artists I’ve seen on Patreon choose the monthly option.
While I may be an outlier, I have now pledged a monthly fee for many artists who, after building a patron base, stopped creating work at all. With the impetus to upload videos for ad revenue gone, it seems that they’re able to satiate their audience’s need for interaction via Patreon blog updates. This is all well and good for the artists (and those patrons who are happy with such an interaction), but does it change the model of Patreon from a way to support artists via scheduled micropayments to more of a begging platform, such as GoFundMe?
The larger question about the current economy, and especially the economy’s ability or willingness to pay creative folks their worth, is too large for this blog post. However, I wonder how many other viewers on YouTube are impatiently waiting through the tales of woe that precede the video content they subscribed to? And how much of that falls into the “relationship between viewer and content creator” that is the backbone of YouTube and how much of it is going to turn people away from the platform in the coming months?
Eventually, a saturation point is going to be reached between creators and viewers, and micropayments on a one-to-one basis between the two won’t be sustainable for the average viewer or the average creator. At that point, who should be expected to get paid? Those who are creating the most resonating art works, or those with the most compelling personal financial tales of woe?
