Mr Samuel Streamer

Potentially Moving Platform Again (I know.)

Added 2020-10-01 03:33:59 +0000 UTC

Hello survivors of the Patreon swap, you can feel really smug reading this:

Attached to this is a video where I give an outline of the situation and some general thoughts, but now I’ve had some time to consider things I wanted to discuss things in written form where I can give things a clear and concise outline - minus the rambling.

To give an extremely brief overview immediately and explain what this is all about: I’m considering jumping back from Ko-Fi to Patreon, but before anything goes ahead, I want your opinions and feedback on that. The simple reason is that all the problems that Patreon had, like taxes added to pledges and not having my local currency, are gone, so now we just have Ko-Fi which is an inconvenient and problematic crowdfunding method that we’re getting no benefit out of.

The following text is *quite* long. I’ve tried to put a lot of thought into it and I think I’ve covered all grounds. There is a strawpoll at the bottom of the post and I’ll be monitoring all comment sections wherever I post this and discussing things further on Discord. I would prefer no direct general PMs about this because I want everything to be out in the open (and I get a huge amount already) but I’m happy to answer personal pledge questions in DMs. Discussions will be had in the #supporters-general-chat channel on discord!

You’re probably wondering ‘Didn’t you give a very heartfelt and convincing speech on why we should leave Patreon for Ko‑fi only two months ago?’ and honestly, yes, yes I did. Let me reiterate some of the things I said during that video/post on why Ko‑fi was a better website for us.

A) Ko-Fi allows me to withdraw in GBP, which means each pledge only has to go through a maximum of one currency conversion per transaction. Patreon, when subscribing converted the currency to USD (if you were outside the US) then it was converted back when it was sent to me, meaning Paypal takes a significant chunk of cash as conversion. That meant if someone from the UK (approximately 25% of the audience) backed me on Patreon it would be converted from GBP to USD, then back from USD to GBP.

B) Patreon added an inclusive tax on pledges. Therefore a $15 pledge on the page appeared as a $16.05 pledge (for example) which could be incredibly misleading to those who aren’t familiar with how Patreon operates. When coupled with the previous point, this meant those outside of the US were being double screwed on their pledge.

Those were the two major points on why I swapped platforms.

To be clear, there was no monetary reason for swapping over - I wasn’t upset about missing out on approximately 7% of pledge totals, I accepted that as a cost of doing business. What I was annoyed about was that the 7% was being leveraged against you guys, upfront, somewhat nebulously, and that there was a good chunk going to PayPal for the purposes of changing numbers into other numbers.

There were several other reasons as well, like Discord roles becoming inactive on occasion, and some Patreon features going unused.

So what has changed to make me think of swapping back?

Well, to be honest, both of those points are now irrelevant. On the 16th of this month, Patreon announced a reversal of the tax added to the pledge. We received this following email essentially saying that the changes had been fully reverted and no action was needed:

https://i.imgur.com/F9lCeaT.png

Then on the 30th of September Patreon announced that they now support currencies other than the USD, specifically the currency I want to use - GBP. They specifically call attention to the currency conversion fees in the email below:

https://i.imgur.com/drlRISr.png

The other point I mentioned is that Patreon takes a cut of all pledges, whereas Ko-Fi is a one-off yearly subscription. What I didn’t realise at the time, during testing, is that Paypal takes a small cut of monthly donations as a handling fee - which was still far better than Patreon AND Paypal taking a double cut on the Patreon platform, that was until this morning with the currency changes implemented by Patreon.

So with these changes taken into account, Ko-Fi and Patreon are now identical in how they handle money; both use my local currency, and both have the same service fee per pledge.

To be clear, this isn’t me trying to convince you all that a move back to Patreon is the right move. I know what I would like to do, but I am not always right, far from it, and what I want is irrelevant when it comes to a crowd-funded website. Let’s be extremely cold and calculated here and say that from a business perspective a move back to Patreon is, without question, going to cause bad faith amongst a lot of people who swapped over platforms when asked and inconvenienced themselves, and some will not follow over. Secondly, moving from somewhere and then back to it has essentially stifled all growth that it would have had in those two months. There isn’t an easy answer.

Now we have to look at both services and ask ourselves which website is better both for you guys supporting me and for myself as the content creator - forgetting all monetary side effects. To put it bluntly, Ko-Fi does not compare to Patreon at all in that regard. Let me give some clear pros and cons, with your feedback included over the past two months of Ko-Fi.

To start off with; actual features. I’ll be blunt when I say that Ko-Fi offers absolutely nothing that Patreon doesn’t have, but that is the point of Ko-Fi. It is supposed to be a very simple, straight forward, and clean way to connect you with a creator. All Ko-Fi is there for is to initiate the handshake.

So I’ll list things Patreon has that Ko-Fi does not, seeing that vice-versa is not applicable:

- Message Center: You can directly message me independently of Discord, which I know a lot don’t have, and I already receive upwards of 50 DMs on discord, so I might be slow to respond. The closest Ko-Fi offers is the ability to leave a message on a donation but paying per message is not convenient. I can also create big group messages on Patreon for polls, feedback forms, or general announcements.

- Pledge Manager: The biggest complaint I received with Ko-Fi is the lack of a pledge manager. With Patreon, you can see your pledge, reduce or increase it, or cancel it altogether and Patreon will handle it. With Ko-Fi you have to go to your active Paypal subscriptions and cancel the payment and make an entirely new one if you want to adjust.

- Tiers and Rewards: Probably the biggest headache for me was working out a similar method to Patreon tracking rewards and tiers. The method I created myself and only briefly trialled was a tremendous failure and didn’t work at all. Some of the responses I received were incorrect, in the wrong order, or people confusing tiers.

- Dynamically Updated Supporter Lists: This is, personally, my biggest want for moving back platforms. Ko-Fi does not have a dynamic list of active subscribers. All it has are people who pledged in a particular month. A bit useless for people who pledge mid-way through a month, or for payments that are declined, or for one-off payments. That, coupled with no way to get in contact with me, is a disaster when it comes to the shoutout lists, I now have to juggle four separate name lists and compare everything manually.

- Discord Backer Roles: This one I’m quite annoyed with Ko-Fi for, they advertised Discord role integration as a feature that was ‘coming soon’ on an article from August 2019 with still no Discord role integration, this means that the Discord moderators, who very generously offer their time for free to help manage the server, and myself have to manually give out rolls and had to prevent all of the supporter rolls being removed automatically.

The only other point of note, which for me is one of the other big reasons for swapping, is that Ko-Fi, or potentially Paypal in this situation but is still relevant either way, lost some pledges at the start of this month. This could honestly be for a multitude of reasons - declined payments, fraud alerts, mobile confirmation, etc. Call me overdramatic, but a pledging platform that fails to actually process pledges is entirely useless.

Thor (the Discord mod, not the god of thunder) messaged me about it initially with several others confirming it as well. To clarify, Patreon has done this in the past, however, Patreon notifies both me and the pledger, Ko-Fi obviously does not handle transactions so I had no idea, I just assumed I said something offensive in a video.

Now for some personal perspective:

With that taken into account, I have to ask myself is the loss of goodwill, and the lost supporters along the way, worth transferring back platforms?

I could definitely continue on with Ko-Fi in its current form no question, but it’s getting to the point that if I want to do it right, and to the extent I’m happy with, it’s becoming too much of a stretch.
I now have to manually keep track of all supporters, their pledges in case of another batch of failures, their discord rank, and their names for shoutouts and characters.

That, coupled with the workload I have currently, and tax season coming up in December, and moving house again in November, has basically pushed me into overdrive with the stuff I have to keep track of. As of this morning with the Patreon changes, there are also no benefits for you guys in exchange for all the extra workload, I’m quickly wondering what’s the point of sticking with Ko-Fi.

Again, in the interests of transparency - Youtube has been ramming every video with ads, I’m putting out 5 videos a day this week, plus the occasional Twitch stream, and we’re just coming down from the CK3 high, but still riding it; I can pay my rent this month no problem. This is not a financial move, the Patreon and Ko-Fi amounts are always visible and will always remain that way.

The only concern I have here is the loss of goodwill among the community. That’s it. A move over will make your lives a lot easier, and mine even easier, but it would also be significantly easier for you all to cancel your pledge and move onto a different channel.
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So, with that all being said let’s discuss hypothetically what would happen if we switched, having learnt from last time.

1) The move over would be announced before the 3rd of this month. The simple reason for that is that 80% of the Ko-Fi pledges are between the 3rd and the 7th of each month because we opened the Ko-Fi page on the 3rd of August. This means that almost all of you can cancel your pledges before another month is taken.

2) The Patreon page will not be reopened before the 1st of November for two reasons. Firstly that means those of you who happen to have pledged later in the month will still get a minimum of 28 days of ‘supporter’ time. Secondly Patreon charges at the start of each month, this means that you’re guaranteed to get an entire month before the next pledge. This, I believe, is absolutely the fairest and right thing to do here. Sure I might lose a few extra supporters who forget but I don’t want people doubling up pledges like last time, especially for a move back. Generous, but I’d feel guilty.

3) Ko-Fi would remain open for those who do not like or cannot use, Patreon. This is simply because the Ko-Fi page has gold membership and it would be a massive waste not to use it. The Ko-Fi page from that point on will be essentially completely unmonitored, I won’t be making posts, checking it, or updating it at all except to thank people in response for supporting it. I will make it abundantly clear that the Ko-Fi page is simply for those who want to support the channel but don’t care about rewards like shout outs or character names. Some RARE exceptions will be made to this rule if the pledge was made without realising.

So, in conclusion, I am going to be collecting all the feedback from the comments on this post (both Ko-Fi and Patreon), along with discussing everything in Discord and going into more detail where necessary.

I have also created a strawpoll with a few options where you can quickly and easily leave your opinion without talking with strangers if you’d prefer: https://www.strawpoll.me/21027569

Overall, thank you for your time, and apologies about confusing the situation once again so soon after the previous platform transfer, but hopefully I’ve made a convincing argument why this has been on my mind recently, and I look forward to reading your responses!

Tales of your misdeeds are told from Cock Excellente to Dr Don, MD,

Sam

Mr Streamer
Roll1D2

Times Magazines’ Businessman of the Year 2020