Life in Patreonia: Inequality in the “creator economy”

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

If you’re like me, you probably contribute to a project on Patreon. You may have even started a project on Patreon yourself, or are considering doing so.

Patreon boasts about its success: “8 million+ monthly active patrons … 250,000+ creators on Patreon … $3.5 billion paid out to creators.” Other sites run articles like “How Much Money Can You Make on Patreon?” and “25 Patreon Statistics You Need to Know.” There’s even a Patreon project devoted to collecting and publishing such statistics on an ongoing basis.

Occasionally you’ll find someone injecting a note of caution, as in a relatively in-depth analysis from five years ago. But the one set of statistics I could never find was about exactly how Patreon earnings were distributed across the whole set of projects, including what typical Patreon projects could expect to earn, and whether there was a straightforward way to characterize that distribution of earnings. So I decided to try doing that myself.

If you’re interested in the gory details, see “Distribution of Earnings Among Patreon Projects Charging by the Month.” The document is CC0-licensed, as is the R code used to create it. However the actual dataset I used (from Graphtreon) is not publicly available; if you want to replicate my work you’ll need to pay for the data yourself. (For what it’s worth, I don’t have a problem with Graphtreon charging for this; it took work to collect this data, and it has commercial value.)

One way to think about Patreon is to think of it as its own country (or state, or province), one with a population of over a hundred thousand. More specifically, Patreon had about 220,000 projects that reported their number of patrons as of December 2022, but only about 130,000 of them reported nonzero earnings from monthly charges. (About 80,000 projects didn’t report their earnings publicly at all, a few thousand charge by the podcast or video, not by the month, and a few hundred reported zero earnings.) Those are the projects I looked at in my analysis.

If Patreon were a country (“Patreonia”) then it would be by far the most unequal country on earth. As you can see in the left graph above, project earnings drop off extremely fast once you go past the top-ranked projects. In fact, the drop-off is so extreme that it’s better visualized using a so-called “log-log” plot, like the right graph above. While the top projects on Patreon earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, the median project (half earn more, half earn less) earns $25 a month, or less than a dollar a day.

This level of inequality is greater than in any country in the world; if you’re familiar with Gini coefficients, the coefficient for “Patreonia” is 0.84, while the country with the highest level of inequality is apparently South Africa, with a coefficient of 0.63. (A Gini value of 0 means income is equally shared, while a value of 1 indicates “perfect inequality” — one person gets all the income, everyone else gets nothing.)

I find it helpful to consider “Patreonia” as consisting of four separate groups of projects, each ten times larger than the last; together these four subsets account for almost all of the projects that I had valid data for. You can think of them as communities of different sizes and economic circumstances.

Patreon Heights

The first group, the “0.1%” of “Patreonia,” consists of the top 100 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in “Patreon Heights” had almost 3,900 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of almost $25,000, or about $300,000 a year. This corresponds to an especially affluent neighborhood in an especially affluent county in the US, like Loudoun County, Virginia, which has a median household income of around $150,000, the highest of any US county.

Patreon Grove

The second group, the “1%” of “Patreonia,” consists of the next 1,000 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in “Patreon Grove” had almost 800 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of about $4,200, or about $50,400 a year. This is well under the current median household income in the US, which is about $70,000. A US county with a comparable median household income and population is Crockett County, Texas, a rural county in the western part of the state.

Patreonville

The third group consists of the next 10,000 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in “Patreonville” had just over 100 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of about $650, or about $7,800 a year. This is well below the US Federal poverty line of $12,880 for a single-person household, and is lower than the median household income for any county in the US, even lower than that for Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, the poorest jurisdiction for which the US Census Bureau has data. (The median household income for Adjuntas is around $12,000 a year.)

The rest of Patreonia

The fourth and final group consists of the next 100,000 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in the rest of “Patreonia” had 5 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of about $28, or about $340 a year. This is comparable to incomes in the poorest countries on Earth, places like Somalia, Uzbekistan, or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Patreon and the “creator economy”

At this point you might say to me, “Frank, these are really stupid comparisons. You can’t compare someone running a side gig on Patreon to a person eking out a meager living in the world’s poorest countries.” And you’re right, but: Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans, and similar services are pitched to “creators” as a way to earn at least a partial living by “monetizing” their “content.”

Not a month goes by without another blog post, news story, or website heralding the “creator economy.” It’s attracting the attention of venture capitalists, who’ve funded a host of startups, all eager to help you realize your dreams as an artist, writer, musician, filmmaker, game designer, or “influencer,” in return for just a few percent off the top.

But the reality? Not so rosy. What I’ve tried to do is to put some more numbers behind that assertion.

P.S. to math-savvy web developers: If you’d like to put together a different kind of “how much money can you make on Patreon?” calculator, it’s pretty easy to calculate the odds of a project earning more than a given amount of money on Patreon. Patreon earnings for the month I analyzed were best fit by a log-normal distribution with μ of 3.33 and σ of 1.84. So to estimate the probability of earning more than x dollars, you can plug x into the formula for the log-normal cumulative distribution function (you’ll need the erf() function for this), and then subtract the result from 1. For example, the probability of earning more than $100 a month is 0.24, or about 1 in 4, while the probability of earning more than $1,000 a month is 0.026, or less than 3 percent.

@Janet (@Janet) - 2023-01-21 11:05

messed up.

but you dont even have to go online. same goes for GEMA in germany. thats the state org handling musical rights, only a few percent of artists (mostly song writers and producers) earn anything at all. if you are a tiny band, there is no way you will ever get money from GEMA, yet any music made will automatically be handled by GEMA, except in case you find another org, but GEMA had a monopoly so you were sool. Some years ago another such org was founded just so you wouldnt have to deal with GEMA anymore… ah but im not really in the know, i only read about it when the new org C3S was founded

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 12:38

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I believe the US has the same system for music, a duopoly between ASCAP and BMI.

june (@junelinked) - 2023-01-22 05:54

a little different; ASCAP/BMI are performance rights only (and do have some small, private, for-profit competitors - notably SESAC) whereas GEMA is an integrated CMO (mechanical + performance), and actually has more restrictive assignment provisions at least in part since ASCAP/BMI are under consent decrees. the market dynamics end up similar though, small writers are lucky to make enough to hit the payout threshold

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-22 11:52

Thank you for correcting me!

jeroknite (@jeroknite) - 2023-01-21 13:46

… Of course the poorest place in the US is in Puerto Rico :c

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 14:15

Thanks for the comment! I was curious about this, and checked the median household income statistics on Wikipedia. The 40 poorest jurisdictions in the US and its territories are in Puerto Rico, as are 58 of the 60 poorest.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 14:20

is there large variance in the size of patreon projects (≈ number of people involved)? If we account for this by, say, dividing earnings by number of people, do the graphs seriously change?

(My first reaction to the graph was that ”this makes sense; the large projects get the most funding but also have to pay out to more people”. But actually I have no clue what the distribution of project sizes on patreon looks like, nor if size correlates with earnings)

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 14:32

Say we very generously assume that all Patreon Heights projects are run by 100 people, Patreon Grove projects by 10, Patreonville projects by 1, and that the rest of Patreonia consist of abandoned projects that people forgot to unsubscribe from.

Then in Patreon Heights we have median income per person per month of $250; in Patreon Grove we get $420; and in Patreonville we get $650

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 15:53

You can find a list of the highest-earning Patreon projects at https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-earners. You can check them out yourself (I haven’t), I suspect that the highest-earning projects aren’t run by anywhere near 100 people.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 22:07

Hmm, yeah. Looks like at least the top few are mostly podcasts featuring a handful of people. Presumably they employ editors and publicizers, etc, but I would be shocked if any number was approaching 100

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 22:19

A four-host podcast making almost $200k a MONTH is absolutely bonkers; holy shit

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 15:49

Thanks for commenting! I cover some of this in the detailed document I linked to, in the section ”How are earnings and the number of patrons related?”; I’m not sure if you’ve had the chance to look at that or not. The short answer is that mean earnings per patron was $6.83 (with a standard deviation of $12.01), and the median earnings per patron was $4.50. Only 15% of projects have earnings per patron over $10, and very few have earnings per patron over $20.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 22:18

Ah, I had missed that link; sorry! (That is a very nice analysis)

I think I phrased my question poorly. I’m not interested in earnings versus number of patreons, but versus number of creators. Looking at Graphtreon, seems like this data isn’t available? I guess if it’s not something Patreon asks for people to self-report on, then it’s not really possible to generate in bulk.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-22 00:30

To my knowledge there’s no source of data on the number of people per Patreon project. That’s why I was careful to refer to ”projects” not ”creators”.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-01-21 21:44

Im not sure how related this is, but this reminds me of an experiment a music site did where they released two beta versions: One where you could see the number of views a song got, and one where you couldnt. The one where you could see the views, completely random songs would get a snowball effect of views and people would be really into them, but those songs were not significant at all on the other.

I feel like that sort of ”attention economy snowballing” is a key part of disproportionate success dynamics like this.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-22 00:32

A very good comment, thank you for foreshadowing some of what I hope to be able to write about in future.

㋬Zen1th (@zenith391) - 2023-01-23 16:16

That’s very true, and it’s also why I like cohost. You can’t see like counts or follow numbers which brings us closer to the version where ’we can’t see the number of views’. I might be following complete nobodies or the most popular account here, I can’t tell the difference.

Pat (@tekgo) - 2023-01-23 16:29

As you noted in the caveats a number of projects with high patron counts don’t report earnings. Looking at the Graphtreon top projects list only 14 of 50 report their earnings. I’m curious if you graph all the projects by number of patrons(that report that data) does it have a similar distribution to the earnings rank graphs?

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-23 16:59

Thanks for commenting! Yes, the distribution of number of patrons per project has a similar sharp drop-off once you get past the top 100, 1000, etc. I actually did an analysis of this as well, but the analysis document was getting really long and I decided to focus primarily on earnings. I may do a separate document discussing the number of patrons vs. rank in number of patrons. I’m going to guess that it follows a log-normal distribution too.

exodrifter (@exodrifter) - 2023-01-24 02:35

I have a lot of complicated feelings about the ”creator economy” and this is part of it. Many of the people I know that participate only do it on the side for fun and use the extra income to afford a few things relevant to the creative pursuit they are doing for fun. And although we are small, we also like to support each other, but every time money changes hands, the platform takes a cut…

Meanwhile, I would like to work full time on my creative pursuits, but it’s hard to imagine how that would work given the slim odds. I don’t really think I’m trying to say anything in particular here, it’s just difficult for me to think about.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-24 19:28

Thanks for commenting! To repeat what I wrote earlier, I am not trying to discourage people who want to supplement their income via Patreon or similar services. My main target was/is VCs and startups that are pushing services like this as the answer for people who want to support themselves full-time (or nearly so) as artists.

Censa (@censa) - 2023-01-29 23:23

huh this was really interesting. Thank you for sharing your findings!