Patreon crosses $10 billion creator payment milestone

Creators on Patreon have received more than $10 billion in payments from fans since the company was founded in 2013, CEO and co-founder Jack Conte tells Axios.

Why it matters: With more than 25 million paid memberships on the platform, Patreon has proven itself essential to the growth of the modern creator economy, says Conte.

• Today, more than $2 billion flows to creators annually on the platform, Conte says.

Zoom out: When Patreon launched in 2013, it focused mainly on facilitating payments between creator-fan relationships that were mostly built on other platforms.

• Today, it offers new tools and products to help creators build and grow their audiences on Patreon.
• Patreon’s iOS app is now the company’s top platform for fan engagement, a spokesperson said.

State of play: This year, Patreon released a slew of new podcast tools, including multishow management, RSS mirroring and syncing. It’s currently testing a new feature to allow creators to upload ad-free live video to the platform directly.

• “What we’re seeing in creators is that, just like media companies, they’re multi-hyphenate,” Conte says. “That multimedia multi-hyphenate approach works really well on Patreon’s infrastructure, because we’ve spent 10 years building horizontally across categories.”
• Last year, Patreon creators were paid $472 million on podcasts alone, and fans watched over 80 million hours of video on the platform.

Between the lines: For years, Patreon was focused solely on paid subscriptions. In 2023, it expanded to allow creators to offer free memberships to fans to broaden their audience of potential subscribers.

• That shift, combined with its product investments, has helped grow the number of paid subscribers on the platform significantly, Conte says.
• Today, there are over 100 million free memberships on the platform, per Conte, with more than 700,000 members converting from free tiers to paid per month.

Follow the money: Patreon is still privately held, and Conte says he has no plans right now to take the company public.

• The firm, which has raised more than $400 million to date, was most recently valued at over at $4 billion in 2021.
• In recent years, Patreon has acquired companies to help it expand into new business areas.
• It bought Moment, a livestream platform for events and ticketed experiences, in 2023; Subbable, a subscription-based funding site for artists, in 2015; and Kit, a platform that helps creators bundle merchandise with their subscriptions, and Memberful, a subscription membership platform, in 2018.

The big picture: With AI-driven content flooding social media feeds, creators are increasingly turning to third-party platforms that allow them to more easily build direct paid relationships with fans.

• Substack, which says it has more than 5 million paid subscriptions on the platform, recently raised $100 million, putting its valuation at over $1.1 billion.

The bottom line: “I’ve never been more optimistic than I am now,” says Conte, who started out as a creator himself.

• “In terms of being a creative person, having control, having leverage, getting to keep your IP [intellectual property], getting to keep your copyright and building a business around what you love and what you’re passionate about — this is the best time in the history of humanity to do that.”