Frank Hecker

This is another brief follow-up to my “Life in Patreonia” post, based on this analysis. It can be summed up as follows: there is no significant correlation between the number of patrons of a Patreon project and the earnings per patron, although the earnings per patron does decline very slightly as projects become more popular.

The numbers: across almost 130,000 projects reporting nonzero earnings from monthly charges in December 2022, average earnings per patron was $6.83 and median earnings per patron was $4.50. Fitting a simple linear model predicts that each additional patron is worth $3.98. There’s a fair amount of variability, though: one project earned less than a penny per patron, while another earned over a thousand dollars from just one patron. (As you might have guessed, it was an NFSW project.)

I also looked into the (in)famous Kevin Kelly claim that creators aiming to make a living in the Internet age just need to find “1,000 true fans” willing to pony up $100 or more per year. How’s that working out for Patreon projects?

Only 31 Patreon projects (about 0.02% of all projects with nonzero monthly earnings) met the specific criteria of having 1,000 or more patrons and per patron earnings of $100 or more per year (assuming December 2022 earnings were representative). If we use the looser criterion of earning $100,000 or more per year (regardless of the number of patrons), 238 projects met that, about 0.18% of all projects with nonzero monthly earnings in December 2022. I think finding 1,000 “true fans” is a lot harder than Kelly thought.

(My apologies, I couldn’t think of a clever headline for this.) In a comment on my “Life in Patreonia” post, @tekgo asked whether the number of patrons of Patreon projects was distributed in a similar way to the earnings for Patreon projects.

The short answer is “yes, it is.” The long answer is here. The in-between answer is that in the sample of about 218,000 projects, the number of patrons per project appears to have a log-normal distribution (like earnings), with a median number of 6 patrons per project. The chances of having more than 10 patrons is about 40%, the chances of having more than 100 is less than 10%, and the chances of having more than 1,000 is less than 1%.

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.