Frank Hecker

Note to stats nerds: I too have read Clauset, et al., and am well aware that many things claimed to follow a power law actually do not. (For example, this appears to be true for Patreon earnings.) But “I fought the log-normal distribution and the log-normal distribution won” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

If you happen to listen to "Discover Weekly" on Spotify (as I do), or regularly check out musicians on Bandcamp (as I also do) then from time to time you may have thought to yourself, “Wow, this is really good! Why haven’t I ever heard of them?” Apparently there are more musicians with real talent than there are popular and successful musicians, and sometimes the most talented are not necessarily the most successful.

This experience is not confined to music, but applies to other areas as well. For example, I suspect that hidden in the lower half of Patreon projects by number of patrons there are writers and artists whose work is as worthy as that of those who occupy the top 100 places.

Why should this be? That’s the key question for today’s post. It’s a very political question, in that proposed answers are often used to justify existing distributions of fame and wealth, or alternately to deny those justifications. I’m still exploring this general topic, so you can consider this just one take on the subject, with others possibly to follow in future posts. (WARNING: This will be a bit long.)

(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.