Patreon, the membership platform that provides business tools for content creators to run a subscription service, it also helps creators and artists earn a monthly income by providing rewards and perks to their subscribers.
According to the company’s CEO and co-founder Jack Conte and Chief Product Officer Julian Gutman the platform is exploring options crypto as a way for creators to make money.
“There’s clearly enormous innovation happening in the crypto and NFT space,” Gutman said. “Obviously there’s the art market and precious goods market that we’re seeing, with crazy pricing, evolve. It’s unclear if that is sustainable across the entire creator economy, but there’s some fundamental technological components to NFTs as a way to sell value to your audience and sort of continue to gain value from that from secondary sales as what you do becomes more and more important to the world.”
The crypto and NTFs or Non Fungible Tokens space offers unlimited opportunities for independent creators.
“We’re right now not talking about creating any type of initial coin offering, which is specifically not allowed under Patreon’s current guidelines,” Laurent Crenshaw, Patreon’s head of Policy, had said on the Patreon Connect livestream.
“But we’ve heard from a number of creators who have been interested in the opportunity to offer exclusive memberships and benefits to their patrons through a coin or token, a digital item that they can hold onto that shows that they are part of your fan club. And so we thought that at the very least, we could explore the opportunity of making that type of offering allowable under our guidelines.”
According to TechCrunch, while Patreon allows creators to share personal investment stories or advice, its guidelines currently prohibit coins for the purpose of the direct financial benefit for a creator or patron, coins offered as part of an investment scheme, or any explicit incentives to purchase or obtain cryptocurrency. But if creators were to express interest in offering creator coins, Patreon would consider changing these policies.
“One thing that I think Patreon has always been committed to at its core is making sure that we’re creating a sustainable, long-term path for creators, right? It’s not just a burst of monetization,” Gutman said at The Information’s summit.”
“So I think we’re certainly interested in evaluating and understanding how NFTs or some of the underlying technologies help us create that sustainable long-term earnings for creators. But I think when it comes to the hype around sales of individual assets and what not… not that we wouldn’t offer that if we felt it was really valuable to creators, as part of the broader portfolio of what they can offer… but I think for us, really thinking through how we’re continuing to ensure we’re creating a sustainable recurring future for creators is why we’re evaluating the crypto space more broadly.”
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