11
votes
Patreon integrating a video platform
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Patreon's building native video hosting for creators to sidestep YouTube
- Authors
- Ashley Carman
- Published
- Nov 11 2021
- Word count
- 451 words
I suspect OnlyFans recent pivot away from explicit content creators, and trying hard to court more mainstream ones to their platform now, has Patreon scared. Especially since OnlyFans already has video hosting, live streaming, image hosting, and a bunch of other really solid, modern, community features. Whereas Patreon's feature list honestly feels antiquated at this point, so it's about bloody time they finally put some effort into improving their platform.
I think the OnlyFans name is "tainted" enough that people will forever associate it with porn. I don't think it would be possible for them to go mainstream without rebranding. The first thing that pops into everyone's mind when they hear that someone has an OnlyFans account is sex work.
I don't think so. There's a lot of youtube creators that do something like "patreon subscribers get the video 1 week early", and right now they have to go through a whole hullabaloo to do that with the video platforms they use currently. It could be pretty basic and not good, but that's is enough for such a thing to be successful, as long as it's easy for the creators to upload.
Patreon's use case for video in the modal case would have two distinguishing attributes as compared to other vide platforms
Video can be one of the more expensive things to host, but traffic can't be compared to something like youtube. Take CGPGrey, for instance - he has ~5m subscribers, but "only" 11k patrons.
It's not just early access to their upcoming public videos that creators on Patreon offer as a perk either. Lots of them offer totally "exclusive" videos at certain donation tiers as well. However, at the moment, those videos are never truly exclusive, since they're typically just unlisted YouTube videos, or password protected Vimeo videos, which even non-patrons can still watch if the URL or password gets leaked/shared.
But with Patreon hosting those videos in-house, it will help ensure they actually do remain exclusive, by forcing people to become a patron in order to view them. Which is precisely how Patreon's competitors, OnlyFans and Floatplane, already do it, since they both support video hosting and live-streaming, and have for quite some time. So this isn't Patreon breaking new ground here, it's just them scrambling to catch up feature-wise, which they desperately need to do if they want to avoid losing market share.