Funding on line vlogs etc.
I remember a couple who several years ago now who vlogged their Disney World trips. They are no longer vlogging so I am not promoting any vloggers. They started a Go Fund Me page to help with the cost and there was outrage. Viewers complaining, Saying they can pay for their own trips. Now right across YouTube and other parts of the internet creators have Patreon pages where viewers support them every month. What do we think of this? Is it a good way to fund creators? What alternatives are there?
Comments
I regard such creators as having zero integrity and credibility. I much prefer the Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee approach.
There were apparently complaints because they had posted an image on Facebook of them having tea-and-cake at a cafe and apparently some people thought this meant that they shouldn't be asking for money.
The moral of this story is that it is interesting how concerned people are about the way other people raise and spend money. Maybe this is particularly a British trait, I am not sure.
In a similar theme, last week I met with some elderly people who were moaning about the amount of money that the chief executive of a charity earns. First, it was not really a large salary. Second, it obviously depends on the complexity of the job (some charities are large and complex) and third it is entirely possible that spending on staff leads to better outcomes and more donations. A decent fundraiser may well be worth much more than they are paid.
Guide Dogs have a few huge army of volunteers and also a large paid staff including the marketing team.
My husband headed up a pretty big and successful charity which had a staff of only two. The rest were volunteers. Of course, volunteers are always a lot harder to manage than paid staff!
On the question of vlogs. If I really enjoy the subject, I would pay the premium to get rid of the ads, otherwise I put up with the ads because I realise contentment can cost money.
(I do voice to text - so instead of 'content making' it read contentment - but I rather liked it so I left it in. 🙂)
I think that's an overly harsh response to creators who get sponsorships. I don't see why it means they have zero integrity or credibility if it's a sponsorship that makes sense for the channel and their audience. I follow channels that do sponsorships and channels that do the Patreon route - and also channels that do YouTube memberships which is basically an in-house Patreon system - and I don't see one as better than the other, there are pros and cons to both. Merch is also a way for creators to make money. I use YouTube Premium and don't mind a brief ad read, which you can always skip unlike traditional ads. Typically the sponsor is a VPN or something else that is genuinely useful.
A GoFundMe is not supposed to be the equivalent of a Patreon, it's for charitable giving (whether via fundraising activities or donating to someone in need). Nobody needs to go to Disney. I think that's an inappropriate form of funding - and vloggers have been doing brand deals and merch etc for years at this point. There must have been alternatives available.
It's possible that there has been crossed wires and someone meant Patreon when they said GoFundMe. But even if there is not, maybe you could show me where it is for "charitable giving"
From their website:
Making videos is a creative project.
An important consideration with crowd-funding platforms is whether the funding is incentive-based, which notably isn't the case with GoFundMe.
By setting itself up as a funding go-between, Patreon faces a number of distinct challenges, for example (from wikipedia):
Distinct compared to what exactly?
You mean something mostly defunct that involved physical cash and goods then? Because all digital payment mechanisms have been subject to similar challenges.
The ongoing debates about fossil-fuel company sponsorship of museums and galleries suggest that more traditional mechanisms of patronage aren't dead quite yet.
And I was addressing Cassa's point:
Also regarding which, while I suspect there have long been brokers of patronage, connecting patrons and artists, Patreon doesn't just allow more people to be patrons, it changes the way that patronage works, putting power in the hands of the brokers, rather than patrons.
I don't find it too hard to see Patreon's gradual progress along Cory Doctorow's path of enshittification, and pushback from the patrons and artists when they move too quickly. As illustrated by the following (also wikipedia):
My problem is that it adds up really fast. My entertainment budget is only so big, and if there are 10 content creators I really like, and each charges a measley $4 per month, that's a big chunk o'change.
Crowdfunding one finite project is not the same as funding ongoing Disney trips.
If I am making videos and I use the money that patrons give me to do this, I can spend the money on Disney trips.
Why are you so concerned about how other people spend money? Is there some compulsion you have to give them money?
It would be a strange thing if people raised money for writing a book and then other people who had not even contributed complained that the money was spent on a holiday. It would be even stranger if people said that they had raised money for one book so should not raise money for another.
Many crowdfund campaigns fail. Where is the problem here?
The bloke across the garden from us burnt the back of his house down a couple of weeks ago. It was caused by foolishness with a barbecue. All his windows, upstairs and downstairs, exploded - and his whole garden including the sheds is burnt out. The inside of the house is completely smoke damaged. It also destroyed next door's patio furniture and exploded two of their windows.
It could easily have burnt all our houses down if the fire brigade hadn't been so prompt.
He set up a GoFundMe page as he wasn't insured. Very little is going into it, there's not a lot of sympathy for foolish fires just at the moment!
And in this case, he hit the exacta. He made the foolish choice not to buy insurance, and then made the foolish choice, whilst carrying his own risk, to arse about with fire.
This kind of ties in to my general feelings about the welfare state. If we, collectively, are not willing to let people individually bear the consequences of their poor choices, then we need to collectively force them to insure (either privately or through the state) against those choices.
We're not (shouldn't be) willing to let people die in the streets, so we should force everyone to participate in healthcare (however we decide to fund that).
This seems like Victorian-era moralising.
Not really. Victorian moralising would involve being willing to let people did in the streets, so long as they did it tidily. This is just common sense - some people will fuck up so badly that the only solution is to have the state pick up the pieces, making the argument of misfortune vs bad choices irrelevant because the state needs to step in regardless.
You are quite correct, I misread the comment I was replying to. Which is not right, I should not have done that.
Forcing everyone to contribute financially and participate in a healthcare system that is shown to discriminate against people on the basis of various protected characteristics is not equitable.
Is it more or less equitable than watching them die in gutters?
Amen.
Regarding the gentleman without house insurance, he may not have been able to afford it.
Because greedy morons thinking that other people should fund their Disney trips is something worth criticising. Also why shouldn't someone complain that someone spending crowdfunded money on something else has stolen money from others?
It's not other people's job to pay for your (general you) wholly preventable bad decisions that endanger other people's lives. You're missing the fact that Boogie's neck of the woods has been in drought for month and the UK has been having a ton of wildfires, and that the fire services here have strongly warned against having barbecues due to everything being like a tinderbox.
The drought and wildfires and warnings do mean he should not have done that, absolutely.
Whose responsibility it is to help someone in need, whether that need comes as a result of a foolish or worse decision on that person’s part, is another matter. Not to mention the matter of not justice, but charity or even mercy, when someone is in need, however they got in need.
It might, but I watched the smoke billowing 40 ft into the air and the embers coming down. My friend who lives opposite him was putting burning embers out with the hose pipe.
We have had heatwave conditions (30⁰) and no rain for 5 weeks.
We have enormous fir trees behind our garden and if they had caught two streets would have been gone.
I flew around the house getting the dog's harnesses on and all the things they would need into the hall, my grab bag and all the important documents ready to go.
It happened on a Friday. It took until the Sunday for my heart to stop beating too quickly.
So my sympathy metre for his smoke damage is pretty low just now.
Yep. I need to learn forgiveness and charity, I get that. The fear and trauma are still rather rare so maybe that bit will take time.
Should I start by donating to his cause?
I'm a bit confused about your point here. You seem to have agreed that a person could crowdfund a single finite project to go and make helpful videos about a Disney park, but you're not happy that they might crowdfund an ongoing series of videos about Disney parks. I don't see the distinction you're drawing here.
I also don't really see the difference between someone using GoFundMe vs Patreon to fund something like this. It's not against the terms of service of either platform. As best I can tell, GoFundMe is cheaper, but might have fewer features that you might want.
"If you enjoy our videos about Disney parks, please think about sending us some money so we can keep doing it" is a reasonable ask. It's not different from a street performer putting a hat out. I don't think it matters whether the people concerned choose to use patreon, gofundme, or any of the micropayment services out there.
"Please give me money because I like expensive holidays but am poor" would be rather silly, but I don't think that's what the people in @Hugal's post have done. What they have done seems to be very much more like "If you like our content, please pay what you think it is worth".
I suppose the association of GoFundMe with charity fundraisers and whip-rounds for people who have had some unfortunate personal circumstance is what's making people feel like this is a "please fund my holiday" charity request, but I didn't get the sense that that was really what it was.
Patreon members get perks such as videos just for them, add free versions of the vids, often extended versions, and other things.
A certain level of professionalism is expected from those have Patreon. Good filming skills, good editing skills, a good knowledge of the subject. As the tech gets better a higher level is expected by viewers. Anything lower that HD is seen in a bad light. 4K is the norm.
Whether you want to donate to that or anything like that is up to you – I’m just saying that if somebody wants to create a funding thing because they have wound up in terrible circumstances, even if it was their own fault, I don’t see that as an intrinsic problem. As for the other stuff, I believe we all need to learn forgiveness and charity, at least in a Christian approach to life, but it’s harder, sometimes very much harder, in some cases than others.