Patreon, reimagined — building a better future for creators and fans
October 4, 2023
Today, we’re launching new features, an entirely redesigned mobile app, and an evolved brand identity, bringing us closer to a future where creators are in control and real community thrives.
Patreon started out a decade ago with one goal: get creators paid.
It was a time when anyone was a click away from sharing their greatest work on the internet, but very few people could actually earn money doing it. Being creators ourselves, we knew we could solve that problem by building a way to connect creative people with their biggest fans. And it worked. Over the past 10 years, creators have earned billions through paid membership.
Our next chapter is about giving creators even more. Patreon is no longer just a paid membership company. It’s where creators have the freedom to make what excites them and share it directly with the people who love it most.
Today, we're introducing a reimagined Patreon with community chats, Commerce, a completely redesigned mobile app, and a new brand identity. Here’s why:
1. Creators need their own worlds
Creators deserve more than just a copy-and-paste page on the internet. They deserve a space that’s all about them — one where they make the calls. Now, each creator’s Patreon is truly their own world. Creators can decide exactly how their Patreon is laid out, their colors, and how their posts show up.
Amanda Seales uses Patreon to build her community, run her membership business, and sell her political comedy doc directly to her fans.
We even reimagined the base of our platform so creators can use it however they want. Earlier this year, we expanded Patreon so creators could access our community insights, publishing, and commerce tools whether they want to run a paid membership or not.
Today, we’re making that option available to every single creator. Now fans can join a creator’s community for free, and creators can start deepening relationships with those fans in a way that’s not possible anywhere else on the internet.
Creators with early access have already welcomed over 160,000 new fans to their communities. In the past few months, Worlds Beyond Number has given thousands of free members access to livestreams, episode transcripts, and more while saving their exclusive Fireside podcast for paying members only.
On Patreon, KAMAUU welcomes fans to his community for free and shares exclusive work with paying members.
2. Creators have to be in control of their businesses
Between ad revenue, brand partnerships, and platform funds, creators have more ways than ever to get paid, but most of those income streams don’t come directly from fans.
We believe the best way to build a sustainable future for creators is to give them that direct line to the people who love their work. Paid membership has been successful for so many creators, but there are tons of other ways they can earn an income straight from their communities. That’s why we introduced Commerce back in July: a new way for creators to sell individual videos, audio, and downloadable files to anyone, whether they’re a member or not.
Emma DeMuth, host of The Royals of Malibu podcast, uses her Patreon shop to sell downloadable items.
We’re already seeing creators like Amanda Seales, Achewood, and Pretty Much It use their own shops to successfully premiere feature-length specials, publish zines, and share watch-along tracks. And over half of all digital product sales on Patreon have come from non-members, which means many creators are making new connections with fans. So today, we’re rolling Commerce out to every creator on Patreon.
3. Nobody should come between creators and their fans
Creators and fans need to have a place where they can build community together. Not the manufactured type of community that comes from fragmented conversations and ranked comments, but real community grown from meaningful connection and defined by the people who are actually a part of it.
With chats and member profiles, that’s finally possible. Now, creators and fans have dedicated spaces for group conversations outside of DMs and comments.
When podcast hosts Sophia and Cinzia launched a Patreon for The Girls Bathroom podcast, they wanted fans to feel like they were hanging out with their best friends, so it only made sense to call their community The Group Chat. Now their fans are spilling secrets, getting advice, and gossiping in the chat at all times.
Chelsea Devantez uses community chats to connect with her members and talk about the latest episodes of her podcast.
4. The biggest fans deserve the best
There are fans, and then there are the fans who stay up until midnight to get the latest drop. The fans who line up at 6 a.m. to get the best seat in the house, and whose wardrobes are entirely made up of merch. Those are the people who deserve experiences that just aren’t possible on the internet today.
When we sat down to make a new app, that’s exactly who we had in mind. Endless scrolls might be fine for casual consumers but they don’t work for the true fans. Those fans don’t want to be inundated by targeted ads and unsolicited suggestions. They want an easier way to access things they actually want to see. So that's where we started.
Instead of dropping into a content overload, members log in and instantly see everything they want at a glance. Their homepage is organized by creator, not by post, which means fans can see a creator's latest work next to their community conversations and anything else going on in their world. It’s creativity in context, the way creators intended.
Ross Tran runs a membership on Patreon where he shares exclusive process videos, images, and more with his biggest fans.
When members find something they love, they can scroll through, reply to, and drop comments on videos, podcasts, images, and more without ever leaving the post. They can also find all of their in-progress, downloaded, and new media in the play tab to keep record of everything they’ve been enjoying so far and queue up what they want to check out next.
5. Our brand should be as expressive as the creators it represents
Today we’re launching our reimagined brand, including a dynamic new logo and wordmark, and new approaches to typography, color, and photography. It’s a motion-first brand for a digital-first world, intended to challenge static, old-media brand-building conventions in favor of an identity that better reflects today's ever-evolving creative landscape. Most importantly, it’s a brand designed to adapt, so that any creator can make it their own… because creator ownership is at the very core of our vision for the future.
A better future for creators and fans
Over the next decade and beyond, we’ll continue bringing creators and fans even closer because we believe that’s how we build the best future possible. When creators can connect with their communities, they have the freedom to make art, not content, and find success on their own terms with the people who matter most.