Patreon CEO Jack Conte Wants to Fix the Internet

What? I don't like the way the internet is going. I don't like it as a creator. I don't like posting and having it feel like a slot machine. That shit sucks. It shouldn't be like that for creative people and for their communities. And so I think it's worth trying something else. And there's gonna be a lot of people along the way who say, 'Jack, that's stupid. Jack, what are you doing? You can't win against TikTok. Jack, you're just copying social media. Jack, it's never going to work.' Fine. People can say that all day long. And I don't... Sorry, Lizzy. It sounds like I'm throwing shade at you. I don't mean to be. I'm just saying I'm used to skepticism about these things. And at the end of the day, if you're not going to try, what are we doing? May as well try.

My name is Jack Conte. I am a creator. I've been a creator on the internet since, oh gosh, 2007. And in 2013 I started a company called Patreon and I'm still CEO of that company. I'm in a couple bands called Pomplamoose and Scary Pockets and Scary Goldings and I make videos and music and all that kind of stuff.

Getting creators paid for their labor, number one. Long-term relationships, number two. And human creation, number three. And I could talk a little bit more about each of those things.

I don't like what the current internet is doing to humans or doing to me. I feel like I'm an experiment in a petri dish. And I feel like my lymph system is getting tested every day with what is sort of maximally fixating me and grabbing my attention. And I think it's bad for us. It certainly feels bad for me. I'm tired of logging on the internet and having it feel like rocket fuel straight into my veins. And I just don't buy. What it comes down to is I don't buy that this is the only way to have media and community on the internet. I don't buy it. I think there's got to be a different way. In fact, I remember when there was a different way. Just a decade ago, the internet did not feel like this. It felt like a much better place.

I do. There were elements of it that felt fun 10 years ago. Certainly 15 years ago. I remember when my bands first started uploading on the internet and we were finding our community and finding people and yeah, there were elements of fun to it. I mean, the comment section was a bit gnarier back then than it is now. But yeah, it was... the very specifically the thing about it that was very different for creative people was you could actually reach your followers when you built a subscription base, when you built a follower base and then you posted your next thing, you could reach the people who signed up to see you. And you can't do that anymore. Every time you upload something on the internet now it feels like putting a coin in a slot machine and maybe you'll reach the people who subscribe to you and maybe you won't. And with that as the sort of system it's impossible to build a community, it's impossible to build a business as a creative person.

It certainly... I can totally see why it looks like that. And I know there's a lot of people who act... in fact there's a bunch of creators who are saying like, 'Hey, is this another social network?' I don't talk about it like that. I don't tell our team it's a social network. I'm not saying let's go copy social media features. I'm in fact asking our team very specifically to not pull from social media and to not look at social media when we're building. At the core of it, if you optimize for watch time, if you optimize for what will somebody click on, what will somebody... what will a human watch or listen to or read for the longest possible time? You end up with stuff that is highly addictive and stuff that fixates us and stuff that's bad for our brains. Versus if you try to pay creative people for their work or if you invest in people building long-term relationships with the people who actually subscribe to see those people, you end up with a very different system. So, I actually... yeah, even if some people call it social media, that's kind of okay with me. The main reason is because at the end of the day, we're trying to get people to be able to build communities and followings and actually be able to reach those people and have conversation with them and actually be able to build a business with them. That's the difference on Facebook. As a creator, everything is a gamble. Every post. I have no idea how many people I'm going to reach. I can't make any money on the platform. I don't get paid for my labor as a creator. And on Patreon, we're paying creators billions of dollars a year.

I think both. I mean, we have to think about it from the perspective of both sides. From the creator's perspective, I mean, this is sort of where Patreon came from, right? My whole perspective as a creator myself, the problems are very clear, which I've sort of just outlined. And then from a fan's perspective, you know, I think there's also a bunch of problems. The internet feels addictive. I don't hear from the people that I want to hear from. Like, I miss things that are important to me because even though I've signed up for them, I can't see them in the future. So yeah, there's a bunch of problems I think both from the fan perspective and from the creator perspective. And we definitely think about it from both. I think it's important that we do. One of the things that our creators have told us, very specifically, is that they rely on Patreon to be able to... I mean, this is the thing that we've been saying for years and years. They rely on Patreon to be able to reach their most important fans. A creator's most important fans. That like 5% of your audience that wants to go to your show, wants to get your merchandise, wants to listen to every episode, wants to download the course, that 5% of your fans is a really important portion of your fans.

I think so. As a creator myself, I think so. If I had the opportunity to reach millions of people or... I mean, this comes back to the Kevin Kelly thousand true fans theory, right? Like if I had the opportunity to reach millions of people or find my tribe who really cared for me as a creator, I want to find my tribe who really cares.

Completely different. Yeah. I mean, if you think about the models on Patreon, there are creators with, you know, a few thousand subscribers on Patreon and they make, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month and really...

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, there are creators... yeah, there are creators on Patreon who are making millions of dollars a year, right? They're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. But the bulk of the creators on Patreon, over half of our payments volume, goes to creators who are making what we call the sort of middle class creativity. It's creators that are making between $1,000 a month and $30,000 a month. So it's not necessarily the Taylor Swifts of the world. It's not like the biggest creators on the planet. It's this emerging group of people who are building businesses with their thousand true fans, with the people that they found that are sort of powering their business and their community.

I think maybe the first one is just starting the company. The first one is just saying, hey, the internet is going in a direction that I don't like. As a creator, I'm being told that I should upload to these platforms and give them my labor for free and I should do it in exchange for the exposure. I mean, honestly, it's kind of hard to even remember that time period, but that was not that long ago when if you told the platforms, 'Hey, you should pay me for uploading to this platform,' the platforms are like, 'Why would we pay you? Like, if you're not happy with our service, just go somewhere else.' That was the attitude of the platforms. And of course now they all have creator payments organizations and teams and they're building all that stuff in the past. So I guess maybe the first step was just like, hey, this is a problem. This is not fair for creative people. Creative people deserve to actually be paid for their work. They are creating value in the world. They are building communities. They are reaching people who love their work. It's not fair or good for society to not compensate those people for their labor. So kind of I guess realizing that, building that, getting that out, step one. Maybe the next important milestone was building, you know, turning that problem into a professional membership suite. Because one of the things that we realized, probably early on, maybe 2017 somewhere around there, was there's this bifurcation of media on the web now. People are starting to... the web isn't just pure free anymore. Even Slate has a subscription offering and different media companies have divided their offering into free and paid. That's not where the internet was in 2012. Everything was free back then. But now people are starting to realize, wait, why should I give away everything? I should be paid for some of my work. And so we built this membership system that allowed people to section off a portion of their catalog and have a premium offering. And that got really big with podcasters and video creators and a whole bunch of creators who were making episodic media. And kind of building the CRM and the email system and the professional tool suite, the analytics around that idea of this membership platform, I think was step two. That sort of, a lot of creators were able to build really serious businesses at that point on Patreon. And that's why now there are creators that are making millions of dollars a year on the platform. And your second question though around what's next?

In many ways I think the journey of Patreon echoes the journey of media. Because essentially Patreon is like we're serving small business media companies, right? Like that's what a creator is. It's a small business media company. They make things for the internet. And the challenge with that is the same challenge for media companies, same challenge for creators, same challenge for Patreon. Being downstream of Facebook and YouTube and TikTok is a perilous business for creators. It is a dangerous, difficult position to be in to rely on those platforms for traffic, for community, for payments. I won't go so far as to say it's a losing strategy because you still kind of need those companies. That's where the world has congregated. But I wish that weren't the case. It sucks being downstream of those platforms. It sucks for media companies. It sucks for creators. And it's bad for Patreon, too. We don't want to be downstream of those companies. And so, what's the future of Patreon? That's the future for creators on the platform. I want to be able to have Patreon send our creators traffic without needing it from Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. I think if we force creators to rely on those platforms, it's bad for them and it's bad for us. And so the next phase of the company is what you mentioned at the beginning of this show: building a place where creators can not just get payments for their work but they can actually get new audience as well.

I think the real reason is because of our values. But I think, you know, we have a lot of the features that a lot of creators who are starting to realize, hey, I want to build a business around my work, we have a lot of the features that those creators need to be successful. We've spent 13 years building everything from RSS syncing to analytics to free to paid conversion tools to a really good CMS to a CRM system to collecting emails of all the people who follow you to all that to integrations across other platforms. Like we have that full suite of tools that creators need. But then I think from a value standpoint, we also do right by creators. And two, I think just the way we handle things on the platform is different than how a lot of companies handle stuff on the platform. We have very specific opinions around what we don't want on Patreon. And we act on that. So like we've taken certain posts down off of Patreon. And at times we've had to take creators down because they're outside of our content policy. I hate taking income away from people, I do not want to do that. And so we take those decisions very, very seriously, but if someone is spreading hatred and is spreading Nazism and using Patreon to do that, I don't want that. Our team doesn't want that. And we act on those decisions. I think a lot of other platforms...

I mean, I know that's happened. Yeah, absolutely. And I realize that's a very controversial thing to say right now because it's sort of in vogue in tech to not have trust and safety anymore. I disagree. I think it's important. I want Patreon to be a nicer place to hang out. I want it to feel safe. I want it to be a home for artists and creators and that means that we draw a hard line on those things. And I'm proud of those decisions.

I don't think it has to do that. I think the current systems that exist have put that pressure on creators because they're trying to maximize for time spent. So, I'll tell you exactly how it works. Those systems say we need to maximize the amount of posts, maximize the length of those posts and maximize the amount that creators can make those posts on the platform such that people log in every 20 minutes for new, more stuff and spend an extra 10 hours on the platform because every extra hour that people spend on those platforms is extra ad dollars for their business. That is not how Patreon's business model works. We don't get paid if you spend an extra two hours on the platform. In fact, Lizzy, if you ask me what is time spent on Patreon, what is the average time that a fan spends on Patreon? I don't know. We don't track it. It doesn't matter to me and it doesn't matter to our teams. That's what I mean by this is fundamentally a different system and it has different incentives and I think we should expect to see different things happening because of that.

If consumers like that, then they can go to Instagram.

Well, I don't... Okay, so if consumers like that, if fans like that, fine. And maybe they'll use those platforms for that experience if that's what people want. But I think there's some things that you'll be able to get on Patreon that you won't be able to get on those other platforms. And I don't think it'll replace those platforms. I think people will still use the big social media sites, but I think on Patreon you'll get... I think what will end up happening because of the way we're running these systems, because of the incentive structures, because of what we're optimizing for. I think you'll get more intimacy. You'll get more vulnerability. It will feel like smaller spaces. It will feel less like a big open public town square and more like a living room. I think it'll feel more open. I think it'll feel less trolly. I mean, not will feel... it already is feeling like this and the people that are using the product now are already saying this. So, that's very intentional on our part. Like we want it to feel that way. And I think we can continue to keep it feeling that way even as it scales. Like there's ways that we can create more of a niche feeling and niche communities in the product. That doesn't just kind of feel like the free-for-all of social media.

No, I haven't.

There's... I wonder if we can disentangle that. I think we can and I think we need to. I think we have to. We got to figure out a way to do that and I think it's worth trying at the very least. I think we're going to be able to do it. I do. I do because I remember when it didn't feel like this. I remember when there were hundreds of millions of people using these products and it didn't feel this bad. And I remember what the sort of catalyst was. I mean actually look, when TikTok came onto the scene everybody thought like, oh, TikTok's innovation is this kind of swiping feed with vertical video. That was not their innovation. Their innovation was you remember that thing you guys used to do called the follow? Forget about that. Don't worry about the follow. We're just going to totally overrotate toward novelty and we're just going to fill your feed with an insane amount of new things and none of the stuff from the people that you chose to form a long-term relationship with. So, all these communities that you intentionally decided you want to be with, you want to spend time with, all the people that you said like, 'Gosh, I like this person. I like what they make. I like what they stand for. I want more of that. I want to hang out with them. I want to spend my time with them.' All that stuff, forget about it. We're just going to show you whatever addicts you to the phone. Once TikTok did that, here's what happened. It worked. It worked on us. We're fragile creatures with impulsive brains, unfortunately. I think we can overcome it, but it worked on us in the first wave. And so what did YouTube do? What did Instagram do? They just copied them. And now no matter what system you log into now, it's the same innovation. It's that same overrotation toward novelty, fixation, addiction. And in a period of four or five years, it felt like every app I used and loved to build community and hang out with other creators and fans on the internet turned into this... turned into rocket fuel for my head. And it is that process and the end result that is why we are here. It does not have to be that way. I don't think it does. I think people want and are starving for a deeper sense of connection right now. A deeper sense of real community and real conversation and real communication, real vulnerability. I think we're all feeling more and more like avatars on the web. And it's a bad feeling. I don't think that's the only way. And I think it's worth trying. I think it's worth trying. Is there a better system?

So there's a couple things that we consider when we're thinking about our content policies. And this is 13 years of iteration and at the end of the day content policy is a living, breathing document, right? Like it has to change and evolve at the pace of culture and if it doesn't then you end up with a content policy fire and then you have to take really fast action. So, part of what we're trying to do is always look ahead around the corner and always look ahead around what's coming up and what do we need to do so that we're not in this very reactive position 6 months from now. That's the first thing. Second thing is what are the inputs that we use when we make content policy decisions and build an actual content policy. And for us, there's a couple things. One is we think about the mission of the company. What is our purpose on the planet and how can a content policy reinforce that mission as opposed to fighting it. Second is just execution risk. And so some things like if you're working with payments partners and your policy is different than their policy then they'll complain and then they'll fine you. And so there's just certain things where we've got to make sure that from an ecosystem perspective we have a content policy that is functional. It has to work. We have to be able to execute on that content policy. And then there's a third input which is values. And that's what makes us sleep well at night and what makes us not sleep well at night? What do we stand behind? What's the type of change we want to see in the world? What's the type of stuff we want to host and distribute? What's the kind of stuff we don't want to host and distribute? And that is an element. It's not all of our decisions. All of our decisions aren't based on that. But it is an important piece of it for me and for our team. And I think my read is like a lot of tech has seems like shifting values on that dimension. And yeah, I don't, it doesn't sit well with me and I don't think it sits well with creators, which is why I think we've seen some creators leave some of these platforms and come to Patreon.

So one of the things I always say with regard to content policy is like it's very hard to talk about content policy hypothetically. We do have systems around for instance COVID misinformation. When all that stuff started to pop up and there was stuff about vaccines, there was stuff about the COVID vaccine, we had labeling and categorization on the site. And so, yes, we do think about that stuff quite a bit. But like opinion, I want a variety of opinions on Patreon. There's some opinions I don't want on Patreon and again, I already gave the example of Nazism. But we do want a diversity and variety of opinions on the platform and then where you draw the line is again comes down to values, execution, mission.

I switched from ChatGPT to Claude when the whole DoD thing went down. It was surprisingly easy. I just asked ChatGPT to output text with everything that it knew about me. And I told it, I was like, be very specific and very detailed because I'm going to take this, I'm going to take your output and I'm going to put it into Claude. So just tell me everything you know. And it wrote me this big long document and I downloaded it and I uploaded it to Claude and then I switched to Claude. And what do I use Claude for? I use it for like... it's been really good for health actually, nutrition and health. Like I'll ask it what's in a particular food and if it's good for my LDL and stuff like that. It actually gives me good answers.

So because there are hallucinations and judgment issues, if it's like a serious thing, I almost always check a second or third source. And actually, one thing that I found is like it often sounds very confident and it can make you stop relying on your own judgment. And so what I found is useful is to not think of it as any sort of authority at all. But to think of it as one person's opinion. And then I use it as a starting point and then I'll look things up online after that. That's how I use it and yeah, I think it's helpful. I like it. I mean, if I weren't so angry about how the tech has rolled out, I think I'd feel better about it. But the fact that pretty much all of these companies have basically used the totality of creator uploaded work without consent, without compensation, and without credit. I find really depressing. And it feels counterproductive to the reason I started Patreon.

It is. And I've looked up my stuff on those models and they'll make an image of Pomplamoose. I prompted Suno to make a song that sounded like my band and it did it. It was like spot on. Sounded like my band. My band hasn't been paid for that work. We never gave our consent to have our music be uploaded to those models. It feels like starting over from zero.

Well, I use Instagram, too, and I use YouTube, too, and I pay my taxes, even though I disagree with a lot of what my federal government is doing. You know, I think... yeah, I think it's very... like if you wanted to be totally pure, at this point you'd have to check off the internet. Like any website you use, any app you use is benefiting from LLMs at this point. Like the code written in a lot of these apps is generated from LLMs. Like we're all using AI at this point. And yes, I mean, I guess what you're sort of maybe insinuating is that it's hypocritical of me to use flawed...

Yeah. So there's another really important thing about it which is if you look at this historically, the first commercially available synthesizer, the Novachord, which I think came out in the 30s, when that instrument came out the musicians union immediately put a ban on it because they were afraid that it would replace orchestras. And you can look back at that and be like, 'Ah, that's really silly. What a silly thing to do to ban the synthesizer.' But guess what happened to orchestras over the next hundred years? In the 40s, every single one of the top 10 songs on the radio was a recording of an orchestra. And now it's essentially zero. None of the top 10 songs are orchestras. And I mean, this is a very sad thing. And my favorite musicians use synthesizers. My favorite artists, Bjork, Radiohead... I'm not going to lie, it is tension. I feel tension in that. I hate that orchestras have been through a financial crisis and have been in decline for the last 50 years. I hate that. I hate that thousands of people lost their jobs as professional musicians when synchronized music and picture came out with the Vitaphone, when talkies first sort of came into being in the 20s. I hate that tens of thousands of musicians lost their jobs, but I love the sound effects in Star Wars and I'm glad that there's sound in movies and I watch movies with sound.

What's important for artists right now and the reason I'm coming out and saying I use these tools, like I'm being very deliberate about that. And why am I doing that? For a couple reasons. One, this is one of those moments on the internet where I feel like the conversations I'm having in private with other artists are very different than the conversations I see happening online. Online, I see this very clear bifurcation and almost like a boycott of all AI tools. But when I talk to my creator friends, they're all using Claude or ChatGPT or they're using Descript to edit their podcast or they're using AI tools to clean up audio and everybody's using these tools in some capacity to help them. And so anytime I've felt that tension in the past where I'm like, these conversations in private are different than the conversations that are happening online, it makes me want to be one of the first people to just go out online and be like, hey, I'm just going to say what I'm seeing. Because something feels untrue right now. And I want to be a whole person. I don't want to be lying and hiding the fact that I use these tools and I don't want artists to feel ashamed for using these tools. Okay. The second reason is because when the synthesizer came out in the 30s, when talkies came out in the 20s, I think it was very important for some artists to learn about those technologies and learn how those technologies could potentially be useful to them. I think right now it's important for artists to at least be curious about AI. I'm not saying use it all the time, but it's going to change how we make things. I'm not saying all art is going to be AI art and sloppy and gross. That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying I think it's going to affect a lot of tools, processes, workflows, our craft. I think a lot of those things are going to change. And I really don't want artists to feel like they're given this polarity choice that we're seeing online, which is like either you betray everyone you know and love by using these tools or you get left behind and you can't make things anymore. That's a terrible choice to be faced with as an artist right now. And it's not true. I don't want creative people to feel that pressure. Like you don't have to feel that pressure.

This is something I'm thinking about a lot right now. It's not in the policy yet because it's really thorny. So let me give you some examples. And by the way, I'm posing a problem, not offering a solution. And it's our job to offer a solution, and we will. But we haven't yet. If a creator makes a video and it's a great video and they use Claude to come up with some metaphors or do research, is that... how... do we need to label that? Okay. What if they used Claude to write one paragraph in the script? What if they used a magic eraser tool in one of the frames to clean up an image? What if they used Descript to remove silences in the podcast or to add room tone? And then you can imagine a spectrum from like the most minor adjustments using AI tools to pixel-for-pixel AI created video. And the thing is what I have realized and what I think a lot of people will start to realize is something is not AI art or not. There is a very broad, very wide spectrum of how much AI is being used here. What I don't want to do and what's very important to me is to not blanket prohibit or label anything where any creator used AI in any step of their workflow. I'll give you an example. There was an amazing artist I found recently. Paul Flores. His name is Paul Flores. He made this amazing video with a team of people. It was like 15 animators or something like that. And they sketched out a bunch of original artwork and then they uploaded that artwork to an AI 3D engine creation model and it turned the artwork into a 3D model that they could rotate a camera around. And this music video is so cool. And they employed like 15 people in making it. Like I'm not going to tell Paul, sorry, you can't upload that video to Patreon. That would be a terrible policy, right? So, we have to be very thoughtful around how we label and how we define that kind of stuff. And that is exactly the stuff that the team is working on. It's very important to be thoughtful about that.

I mean, a lot of people aim that at me, too. I appreciate your dad in a hat comment, but I get plenty of...

I'm quite personally familiar with that. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Of course I do. Why do we hate tech CEOs? There are so many reasons. There's so many reasons. Maybe one main reason, and this is something I've learned in just going from YouTube creator to being in tech, which was not something I expected or wanted. It still feels like an odd turn in my life. But people in tech think in a very different way than people I think in the rest of the world. And it often makes tech people seem just so fucking out of touch with how humans act and what humans want. And I think it stems from a different way of seeing the world, different way of thinking about the world, different way of kind of being in the world. Maybe that's one. Two is maybe a more forgiving reason. Although I don't mean to be forgiving of tech CEOs. But I think like anytime you are making decisions at that scale, like making decisions with billions of people, you're going to just... yeah, you're going to make decisions that hurt a lot of people. I think a really good example of this is I remember in 2018 when Facebook made a change to their algorithm. And then it was just like years of media layoffs. I remember that. That's... right to everybody in the world. You look at that and you're like, this is fucking evil. How could you do this? And I think it's very hard for them to explain themselves in those moments for whatever reason. I mean, I could keep going. There's so many reasons people hate tech CEOs.

I remember in 2013 I remember pitching Patreon to a bunch of people, pitching Patreon to investors, pitching Patreon to friends, and everybody's like, 'Jack, nobody's going to pay for stuff that they can get for free on the internet.' And like, we have a long way to go. I'm not declaring victory. I don't want... it's not an 'I told you so' thing, but we've made a difference. You know, we've sent $10 billion to creative people. That's $10 billion that would not be in the pockets of creative people had we not been like, you know what, let's fucking try it. Let's try to make something better because I don't like the way this is going right now. And I have that same feeling now. I have that same feeling now. I don't like the way the internet is going. I don't like it as a creator. I don't like posting and having it feel like a slot machine. That shit sucks. It shouldn't be like that for creative people and for their communities. And so I think it's worth trying something else. And I think there's going to be a lot of people along the way who say, 'Jack, that's stupid. Jack, what are you doing? You can't win against TikTok. Jack, you're just copying social media. Jack, it's never going to work.' Fine. People can say that all day long. And I don't... Sorry, Lizzy. It sounds like I'm throwing shade at you. I don't mean to be. I'm just saying I'm used to skepticism about these things. And at the end of the day, if you're not going to try, what are we doing? May as well try.

Thank you, Lizzy.