Patreon pivots to be creators’ top funnel

Patreon builds – Patreon’s CEO Jack Conte says the platform has moved from being payments-focused to building discovery and deterministic reach for creators. In a wide-ranging conversation, he argues that follower-based platforms have shifted into interest-driven distribution,

By the time Jack Conte finished laying out his argument, the core change at Patreon didn’t sound like a product update at all. It sounded like a fight over control—control of reach, control of trust, and control of who gets to capture the value of a creator’s work.

Conte. Patreon’s cofounder and CEO. returned to Decoder nearly five years after his last appearance. and he described what he believes has fundamentally shifted across the internet and inside the creator economy: the move away from follower-based distribution toward an interest-driven model pushed by platforms like TikTok. YouTube. Facebook. and Instagram.

He said this shift breaks a creator’s “deterministic line of reach” to their fans. If creators can’t reliably reach the people who want them, he argued, they can’t build community—and they also can’t build a business.

In Conte’s framing, the result is familiar and brutal: bigger platforms don’t just compete with creators. They consolidate the top of funnel—then treat creators as “users,” not fans.

“It’s disgusting,” Conte said of the way platforms treat creators, adding that major tech companies will keep taking creators’ work “however they want,” leaving writers, musicians, and artists “holding the bag.”

Patreon’s response, he said, is to stop waiting.

The platform has reinvented itself as what Conte calls an “index of small business media companies.” And that perspective. he said. has pushed Patreon to act more like a direct competitor to social platforms such as Instagram and TikTok—especially as social networks have grown more closed off and flooded with what Conte described as “AI slop.”.

Conte pointed to a turning point inside Patreon that would have surprised him, he implied, during his previous visit. At that time. he said he was “adamantly opposed to building any kind of discovery features into Patreon.” Now he says the company has built them—because without its own audience system. creators would depend on Facebook or Google to find audiences and customers.

He described the strategy in practical terms: Patreon has spent recent years building media tools, distribution tools, and hosting tools so creators can start providing their own growth.

Patreon now includes native video, chat, discovery, short-posting tools, and a feed. Conte said Patreon can no longer rely on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube to deliver those experiences. He described the goal as deterministic reach on Patreon—so creators have a way to reach people without hoping an external algorithm sends traffic their way.

One product example Conte returned to was free memberships. which he described as “a follow.” He said they give creators deterministic reach to people who choose to follow. including the email address associated with the account. He said when creators post to their followers. it triggers emails and also shows those posts in a ranked feed so followers actually see them.

Conte said free memberships have been a success: Patreon has 185 million free memberships on the platform, and he said that figure is up about 2x year-over-year since last year.

He also cited native chats. Conte said last year Patreon had something like 35 million chat messages sent back and forth and 110 million hours of video watched on Patreon.

That technical pivot—toward reach and community rather than only payments—has required structural changes, too. Conte said Patreon now employs “hundreds of people. ” organized by function at a manager level. but run by objective across cross-functional teams. He described all-hands meetings and planning as organized around objectives rather than silos.

He also said that, when Patreon changed its product mission, “everything breaks.” In his example, shifting from being a membership platform and bottom-of-funnel payments suite to a top-of-funnel network and community meant rebuilding infrastructure and privacy policies, alongside navigation.

To keep that work moving, he said the company chips away at “10 fixes every quarter” and targets shipping eight of them.

The conversation also widened into a question of what “AI” should mean for a platform that serves creators who reject what they see as low-effort machine content.

Conte said he believes Patreon has to embrace AI internally while keeping the outward experience centered on creators making their work. He said creators do not want Patreon to be an “AI company,” and that they don’t need scripts, agents, or automation that replaces creativity.

Instead, he said Patreon thinks of AI use in layers, like a bullseye: at the center are creators making creative work; then comes packaging of material; then marketing; and then business management.

He said user research boiled down to a blunt expectation he quoted from an interview: “I have a million ideas for new videos. I don’t need AI to help me make more videos. I need AI to help me do my taxes and clean my toilet.”

Patreon’s AI work, he said, already includes using LLMs to write features, using LLMs when engineers code, using LLMs to organize the team, and using Notion agents to crawl internal documents and create summaries.

Conte insisted that embracing those tools isn’t about chasing trends. If Patreon doesn’t, he said, “we, as a company, will be dead in three years.” He tied that warning to platform shifts like mobile, and to the need for Patreon to ship faster and with higher quality to remain useful to creators.

But he also put the blame for the current chaos on what he described as a techno-legal cycle where tech companies use creator work without consent. compensation. or credit. then argue transformation or fair use. He connected the issue to earlier cases like Google Books and YouTube. including the mention of a $1 billion Viacom lawsuit against YouTube.

In his view, AI models have “Borg’d the entirety of the free creative web” and should not be allowed to operate without opt-out and credit. He said he believes there should be regulation to prevent this pattern with AI.

The tension around AI also shows up, he said, in moderation—another problem Patreon said it’s trying to confront head-on.

Conte said community feedback accelerated Patreon’s work after he published the long 45-minute video laying out the AI approach. He said the most common concern was whether Patreon would prevent the platform from becoming clogged with “slop.”

He described the moderation challenge in blunt terms: there’s no canonical system for reliably detecting whether something is AI-generated. he said. and he pointed out that even if detection worked today. someone could build tools to break it later. He said YouTube had also announced something about this “this week. ” while he discussed the lack of confidence that any single method would hold.

He also mentioned an alternative path some people favor: labeling human-made work rather than AI work, describing it as flipping the labeling game. Conte said the company is thinking through multiple options and that those ideas were prompted by community feedback.

Moderation, Conte argued, is part of why Patreon differs from competitors. He contrasted Patreon with Substack, describing Substack’s moderation vibe as “Screw it, do Nazis on Substack,” and added that Substack already has “a ton of slop” on it.

Conte said some creators have left Substack and moved to Ben Thompson’s platform called Passport, and he used that to underline a point: Patreon’s content policy is not an afterthought.

He said Patreon does not allow Nazis and that its content policy is a key differentiator. Conte said he wrote the first version of it in 2013, that it was 40 pages with help from an outside consultant, and that it’s been iterated since.

When asked about adult content. Conte said Patreon has an 18-plus category but does not allow porn. and he emphasized that porn is defined in Patreon’s policy. He said Patreon allows nudity and cited creators who discuss marijuana and whiskey as examples of the kinds of edge-pushing expression he wants on the platform.

He said Patreon built policies with enough detail that “10 humans” can review content and make consistent decisions.

In the middle of all of this is the uncomfortable math of payments.

Conte said Patreon has been forced to build more direct leverage with payment processors because, as the company became more visible and more central to creators’ income, processor and bank partners can apply pressure over what is allowed.

He said that early on there wasn’t a way to push back. Later, he said, Patreon sent “many 3AM emails” to payment processor executives—though he framed them as a plea to reconsider.

He said Patreon now processes over $2 billion a year and has processed $10 billion since the company was founded, and he described that scale as the basis for leverage: Patreon’s processors want the volume, so Patreon can negotiate more aggressively on content policy.

He also said Patreon built a hot-swappable payments architecture so it can unplug one processor and plug in another. He described this as providing leverage and helping protect creators’ income.

Conte said Patreon has had no “P0 payments processing issues” in recent years after early challenges.

The conversation returned again to platform power when Conte described his relationship with Apple. He said Apple’s fee structure and App Store requirements have pushed creators toward monthly subscriptions, and he said he disagrees with the decision.

Conte said creators still pay the “Apple tax,” and he said he tried to advocate directly with App Store employees. He said Apple told Patreon’s team that in-app payments are nonnegotiable.

He described legacy billing models as incompatible with Apple’s in-app payments system, forcing Patreon to deprecate them, and he said that deprecation has been painful for creators.

Conte said Apple required a 30 percent fee for memberships coming through the iOS app natively. and he described how Patreon built a flow that lets creators direct fans to the web after an Epic ruling. He said Apple initially seemed okay with it. and that Patreon pushed back on an initial deadline for legacy billing deprecation. but later Apple tightened its position.

He said Apple extended Patreon’s deadline “until the end of this year,” and that missing that extension would have been “catastrophic” for creators.

Conte also described a workaround: allowing creators to up the price on iOS so creators’ net income remains flat. He said this shifts the extra fee onto fans and is a worse experience, but that Patreon considers it necessary to protect creators’ income continuity.

For all the anger and friction in the story, Conte still kept coming back to one idea that sounds almost like a roadmap: power should shift away from institutions and toward individuals.

He said Patreon’s origins included giving creators the email addresses of their fans—something he described as part of an earlier decentralized instinct. He said the purpose was to reduce switching costs and create an incentive for Patreon to build a product valuable enough to keep creators.

He called Patreon “the original Web3 before Web3,” and he argued that creators need the ability to take their audience elsewhere if platforms “enshittify.”

He said Patreon isn’t federating yet, but he said he is watching open social ecosystems closely, including Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon. He referenced Mike McCue, the Flipboard CEO who runs Surf, which he described as a feed builder and browser for Threads and Bluesky and Mastodon.

Conte argued that the benefit of interoperability would be creators owning their audiences—confidence that the platform won’t “fuck them,” and a way to switch front ends if trust breaks.

In the end, Conte returned to governance, business models, and optimization functions as the three legs of what he thinks networks need to do differently for the next two decades.

His final emphasis wasn’t on any single feature, or even on AI. It was on what happens when platforms control the network effect and optimize for the wrong incentives.

Conte said that for the next phase of networks to work better for creators and users, it won’t be enough to change algorithms or add labels. Platforms need the right governance to stay aligned with their mission and customers over the long run.

If that sounds idealistic, Conte didn’t pretend it was painless. The whole conversation, from deterministic reach to content moderation to payments to Apple’s fee rules, was the record of a company trying to keep its creators from being cut off at the top.

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