Paying five dollars a month to an overseas artist’s page brings their rough sketches, unreleased demo tracks, and a long monthly production diary. Three dollars brings only the diary; ten dollars adds access to an online Q&A. As the support tier rises, the distance to the creator narrows in stages. This mechanism became the standard of the 2010s creator economy, and its prototype was made by Patreon.

Patreon is the name of a creator-facing monthly-support platform founded in the United States in 2013. This entry covers its founding, the establishment of the tier-based subscription model, its handling of adult expression, and its relation to Japan’s FANBOX, Fantia, and myfans.

Overview

Patreon lets a creator issue several monthly tiers on their page, and a patron (originally “protector, patron”) subscribe to any tier for continuing support. The creator freely designs the perks of each tier (limited posts, goods, interaction with the creator), and the patron chooses a tier by budget and interest. The service fee runs from 5 to 12 percent by plan (as of 2024), with payment fees added separately. As a US corporation it runs a payment network centred on credit cards and PayPal, operating as an international platform linking creators and patrons worldwide.

Founding

Patreon was co-founded in 2013 by the musician Jack Conte as a mechanism to gather continuing support for his music-video production. Implementing the idea that “an artist receives support not only for selling works but for the ongoing act of creation” as a subscription web service was the novel point. Earlier crowdfunding (Kickstarter 2009, Indiegogo 2008) centred on one-off, project-based support, while Patreon centred on a monthly continuing-support model, which became the prototype for later continuing-support platforms worldwide, including FANBOX (2018), OnlyFans (2016), Fantia, and myfans (2021).

Handling of adult expression

Patreon adopted loose expression rules at first, but from 2017, under tightened review from the international card brands Visa and Mastercard, it laid down guidelines strict on sexual expression. In outline: providing real-life sexual acts for support is banned; two-dimensional ero manga and illustration are conditionally allowed; and child sexual expression, bestiality, and the positive depiction of non-consent are wholly banned.

This tightening expelled many adult creators from the platform from 2017 to 2018, advancing a shift to competitors more tolerant of sexual expression such as OnlyFans. Japanese illustration creators increasingly chose FANBOX and Fantia, with looser expression ranges.

Comparison with Japanese services

In Japan, under Patreon’s influence, pixivFANBOX (2018) and Fantia launched. Both follow Patreon’s tier system while differentiating on yen-denominated payment, linkage with pixiv and doujin culture, and the operating range of sexual expression. In the live-action adult sphere, OnlyFans (UK) dominates the world market, and in Japan myfans (2021) entered with yen-payment support for Japanese creators. Patreon itself maintains strict rules on live-action adult content and now sits outside the core base of both live-action and two-dimensional adult content.

Economic role

Patreon is a core base of the Western creator economy, with some top creators gathering monthly support in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Japanese creators are few, but some illustrators, game makers, and adult VTubers who address overseas readers use it in parallel as an English-language window.

See also

• pixivFANBOX
• Fantia
• OnlyFans
• myfans
• Personal fan club
• Ero creator economy