There's a political angle and a legal angle. In deference to the forum rules, I'll just cover the legal angle and leave you to search around the interwebs for the political angle. It's a hot topic right now so it should be easy to find. Patreon lost a very important lawsuit today. Basically it tried to use its terms of service to stack the deck in its favor and it backfired dramatically. Now it's on the hook for like 100 arbitration claims. Which is going to be a bit costly but it isn't much when compared to what happened to DoorDash. However, when you consider that there are potentially thousands of victims that now see that this is possible and may want to enter the game.... I heard from another youtuber that if you have a creator's account, make sure that your earnings are ready to move at a moment's notice because, if Patreon can't cover the costs: - It will either use undisbursed money that's lying around (like yours) to try and survive (illegal so they won't admit it out loud) or, - If Patreon decides to dive into the bullet as a middle finger, it might disappear and take your money with it. (Bankruptcy ensures money goes to debt holders and stock owners first. Not the people who use the company's services.) That being said, I think they can probably get a loan. But I'm not sure you can get a big loan if you're using the money to pay off credit cards instead of investing in expansion.
I've been following the story for a while and I'm a Patreon creator. I think it's hilarious. They really screwed up on this one. I moved all my money out just in case and I'm basically adopting a wait-and-see approach in the meantime.
The way things are going, they'll probably either sell the debt off to a private bank or be bought out by another company if they can't secure the funds to pay it back.
Haha nice. I heard about this too. Corporations always trying to cheat with all sorts of absurd and disgusting "terms and conditions" that violate a person's right to fair business. Even worse when they use their absurd powers to enforce certain opinions and speech from the user/customer by holding their income ransom. "Oh gee it'd be a shame if something happened to your financial security... you better tow our arbitrary line (that we reserve the right to change, alter or edit at any point in time for any reason) OR ELSE!". Get rekt, jerks. I hope better services get more traction.
The argument that they might go bankrupt is fairly weak. They have a massive amount of money coming through each month and the purges that fans hate also make them more appealing to investors. It's been a few years since they last farmed cash from investors too, so they likely can get more. The more that 'edge' creators leave(or get kicked) the platform, the more that they go mainstream. I said something similar on a thread a while back about purges. YouTube is similar but they rely on ad revenue, getting rid of 'problem' creators make them more appealing to mainstream brands that have the big money. The only thing that will torpedo Patreon is if a good alternative gets started. And that alternative will have to deal with the same issues after a few years of business.
Patreon lost All my ability to give a shit when they suddenly banned anything with "Japanese artstyle",they are a garbage company that deserves all the shit they are getting,the patreon competitors like subscribe star are gonna profit and expand like hell.
Won't they have to pay arbitration fees of their own too? How many patrons are willing to spend $250 for a creator and time doing this? Also, where do they get the $10k requirement? Isn't it only $1,750 - $3k according to https://www.jamsadr.com/arbitration-fees. They used Doordash's arbirtation as an example, but that was only $2k per arbitration (9.5mil/5,010 drivers)
I'm still waiting to see what happens to the Ko-fi and Buy me a coffee things once someone decides to be petty and dunk them for the users not using the funds to buy coffee but for other funding purposes
For those not clear, Patreon is shit, but that's because they are a corporation. Their competitors will do the exact same shit in a few years. The only thing creators can do is time when they jump ships from platforms, because the new platform will be similar to the old soon enough. If you are a creator on any platform, Patreon, YouTube, Twitch, etc. you should know deep in your soul that they aren't looking out for you. It's up to you to weigh the gains and losses and treat it like a business, because they are doing that no matter what fluffy windowing they put on it. If you feel like you like or hate a platform as a creator, you are doing a disservice to yourself. And when one goes down it makes the other competing services worse, because they are closer to a monopoly, not better.
I wouldn't worry too much, a lot of people don't understand how class action lawsuits work. It works like this, let us say you win 200 million dollars in a class action. Then the lawyers will "humbly" take 10 million, and everyone else will get 3-6 million combined. Wait, didn't I say you won 200 million? Well that's the funny thing, the class action lawyer is only your friend until you win, after you win, your class action lawyer switches sides to the one you sued. Because you see, the class action lawyer pay isn't based on what people get, but independent based on the overall sum. Which means its in class action lawyers own interests that the pay to consumers is as small as possible. This way, corporations are more likely to settle the lawsuit, the lawyers get paid, corporations minimize their losses, everyone else gets screwed. On average, only 2% of winnings ever reach the consumer. So I wouldn't worry about patreon, they will do just fine. And to answer your question, you can most definitely take a loan to pay off your bills, you simply need to put collateral, often times companies use stock. Or you can simply open a line of credit and use it for whatever.
How do you move all your money from patreon? to a paypal account?, Also did you use patreon as a bank if you dont move all your money there monthly and accumulate it?
Here's the thing, it's not a class action lawsuit. Patreon's TOS expressly prevented the claimants from litigating as a group (2:00 in the video). As a result, it needs to treat each arbitration separately. As I said before, Patreon was being too clever for its own good. It didn't want people pooling resources together and creating an effective lawsuit. Sure the majority, if not all, of the arbitrations are going to be losses, but based on how arbitration works, Patreon is on the hook for much of the each arbitration's filing cost. To be paid in 30 days or they'll be hit by additional fees for being in default. This isn't some huge monetary victory for the lawyers after a long hard-fought battle. It's death by a thousand paper cuts just to start the legal process.
yeah, i agree with others about going bankrupt is just a dream is just people using it to create fame for themselves , without doubt the current legal issues could put a dent on their annual report by the need to pay each and every arbitration that is currently going on by the followers of "Owen Benjamin" that started it all but all he needs to do is right now is get a good lawyer , even before everything is over and redraft their entire TOS to reflect it and abandon arbitration as their main and unique method of dealing with law problems. again this would not be valid for things that already happened like the current problem with "Owen's followers" but would pretty much stop all future ones from happening and allowing them to stop the future bleeding from happening. So unless everyone right now find a problem against PATREON and start arbitration before they fix it up, they are complete fine outside ,of course, of the close to 80 arbitration already in court that should cost them close to one million USD (if the info i found is true) in process fee outside payment fee based on the results of each case. people simple forget that patreon can simple amend their TOS to fix up their loopholes and thus invalidate all future bleeding that he is having right now, instead of having a generic TOS like most people do!! instead the implication of this law suit should be far bigger in the entire community than the payment made by patreon, with a quick search to understand more about this before making a answer i discovered, or at least the sites i used stated that most tech enterprises users this generic method in their TOS to avoid legal problems and the main type of them is arbitration, so now that pantreon was shot, we should really find a lot other enterprises like Amazon-paypall changing their TOS to reflect this new change to avoid the same situation.
As a person in patreon,... if that happens im screwed, will have to think fast second options but i hope nothing happens... Still Owen jokes and the like... Well he was banned from youtube, instangram, facebook, paypal, twitter, patreon... for a person to be banned from basically all social media... well there must be a reason