Now there's one fewer way to support your favorite indie artists
Whether you're crafting YouTube videos, blogging for yourself or making another form of content for the web, earning a living off of your creative output can be tough. That's where services like Patreon and Subbable come in. Both are fairly similar subscription tools (fans agree to give a certain amount whenever an artist releases a new piece of content), so it makes sense that the former would acquire the smaller latter. The move brings Subbable creators Hank Green and John Green, along with two dozen others, to Patreon according to TechCrunch. The reasoning is fairly straightforward: Subbable's payment platform, Amazon Flexible Payments System, is shutting down come June. The brothers Green feared that their service would lose a ton of subscribers in the process of overhauling the cash-handling platform, and Patreon's Jack Conte saw that as an opportunity to merge the two companies.
As far as numbers go, how much Patreon paid the Vlogbrothers and their compatriots wasn't released, but Conte told TC that a "bulk" of it would go toward a donor-matching program. For the next 40 days, Patreon will match any funds pledged to a content creator, up to $100,000. Well, that's one way to get creators to stick around. Still not sure what Patreon's all about? Peep the video just below.
[Image credit: Dave Dugdale/Flickr]
