You need millions of fans to be successful

You need 1,000 true fans who are willing to buy $100 of stuff from you per year

You need to reach as many people as possible

You need to have a large following on social media

Maximizing attention and maximizing watch time

Building strength of relationship and maximizing attention

Building strength of relationship and maximizing watch time

Maximizing attention and building strength of relationship

Building direct-to-fan connections and community strength

To maximize the amount of human hours spent consuming work

To find a leader or manager to guide their artistic goals

To make things that are timeless and feel true in 50 years

To focus on metrics and success defined by others

- The speaker discusses the evolution of the internet and how it has impacted creators and artists
- They share their personal experience of reaching people through the internet, particularly through YouTube
- The concept of the "follow" button on YouTube is highlighted as a significant development for creators and their audience
- The speaker also shares their experience with their musical collaboration, Pomplamoose, and how they engaged with their fans through various creative projects and merchandise.

- The speaker and his wife, Natalie, had a successful music career by connecting with true fans.
- They gained a following through viral videos and direct interaction with fans.
- They made a significant amount of money by selling music directly to fans and using platforms like Stage It and Patreon.
- The rise of ranking algorithms on social media platforms led to a shift away from the original promise of creator-led communities.

- The speaker discusses the debate between chronological and algorithmic feeds on social media platforms
- They express concern about the impact of algorithmic feeds on creators and their ability to connect with their audience
- The emergence of TikTok and its impact on the social media landscape is discussed
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of direct-to-fan connections and community strength for creators
- They highlight the shift towards building deeper connections and the emergence of new companies focused on this approach
- The speaker, who is also the CEO of Patreon, expresses a sense of responsibility in shaping the future of art and community on the internet

- Patreon has evolved from a membership platform to a more holistic approach, focusing on media, community, and business.
- New products and tools have been introduced, including a community feature, commerce, and free membership, to help creators connect with fans and build their businesses.
- The acquisition of Moment allows creators to sell tickets for live experiences and engage with their fans during the event.
- The company's goal is to create an internet where creators have true creative freedom and control of their careers, and where fandoms thrive.
- Creators are encouraged to invest in their true fans and focus on making beautiful, meaningful content rather than just catering to algorithms.

- The piece discusses two types of businesses: one focused on new customers and one focused on repeat customers
- It highlights the success of creators who produce long-form, meaningful content and build strong communities
- The importance of knowing and staying true to what you want as a creative person is emphasized
- The piece encourages creators to focus on their intrinsic goals and not be swayed by external metrics
- The importance of staying true to one's purpose and finding meaning in creative work is emphasized

The speaker discusses the impact of the internet on creators and artists, sharing their personal experience with YouTube and their musical collaboration. They emphasize the importance of direct-to-fan connections and express concern about the shift towards algorithmic feeds on social media platforms. As the CEO of Patreon, they highlight the company's evolution and new tools to help creators connect with fans and build their businesses. The piece encourages creators to focus on building strong communities and staying true to their intrinsic goals, rather than catering to algorithms or external metrics.

Portuguese and Spanish language translations for SXSW 2024 Keynotes and Featured Sessions presented by Itaú

Patreon CEO Jack Conte explains how the current internet algorithms are killing the traditional "follower" for creators, threatening their creative freedom and livelihoods. The internet started as a platform that democratized creative distribution. You could upload your work to platforms like YouTube and immediately have it accessible to millions of people. After that came the "subscribe" button, which enabled creators to go beyond reach. Now they could build a following and find their true fans that would support them to build a creative business. But with the rise of platform-focused algorithms (Facebook's ranking, TikTok's "for you" curation), creators cannot reach their following and true fans. This shift has had a devastating impact on creators' creativity and ability to support themselves doing what they love. He advocates for the new spaces on the internet (like Patreon) where creators can always connect with their communities, create what they want, and control their own destinies.

About SXSW:
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Maybe before I even get started, can I just get a show of hands?

If you're in the music industry, folks in the music industry, management companies, labels, OK, great.

And then how about if you're just in tech?

Like anybody in tech, creator economy, tech?

I've been thinking a lot about the whole arc of the internet and how it's evolved over the last couple decades, and then how I think it's going to evolve, and Patreon's place in all of that.

And that's what I want to share with you today.

So I started making music and videos and putting them on the internet right after I finished college in 2007.

I also made animations as a kid, so making stuff wasn't particularly new to me.

But I had just spent, at the time when I finished college, 6 months and thousands of hours on a new record called Nightmares and Daydreams.

I was living at my dad's house at the time, working out of my old childhood bedroom, and I was trying to figure out how to reach people with this new record that I had worked so hard on.

Like even the cover, that guy on the cover is an actual clay guy that I made out of Sculpey and then I did a photo shoot with him and I got a great shot, but then I had to use the lasso tool in Photoshop to cut him out.

And this was before the magnetic lasso tool, So I had to do that shit by hand, and that took way too long, but none of that mattered because by sheer luck, I happened to finish school right when this budding technology called the Internet was going through a massive shift.

It was just starting to move from what people called Web 1 to Web 2.0.

I'm sure everybody knows about this in this room.

You all are here at South by Southwest, so you probably know this.

But Web 1 was essentially a read-only version of the internet.

In retrospect, people call this 90s version of the web the static web.

It was like AOL, where you could browse web pages and read the news, but there was no easy way for people to upload and share and then in the early 2000s a slew of new companies like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter came onto the scene and YouTube's motto was broadcast yourself The whole idea of web 2 was that for the first time as a creative person, you could easily participate on the Internet.

You could post and tweet and upload instead of just being a passenger.

Honestly, I still think it's fucking awesome.

It's so easy to forget how magical this is, how special this is.

But this moment in history marked a shift for humanity and for artists and creators especially because for the first time on the internet, you could do more than just consume.

And it was in that moment, right here in 2007, when I had to graduate college and finish my record, Nightmares and Daydreams, and I was trying to reach people with it.

And at the time, my best bet was DMing bands on MySpace and asking if I could open for them at local bars up and down the West Coast.

I sent cold outreach to music venues to get booked, and then I got in my car because I couldn't afford to rent a van, and I drove up and down the West Coast to the United States, and I played the dankest local bars, and I sang my guts out, and I sweated and I sang and I sweated and I sang, and I ate tacos out of the back of my car while my friends were all getting promoted in high paying jobs as investment bankers.

And I did that for years, tour after tour.

And I'm using the word tour lightly here.

On a good night, There were a couple stragglers who wanted in off the street But I was playing empty bars.

It was so hard to reach people So you can imagine how excited I was when a friend sent me a video of a guy named David Choi singing with a guitar in front of his webcam on a new website called YouTube.

And this video had like 300,000 views or something like that.

This phase of the internet had the potential to solve a fundamental problem for me as an artist.

I immediately started uploading videos to YouTube.

Back then, no 1 else was showing the at-home recording process, so I just filmed myself playing instruments, and then I layered them in the video with split screens so people could see all the musical elements coming together to form a song.

And it's funny because in 2023 this idea seems totally obvious, but nobody was doing that back then.

It wasn't a fancy recording studio with millions of dollars of equipment.

It was a bedroom with an M box audio interface and a cheap version of a laptop recording software called Pro Tools LE and an old Sony handycam that I lugged around with me everywhere that shot on high 8 tapes and a bed Comforter hung on the wall to dampen the sound and broken symbols that a fan sent me in the mail for free But I was making real music I was screaming my fucking guts out and playing accordion and doing collabs with friends, and it started working.

People started watching my videos and listening my music.

My videos started getting thousands of views.

It wasn't millions of people at first, but it was so much better than playing empty bars.

And by 2009, I had made 43 YouTube videos of my songs, and I was feeling amazing because for the first time in my life, I was actually reaching people with my work.

But the real beauty of this new website called YouTube, the most amazing thing about it was that it had a subscribe button.

I only realized how truly special this idea was in retrospect.

But in my opinion, this concept turned out to be 1 of the most important things about this new era of the internet, what people called Web 2.0.

It changed YouTube from being a tool to reach people to being a way to reach them and then build a following around my work.

The subscribe button allowed people who liked my stuff to sign up to see more of it in the future and as a creator it gave me a channel of distribution to ensure that my future work was sent to those people.

So it turned out that Web2 solved more than just reach, more than just discovery.

It represented the birth of the follower.

In my opinion, the follow is not some handy feature of a social network.

The follow is foundational architecture for human creativity and organization.

The idea of a creator, an artist, or a community of fans around them who want to see their future work, this concept, the follow, it's profound.

Whether it's the following that I was building as a musician or a podcasting duo who talks about what it's like to be single moms in a community of single mothers who finally feel seen and understood, or a science education creator and students who didn't previously have access to high quality education, the Follow was a system of organization for the entire internet.

It was a framework for the distribution of creativity and communication.

Ongoing communication, connection, a sustained relationship, community.

And I learned just how magical the concept of following could be when I did my first collab with my girlfriend, Natalie.

We put up a video on my YouTube channel in 2008.

That was a song we created together, and it was different than my music.

It was way less screamy and insane, but it was more active and fleshed out than her music.

So we decided to create a new separate channel for our collabs, and we called this new YouTube channel Pomplamoose.

But we, oh, all right, got some Pomplamoose fans in the house.

The first Pomplamoose video was actually posted on my channel And I had about 7000 subscribers at the time and my subscribers loved this new video and at the end of it We posted a little link to the new pompous channel to tell people about it and almost instantly the new Pomplamoose channel got 3,000 subscribers.

Literally, they follow you wherever you go on the internet.

So Natalie and I started making more videos and more videos and within a year we got 18,000 subscribers.

And then in 1 video we announced that we were playing a show and we showed up to the show in San Francisco and there were 40 people there and oh my God guys, I cannot tell you what it's like to have 40 people at your show after years of playing empty bars.

I feel like I literally can remember that.

Another time, Natalie and I were filming a vlog to put in 1 of our videos.

And my sister happened to walk in behind us, and she was holding a bar.

She was holding a bar of grapefruit-scented soap.

And she said, hey, guys, look, I have Pompelmousse soap.

And Natalie and I just saw that and decided to keep it in the video and we put it up in the video and our fans were like, oh my God, Pomplamoose soap, we want to borrow Pomplamoose soap.

And so we made another video and we said, okay, now you can order Pomplamoose soap.

And we got hundreds of orders for Pomplamoose soap.

Another time when USB thumb drives were starting to get huge, we thought, why do CDs?

Let's put all of our music on a thumb drive.

And we loaded up the thumb drives, we put up a video, we said, hey, if you want to buy a thumb drive, you can buy a thumb drive now.

And we ended up selling hundreds and hundreds of thumb drives.

We decided to sign every 1 of them, because we wanted to be really personal with our fans.

We had no idea how to package that many thumb drives.

Another time, we decided to put our album on iTunes, our first Pomplamoose album back in 2008.

So we asked our fans like, hey, do you want to make the artwork for Pomplamoose?

And we got hundreds of submissions for the cover of the new Pomplamoose album for our fans and they were freaking talented.

So this is actually the artwork for our first album.

Another time, we booked a show at a laundromat.

The idea was like, it was a laundromat where there was a cafe and a laundromat.

You could go order food, do your laundry, eat.

By the time you're done eating, take your laundry home.

Like, if you crammed people in there, it held like 60 people in this laundromat.

And this was the first video that we ever uploaded that went viral.

And it got like half a million views overnight, and we showed up to our show at the laundromat, and there were 200 people crammed inside the laundromat, And then 150 or 200 people outside like spilling in the street cars were swerving around them And like there was no stage like it's a laundromat So literally I'm playing music and there's a person like I'm like looking at a person's eyes while I'm playing Pompano songs like it was it was insane honestly was the first night It was mayhem.

I don't have any pictures of the night, but this is what it felt like.

And this was the first time I was like, oh my god, this is going to work.

We're going to be able to be full-time musicians.

And at the end of the video, we told our fans, hey, we're uploading a song to iTunes.

We decided not to ever sign or kind of enter the music industry.

We negotiated our own contract with iTunes directly.

And so we kept almost all of the revenue associated with that.

And when we posted this album, told our fans about it online, told our followers, we sold 30,000 songs that month, and we got $22,000 deposited directly into our bank account.

It was more money than I'd ever seen in 1 place ever in my life.

Then, then, Pomplamoose started playing shows and we started touring and, you know, hundreds of people started showing up and then many hundreds of people and then thousands of people started showing up.

And this is my wife crowd surfing, because she's a fucking badass.

And That's what I mean when I say that the subscribe button is not a silly feature.

The concept of the follow changed my life.

It made my dreams come true as an artist.

It took me from playing empty bars to living out my fantasy as a musician.

The follow is a piece of Internet architecture that felt closer to magic than anything I had ever experienced in my life.

Right around the moment that Pomplamoose was starting to work, right through all of this, there is this genius named Kevin Kelly.

Founder of Wired, yeah, a bunch of people.

He wrote an essay called A Thousand True Fans.

It was that in the age of the internet, you don't need millions of fans to be successful.

If you can just find 1,000 people who are willing to buy $100 of stuff from you per year, That's $100,000 per year, which is a pretty freaking great business.

As a creative person, you just need 1,000 true fans who really connect with you and believe in you.

And this is different than just reaching people.

This is super fans, true fans, real fans, call it whatever you want.

The idea is that there's this group of people that is your core.

If reach means people see it and follower means people want to see more, then true fans are the people who go to the shows and buy the merch and download the record and pay for the course and get the live stream tickets and all the things.

We had fans showing up to Pomplamoose shows with tattoos of the band.

We had fans literally making custom t-shirts of Pomplamoose, posters, drawings, artwork, cookies.

We had a fan do icing of my face on a cookie.

We had a fan who made an oil painting of me screaming my fucking guts out.

I learned HTML and I had a little website.

I used this link release software called E-Junkie and I cobbled together like a little mp3 store for myself on the internet and I would sell original music and I was selling 500 bucks a month of my original songs on my own website with my own shitty thing that I made.

Fans were showing up to buy things, to be there.

1 time we asked our Pomplamoose fans to come film a music video with us on a Saturday, Like show up to Dolores Park in San Francisco.

Another time, we would actually always use this software called Stage It, which was like a ticketed live stream software.

People could buy tickets and show up live on the internet.

And Natalie and I would just sit at home and play these songs for 45 minutes.

And people would buy tickets and leave tips during the concert.

And we would routinely make like 3 grand in 45 minutes playing our songs.

Another time Natalie raised over $100,000 for her record from just 2,000 people.

Another time We made a Pomplamoose album and we went online on YouTube, we put up this video and we said, hey everybody, we have a new Pomplamoose album.

The only way to get the new Pomplamoose album is if you donate a book to the Richmond School District and then send us the receipt for that book, and we will send you the Pomp and Move's album for free.

Just donate a book, super easy, we'll send you the album in the mail for free.

And the Richmond School District ended up having to rent a shipping container to keep up with the packages.

It's like 11,000 books that got sent to the Richland School.

It felt incredible to see that many people show up for this.

But this was the concept that was rattling around in my head when I started Patreon 11 years ago.

This is actually the first sketch of Patreon.

I called up my co-founder and he turned this into what is now Patreon.

It's like a membership platform where fans could sign up for a subscription payment to the creator and the creator could run a membership and get paid for their work.

I'm not gonna tell the Patreon founding story.

But the company is now over 400 people 11 years in.

We have over 250,000 creators who have made over $3.5 billion on the platform, which I think of as proof if we ever needed it that the true fans are there and the true fans are ready.

In the background, while Patreon was being formed, building over the last decade, the whole internet was again starting to shift.

And if you think of the 90s as web 1, the 2000s as web 2, right around the 2010s, there was a new change happening.

Facebook started experimenting with a new thing called ranking.

And I realize most everybody here knows about this, but what ranking did was essentially it took the feed, which you can think of as a list of posts from creators that I follow, and it analyzed each and every post for how engaging it was.

And if it wasn't engaging enough, Facebook would then take that post and push it down in the feed.

In other words, they started ranking or ordering posts according to what was best for their business.

It was the right business decision for them and their company and their revenue model.

But what it meant for creators was that for the first time since Web 2.0, my followers might not necessarily see my posts.

And this idea of a subscription started to break down.

If the person doesn't receive the things, it's not really a direct true connection between a creator and their fans.

And it creates another problem too around creative freedom because now suddenly my post has to be better than the other posts, according to a set of criteria that I don't know or have control of or even agree with.

So instead of thinking, what do I want to make?

What is the output that I want to create as an artist?

Instead of thinking those questions, now in the back of my mind I'm thinking, what will the ranking algorithm favor?

And that subconsciously or consciously changes my creative output to achieve Facebook's goals, not my goals as a creator.

And if it were just Facebook doing this, fine.

Creators would just leave and post somewhere else.

And people started spending even more time on the platform.

So the other platforms had to compete, and YouTube launched the Cosmic Panda redesign, centering the entire company around watch time.

And Twitter and Instagram followed with ranked feeds in 2016, and we only saw it in retrospect.

But now I think of the 2010s as the decade of ranking, the decade when the original promise of the creator-led community, the true follow, was broken for the first time.

I want to just do a quick aside here, because I know There's this big debate in the world about chronological feeds versus algorithmic feeds.

And I don't want to make it sound like I'm a zealot on either of the 2 polarized sides.

I actually see problems with chronological feeds, because as a creator, if it's chronological, then you have to keep posting to stay on top So I don't think that's necessarily the best way to build strong relationships either the problem that I have is If you're going to change that if you're gonna adjust the way you you create a feed.

Are you trying to create a place where you can build strength of relationship with your community, where your fandom gets energized over time, where people are guaranteed that subscription, where you get a direct connection with your community and your true fans?

Those are 2 very different goals and very different ways of organizing your entire product as a technology company.

But around the turn of the decade, a new company came onto the scene called TikTok.

And TikTok had a much deeper impact in the ecosystem, I think anyone foresaw at the time.

It wasn't just short form vertical first video.

TikTok said, we want to make the most engaging feed possible.

This whole idea of a list of your subscriptions, forget about that.

In fact, forget about the whole concept of subscriptions.

TikTok started from the ground up with something totally different called For You, where each of these posts are chosen for me by TikTok instead of me choosing what's in my feed.

And this completely abandoned the concept of the follow.

TikTok hit a billion users by 2021, and traffic on the internet started flowing away from the legacy social companies and toward TikTok.

So just like with Facebook and ranking, the other platforms had to compete.

YouTube launched shorts, Instagram launched Reels, and Twitter launched a 4U feed as well.

And within a couple of years, this whole system of organization for the Internet, the creator-led community, started to fade into the past.

I have really felt this personally as a creator in the last 4 years especially.

My fans don't see as much of my stuff anymore.

See all SXSW transcripts on Youtube

Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web with Jack Conte | SXSW 2024 Keynote