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The fan membership platform Patreon is beginning to roll out a chat feature, connecting creators directly with their fanbase in a group message. The offering will become available to some creators today, but will spread more broadly within the coming months.<\/p>\n
Patreon has long had an integration with Discord, which automatically adds patrons at certain membership tiers to a paywalled Discord server (so long as the patron has their Discord account linked to Patreon). This new feature isn\u2019t a necessarily Discord killer, but it achieves a similar effect of getting an entire fan community together in one place to have a more direct relationship with creators.<\/p>\n
\u201cDiscord is amazing,\u201d Patreon CEO Jack Conte told TechCrunch. \u201cWe\u2019re going to continue to support that partnership and support that integration, and invest in it even.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, some creators and their communities aren\u2019t Discord savvy, and as Patreon vies to secure its dominance in the paid fan memberships world, a native group messaging feature can give creators another ways to monetize.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome creators will want an in-the-box solution, and they\u2019ll just want to use something simple right in the app,\u201d Conte said. \u201cTheir fans don\u2019t have to download another app. Their fans don\u2019t have to go to a different place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Patreon\u2019s chat feature doesn\u2019t have as much functionality as Discord (which makes sense, since Discord is a whole established product, and this one feature within a larger app). At launch, creators will be able to create four different chats to start, and any of those chats can be gated to specific patron tiers. So, a cooking vlogger might have one chat for fans to exchange recipes, one chat to post pictures of food, and another to discuss new uploads. On Discord, one fan community\u2019s server might have twenty to thirty channels, and while that can be fun in certain scenarios, it could also overwhelm fans who are newer to Discord.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thinking here is creators should have control, not Patreon,\u201d said Conte.<\/p>\n
Fans themselves can also customize their own profiles, which show how long they\u2019ve been a patron of a certain creator, what other communities they\u2019re in, and a photo, name and bio.<\/p>\n
At the outset, moderation will be handled by the creator themself, with fans able to report comments. Down the line, Conte says that creators will be able to appoint moderators to help.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n