Exclusive: Patreon expands access to discovery network to grow creators' paid audiences
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Patreon is expanding access to the discovery feed it announced in November to most of its 300,000 creators, the company exclusively tells Axios.
Why it matters: Creators are making more money directly from fans. But they still rely on social platforms to find them.
- "We don't think there should be a tradeoff between owning your audience and growing your audience," Patreon's vice president of product Drew Rowny tells Axios.
How it works: Patreon's "discovery network" centers on a redesigned home feed, where users see posts from creators they support alongside public posts and recommendations for other creators and communities.
- The feed includes a new format called Quips — short-form posts featuring text, images and video — along with longer content like written posts, newsletters, podcasts and videos.
- Patreon also introduced collab posts, allowing creators to co-publish content to reach both of their audiences and potential new fans.
- Posts from creators who users already support are ranked at the top. A dedicated memberships-only feed also lets fans avoid recommendations altogether. Patreon also updated its blocking features and spam detection.
By the numbers: The network and other discovery tools have helped drive more than 1 million new members to creators each month, including during early testing last year, according to Patreon.
- Nearly 80 million fans are on the platform, including free and paid members — a statistic the company has not previously disclosed.
- Patreon has more than 165 million free memberships, nearly double from a year ago.
Between the lines: The updates address a growing desire for more intentional online engagement — rather than mindless scrolling — and a long-standing gap in Patreon's model.
- CEO Jack Conte said in November Patreon previously wasn't a "true alternative" to social platforms because it lacked built-in audience growth.
- In an opinion video titled "I'm Building an Algorithm That Doesn't Rot Your Brain," for The New York Times, Conte said, "We just need to rethink how creativity and community exist on the internet, with creators and their fans at the center, not advertisers."
Reality check: The challenge is to avoid becoming another engagement-driven feed or creating an environment that pressures creators to post more.
- "What concretely stops it from becoming a rageverse or traditional social media [is] what we optimize for," Rowny tells Axios. "Our objective function is long-term relationships to creators that are meaningful to you."
The big picture: Creator platforms are converging on similar features, intensifying competition.
- Patreon, Substack and Beehiiv are all evolving into one-stop shops, offering full-stack toolkits for publishing.
- The shift mirrors what happened in social media, where they adopted similar formats like algorithmic feeds, stories and short-form video.
The bottom line: "There's a better internet that we could build than the one that we currently have," Rowny says.
